Fencing, 6 years later

My field fence, after 6 years of rough life, has finally gotten to the point where I need to replace it. 

You served well, fence, but you're just not the right kind of fence

 I've tried all sorts of fencing, from the field fence that didn't work very well, to woven wire fences of various sorts, to electric fence and electric net fences, and after all of that I've settled on a favorite kind of fencing.  It's not cheap, but it's easy to repair and stands up well to the sort of wear-and-tear that cattle and pigs cause. 

Same area, same day, just nicer looking. 

The basic fence is a 16' cattle panel supported every 8 feet by an 8' t post driven about 3' into the ground.  I make the t posts level with the top of the panel so that there's less chance of a puncture injury should someone fall onto the fence.  I overlap the panels 8" at either end, so I don't have to be all that precise about pounding in the posts -- sometimes a rock gets in the way -- and I use 12" lengths of 12.5 gauge smooth galvanized wire to tie the panels to the post.  A pair of side cutters and a pair of needle nose pliers are my basic fencing toolkit. 

Notice the electric fence to right, on pig side of fence

 Inside the fence, on the right in this photo, I string a separate electric fence.  I've settled on the polypropylene electric fence rope because it's easier to coil than the tape, and more visible than the wire.  I use step-in posts because it's too hard to keep the polyrope off of the panels when I attach it to the fence tposts.  Having it be a poly line also means that I can easily move the rope to clear the pigs from an area that I need to work in; that's what I did in the picture below -- I moved the polyline back about 25' so that I could replace this section of fence without inquisitive pigs running out onto the road. 

The other type of fence that I've moved to is a standard corral type fence.  6x6 posts with 2x6 rails.  I use this fence in areas that are going to be high traffic, or where I expect to break the fence, like around the cattle feeder.  I consider this sort of fencing safer when you're handing large animals because you can easily climb over it in case of emergency, where the cattle panel fences aren't sturdy enough for that. 

I have moved to the cattle panel or rail fences because they are easily repaired; you pull a damaged panel and put in a new one in a few minutes, or you buy a new $3 2x6 board.  With tensioned fences, like woven wire or field fence, damaging a portion of the fence had no easy way to fix it or re tension the fence afterwards.  Yes, you can do it, it was just a lot of work.  With either of these fencing choices a fix is a 10 minute operation.  Couple of big nails and a new board and you're good to go.