Fences and the provision of water are two critical items in any pasture setup. They don't get much attention from the experts because they don't present nearly so difficult an intellectual challenge as the sward does. But they're still important. Most of our fence is high-tensile smooth wire. This material offers many advantages over barbed wire and woven wire fences, which are the traditional materials. It is cheaper to install and maintain, principally because it doesn't require as many line posts. Any affordable fence for cattle holds them better and lasts longer if it is electrified. We electrify two or three wires on our high-tensile fences.

This is an example of what I call the bobbin-type fence strainers. They are quick and easy to apply but difficult to get really tight. While a 1/2" drive wrench handle can be used to tighten them (a t-handle works best), a special tool is required to get them really tight. A regular 1/2" drive wrench handle tends to flop around and pop out when used to tighten these.

The bobbin-type strainers are fine for electrified fence that doesn't need a lot of strength or tension. We mostly use them for temporary fences. They are also sometimes handy for ordinary electric fence wire.

Here's one way to build corners. Corners are important on any fence, but they are especially critical on H-T fence. We use 10 foot long poles for the cross piece. These should be installed with brace pins, not toenailed. The diagonal brace wire makes two figure-eight loops. Two loops are enough for strength, and the figure-eight arrangement helps keep the brace wire away from the hot wires. We have had a lot of fence failures due to shorts against the brace wire.

We have quit using the ratchet strainers for brace wires. We just tighten the wire with a stretcher and crimp it in place.

We have a few really heavy line posts made from leftover pieces of electric pole. This is one. Note that the staples holding the ground wires are at an angle to prevent splitting. The staples holding insulated wires have to be vertical because of the tube insulator, so we take our chances and some of them split.

Tube insulators are cheap and are the least work to install, because only one staple is needed. They are a nuisance to thread onto the wire, and we always have a few of pin-lock type on hand because we will end up one insulator short once in a while, and it's easier to use a pin-lock than to take the whole wire down and put on another insulator.

I'm not sure these springs are really worth having. This fence is stretched to 200 pounds tension which is plenty. After you have worked with H-T wire for a while you get a feel for the proper tension.

Standard way to terminate a hot wire at a gate post. Two crimp sleeves are used anywhere the wire is folded back on itself. The insulated wire goes underground to the other side of the gate. We put a couple extra crimp sleeves on the wires to allow for jumpers and underground links like this.

It's important to think through the cross brace placement considering where the wires will be. You really want the cross brace halfway between the top two wires, not haphazardly placed as shown here.

Cutout switches are important for any electric fence. That fences short out is a fact of farming. Cutout switches allow shorts to be found and fixed without constant running back to turn the fencer on and off.

Some fence vendors suggest that fiberglass posts can be used instead of battens. It doesn't work, as you can see. The wire jumps out of the clips on the post when the livestock push on the fence. We're going to tear all these out and try something different.

Most of the H-T fence suppliers try to discourage use of steel posts. We have a good number of steel posts and find that they work fine. Wood posts are great, and you don't need as many. But they're expensive and hard to install. We hire someone to drive wood posts unless we only have two or three to put in. We figure the installed cost at almost $15 a post. We can put in steel posts ourselves and they cost $2. We use three times as many but still end up money ahead.

We have had some trouble with insulators breaking in cold weather, on steel posts, in years when the snow load is heavy.

We find that these lag screw insulators are handy for scare wires across gates.