Establish a Perimeter!

Greetings, fellow livestock enthusiast.  You may recall that just a few short months ago, our heroes of BOTL Farm ran a long and difficult campaign trail to seek election to the highest office in an 1820’s farmhouse.  The office is on the first floor.  However, one of the campaign promises made by our farmers-elect was to build a big, beautiful wall to keep all those unauthorized raccoons out and to prevent them from picking our fruit.  In the orchard.  Not only did they promise us a wall, they vowed that the state of Connecticut was going to pay for it.

Behold citizen, our farmers-in-chiefs have delivered upon all these campaign promises and more.  We’re not talking about a partial prototype in the southern California desert or multiple decades of eminent domain disputes with the owners of Cards Against Humanity [1].  No indeed fair reader, for what we have here is the Biggest, most Beautiful wall the world has ever seen:

In our early days of herding meat rabbits on the shores of the Jersey coast, we learned what security researchers have long known: multiple concentric layers of defense are the foundation of any reliable system.  This became clear to us the day the rabbits dug a hole under the electric fence, and we ran all over town with a butterfly net trying to catch them.  This lesson was re-enforced the day we lost electricity and the rabbits got out, the day the rabbits found an old woodchuck tunnel system and got out, and all the other times we accidently altered the local rabbit gene pool.  A perimeter fence around animal paddocks is critical to the success of a livestock farm.  Fences are like onions.

Our goal was to fence off 19 of our 40 acres with an electrified perimeter fence, so that in the inevitable event animals escape their individual paddocks, they are contained within the 19 acres.  We budgeted $15,000 to build the perimeter fence and all animal paddocks.  We received quotes from several contractors, and after reviewing our original budget the phrase “hotdog down a hallway” came to mind.  The cheapest quote was $47,000 to build only the perimeter fence and did not include land clearing or electrification.  We began seeking alternative plans.  As we often say here on the farm, “you’ve gotta swing to miss!”

The revised plan was to do all the land clearing ourselves, do all the design work ourselves, do all the post and panel sourcing/distribution/installation ourselves, and do the electrification ourselves.  We believe that we’ve built ourselves a one-of-a-kind farm fence, and we’re writing a whole separate blog post to talk about all the parts that went into it.

Since we never back down on a campaign promise, we still vowed to get the citizens of Connecticut to pay for our big pig wall.  Now we understand this could be a controversial goal if, for example, you live in CT and pay taxes.  Don’t worry, you can tour the outside of the fence at any time.  Please don’t touch it, that hurts like really quite a lot.

We found the Farmer’s Land Grant Association of North Eastern CT and wrote up a proposal to the state on why they should help build our wall.  The proposal quoted the scholarly body of Subaru Outback bumper stickers including “no farms, no food” and “galvanized T-posts are expensive”.  After being compared to an uncountable number of other proposals, our proposal was selected!  Our fence was inspected, high fives were issued, a commemorative selfie was taken, and we look forward to receiving a $20,000 reimbursement for 50% of the fence cost installation any day now.  In fact, I should go check the mail box right now.

Good neighbors, help you make your fences good.  Shout-out to all of our neighbors.  Sorry about those post pounder noises, we should be mostly done with those now.  Cheers everyone!

[1] https://cardsagainsthumanitystopsthewall.com/
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