cross fencing

[grefer]

I am going to do some electric cross fencing and would like some opinions on whether to use rebar with insulators or treated posts with insulators,and also what wire do you find works best with the least maintenance.Thanks

[grassfarmer]

I assume you are talking about setting up permanent crossfences? If you are I would suggest 12.5 gauge high tensile wire. I have no experience with rebar posts but generally use either 2 inch treated posts (especially if you can get them on sale at @60 cents)or fibreglass posts and wire clips. The latter are great if you have a lot of wildlife passing through as the just bend over and spring back up again. Disadvantages of fibre glass are that it deteriorates with sun and time and if you need to move posts etc your hands get full of shards of fibreglass. Another disadvantage I found was when I later decided to crossfence within the fibreglass post enclosures with temporary wire running at 90 degrees to my existing wires was that the posts bend over too much. So I had to go back and replace some posts with wooden ones. On balance I probably prefer the light wooden posts if you can buy them cheap enough. Be careful what type of insulator you buy, many of them are complete junk and will break or come off as soon as a moose/fallen tree hits the wire.

[victoire]

It mostly depends on the relative costs of materials .
we use lengths of3/4 inch oilfield
sucker rods .
then use 3 piece insulators

[kato]

We use treated posts and insulators. You can put the posts quite a distance apart. We still use three strand barb wire regular fence for the perimeter though.

For dividing the corn up into smaller chunks we use the push in ones and the twine. It works really well for temporary, but not for long term.

[andersoj]

There are lots of factors. We like to use wooden posts with good quality insulators and flip up insulators where we might like to take a wire down if needed. Along a river, we use large wooded posts so they don't get broken off with flooding water. Trees will lay the high tensile wire down and can be removed. After 8 years we have only replaced a couple of posts although we have had flooding a number of times. Even temporary fencing (eg. one season) isn't that hard using wooden posts with two people, a front-end loader and a wire roller.

[DaneG]

I have started to use 1/16 aircraft cable for temp and cross fences,It's more costly than high tensile but it is just as strong and easily rolled when removing fence and it seems to carry the juice better.