Of Guineas and Guard Dogs

Almost two months ago I posted about the guinea egg mobile that we built and rolled out into the pastures. The purpose of the guinea egg mobile is for pest control, but eventually they'll also lay some might fine eggs. At the same time the egg mobile provides shade and shelter for the goats. The guineas are great foragers, so we feed them a nominal amount of feed in order to keep them coming back to the egg mobile, but other than that they’re on their own.


Guinea keets on their first day out
At first the guinea keets were still quite small (only 6 weeks old), so they remained in the coop, getting accustomed to home for another 3-4 weeks. We laid fresh hay on the floor of the coop and after about a week the keets would eat it and scratch it through the cracks. We would replace with new hay and the process repeats. It worked well, but we were really looking forward to having them out free-ranging.

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Goat Buck Pen - The Finer Points



Electric fence insulator, gate handle and hot wire clip

The last post on the bucks omitted a lot of the little details about the pen that we just made up on the fly, but that might be helpful for someone looking to build a pen. Before we started frequenting the Co-Op and Tractor Supply I never knew most of the stuff we use everyday even existed. I hope that by sharing the details other readers who are interested in the little stuff can get a better idea of exactly how it's all put together. I'd also love to hear feedback and what other people have done that worked well for them.

As you can see in the photos above and below, we put an electric wire around the top of the cattle panel using 2" insulator attachments that we got from Tractor Supply. The purpose having it stick 2" inward is so when the bucks climb on the fence they get zapped on the head and learn not to do that. If they are allowed to climb the fence will slowly lean over and they'll be able to climb out (and it will look ridiculous). At each gate there is a gate handle so we don't have to duck under the wire if we don't want to or if we need to bring something into the pen.

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Revised Pig Pallet Pen

New and improved pig pallet pen

A few weeks ago I wrote about the temporary pallet pens that we built for the pigs to train them to the electric fence. My expectation at the time was to release the pigs into larger paddocks within a few weeks. To my dismay, that hasn’t happened. I wrote a bit about the frustration with the pigs in a couple posts during my weekly column on Farm Dreams. You can find them here and here.

The short of it is that the pigs remained very small and tightly wound. I wasn’t making a lot of progress with getting them to calm down and/or respect the electric fence. Sure, the electric fence was inside the pens and it would zap them if they touched it, but I noticed they were touching it a lot. At first I thought they might not be respecting it the way it was intended. I figured I’d give it a couple weeks and see if they learned better.

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