Stripe takes her piglets for a walk

Stripe is a mostly-hampsire sow that's new to my farm; she's been here about 6 months.  When I first got her she'd never seen dirt -- she'd been born on concrete and was there until she was sold to me.  I bring in new pigs and new genetics from time to time, and the hampshire breed of pig is one that I think does pretty well.  I'm going for a hampshire/berkshire cross herd, mostly. 
Her 7 piglets are actually under and around her.  Behind her you can see the rear end of a brown-and-black piglet and over the top you can see a black piglet. 

Stripe is actually the brave one that is leading her piglets and the other pigs out of the hay barn and onto the field.  She'll take a few steps, and then pause as everyone catches up, and then repeat.  They're a few acres from the barn, making a wide leisurely tour of the pasture.  Eventually they'll end up back at the barn and go to sleep for the night. 

She's teaching them to forage; that's one nice thing about breeding your own pigs.  Each generation introduces the next generation to your system, and there's really not much I have to do, other than make sure that the feed and water are there, and the fencing is in good shape.  It's kinda peaceful, actually.

Gate latch design

I have learned that you cannot have too many gates, and that you can't have a gate that is too big.  For my own operation, I've found that a 14' gate is a good size.  Even though my tractor is only 7' wide, I'm often going through the gate at an angle, or carrying something big, or dragging something, and the extra space makes life so much better. 

A good source of relatively cheap gates for me is when there's an auction of a dairy farm.  They'll often put all of the gates up as one lot, and yes, it's a lot of work to take down 50 gates, but they're often very nice gates, and come complete with hinges and latches.  So that's what this post is about. 

The picture above is the latch from a 14' wide dairy gate that I bought; I think I paid $5 for this particular gate.  It's a cool latch.  You work the lever, and it inserts the two flat pieces into the end post, about 4".  That's plenty sturdy.  It also has a lock on it, and you can see the entire thing, so if something goes wrong you can fix it. 

Here's a closeup of the lock.  This is in the "locked" position.  To unlock it you flip that piece of round stock up. 

Here's the latch in the "open" position.  I don't know who made this design -- this gate is probably 50 years old -- but whomever it was was pretty clever.  I'll be glad to add another decade or two to its useful life. 

The hinges are pretty beefy, too.  They're made out of 1/8" stock.  Big, tough gate.  If I were to buy the gate and hinges new I'd be out something like $200.

Driving T posts with a tractor

You might have noticed that the order I construct my fencing is 1) fenceline prep, 2) braces and gates, 3) stretch wire, 4) T posts.  I do it that way becuase I get a better looking fence.  Once you've stretched the fence, driving the T posts in becomes easy. 

I've found that the front loader on my tractor does a fairly good job of driving T posts into my river-bottom soil.  Not many rocks, and heavy-duty T posts are pretty tough, so you can just push them in.  To do that I'll go and tap each T post in by hand, so that they stand up.  In this case I want the T post to stick out about a foot above the level of the fence so that I can put a hot wire there if I chose.   The white painted area is easy to see so I'll drive these down with the bucket until the white area is about level with the top of the fence. 

Here's the veiw from the cab of the tractor as I prepare to push this post in. 

The biggest challenge is to make sure that the teeth on the t post don't hook into and cut the wire of the fence.  If you're working with someone, you can have them pull the fence down, but I'm workig alone today.  So what I do is orient the tractor so that the front tire of the tractor pushes on the fence a little.  Not much, but an inch or two.  This pushes it out of the way so that I can drive the t post. 

Here the taut fence is about an inch from the posts. 

Doing it this way I can drive 150-175 T posts per day.  Manually setting them, and then moving from post to post with the tractor to drive them.  The one problem is when you run across some tough ground, and it gives way all at once.  So I'm careful to slowly increase the pressure.  I've had to pull a couple of posts up and out so that I have a nice pretty fence with all of the posts in a line. 

Yea, the animals won't care about it, but I like seeing nice, straight fences that have a uniform appearance.  And not just for my ego -- it's easier to tell if they've been moved or damaged, so you spot problems sooner.