A NEW DIRECTION FOR THE OLD RAM

[The Old Ram-Australia]

OMG,your results are "amazing",there should be some sort of medal for farmers like you who achieve those results.I hope all the group will join me in "congratulating you for your efforts".That is a serious fence it looks to stand about 5 ft tall,When it rains what sort of water volume do you get in the gully?Is the pasture paddock in the background yours?

On the chicken thing,down here a useful X is a Rode Island Red over a White Leghorn,they produce a Brown egg and the roosters make a useful "feed".They refer to them as Isa Browns.We are about to replace ours with a "new lot" ...T.O.R.

 

[Baymule]

These pictures were taken as we built the water gap. Since then, the paper has pretty much rotted off, leaving the concrete. We have had some hard rains and the water gap lets the water through very well. I have only had to make water gaps for horses and cows, so sheep and dogs present a special challenge. In the wettest winters, there is a constant trickle in the gulley due to seeps where water oozes out of the ground.

Thank you T. O. R. for the lovely compliment.

I was planning on using 40 pound bags of concrete mix for making a water gap in the gully. Our son showed up and changed it to 80 pound bags and he did the lifting! I sure was glad he showed up!

He stacked them in 3 rows to make a good base and a spillway for the water to run out on. We left 2 holes in the third layer. We pounded in 3 T-posts to further stabilize the bags and to securely attach to the long span of wire across the gully.

We left a gap in the top layer.

We stacked 50 pound bags on both sides of the fence in two low spots.

The next day my husband and I cut a piece of wire and using hog rings, we closed the gap between the concrete bags and the fence wire. We ran a piece of twisted smooth wire at the bottom to hog ring the 2x4 wire to.

 

[Baymule]

Oh, the fence is 4 feet tall with room at the top of the T-posts to run 2 strands of barb wire.....that we haven't got done yet. That will make it a 5 foot fence and the barb wire will help keep the horses from "necking over" the fence.

We have several crosses that produce red or black sex links. Each hatchery has their own cross or name. I have 5 red sex links that are turning 3 years that will go to the soup pot and be replaced. Darn good layers! We bought an incubator and I want a breed that I can keep replenishing without always having to order chicks.

My layers are housed in a hoop coop, I have 2 batches of juvenile Easter Egger chicks housed in A-frame chicken tractors. Plans are to build permanent breeder pens to go with my assortment of coops. LOL

 

[Bossroo]

Very nice job for your fenceline over the gully. However, I have a wee bit of a suggestion for you if you want to keep your fence in place from personal experience. Since the fence is just over the concrete bags, in a rush of water that will contain debri , dead tree trunks or ? and pile up against the fence and then pull the fence with their posts out and deposit it elsewhere. I would modify the fence with a wood frame swinging overhead gate/fence over the gully. ( like a doggy door ) When there is a rush of water the gate will swing upwards with the water flow then return to it's normal fence line when water is gone. I hope that this tip helps you, as it did me.

 

[Baymule]

Thank you @Bossroo for that suggestion. I have built such watergaps. Our previous property had a dry wash that captured run off water from a large watershed area and could go from a dry wash to a raging river in a matter of hours. I battled the water gap constantly. Our road also went under water, cutting us off from the feed shed and causing general misery. We finally put in a 7'x21' steel tank with the ends cut out for a culvert, ending the water over our road. But the fence was constantly knocked down, horses got out, it was a PITA. The dry wash was a pain where it entered and left the property. I was constantly trying to better the situation, and learned a lot from my failures.

We've had 3 winters here to watch what rains and floods can do. The run off that goes down this gulley comes from a much smaller area, the water never gets very deep, nor does it flow so fast that it is dangerous. I know I will have to clean out the leaves and branches, but this one is a cake walk compared to what I had to deal with before. On our old property, I've had to weave my legs in and out of the barb wire fence to keep from washing down stream, over my waist in water, dragging branches off the fence and passing them to my husband in a futile effort to save the fence.

There is a very narrow strip of forest between the pipe line and the water gap, so that also lessens the branches that can float down stream and muck things up. Eventually we will clean along the gulley like we have done on other areas of the property.

I've had time to study this to figure out what would let the water through and keep the sheep and dogs in. I've gone out in the rain just to watch the water flow. We've had torrential rains that washed out county roads, county culverts and flooded areas. The highest elevation in Smith county is 671 feet, we are at 610 feet. So the water drains FROM us TO somewhere else. What a happy accident. LOL

 

[Baymule]

T.O.R. the pasture in the back ground is part of a 1,000+ acre ranch behind us. It is high-wire fenced and contains exotic deer, some horses and is parameter fenced with no cross fences. His fence is offset from the property line by 3 feet and he has 2 feet of wire laid flat, hog ringed at the bottom, all the way around it, to keep coyotes and dogs from digging in. Him and his wife are real nice folks, community minded and just good people.

 

[The Old Ram-Australia]

G'day,when we were repairing our creek we had to address the problem of debris taking out our boundary fence.

What i developed was a system to "trap the debris"up stream using two different types of trap.The first is at the inflows to the creek proper and is a loose arrangement of tree branches and the other in the creek proper is a line of posts in the ground about 3 ft deep.As you can see the debris is trapped and when the rain stops it just falls to the ground.The posts are 3 ft out of the ground and it cuts the water speed by about half,which assists in limiting damage to the stream bed during heavy rain.I think it is better to catch the rubbish well up-stream of the fence,although in your case you could trap any thing that makes it on the other side of the road away from the fence

 

[Baymule]

That is a brilliant idea! I could have used that at our old property. But now someone else has it and it is not our problem anymore. The gulley we have now starts on our property, so the velocity of the water is nowhere near what we had to deal with in the past. But about 15 acres over, it is a force to be reckoned with, producing flash floods.

 

[The Old Ram-Australia]

Thank you BM,the final photo is "proof of concept" as there is no Debris in the boundary fence. Traditional thinking is to install barriers which once are topped do not reduce water speed or they install a concrete "flume" which in fact concentrates the flow and actually increases the volume and speed of the flow.I saw an example of this only this week where the ACT govt was attempting to repair an erosion gully which has been developing for over 100 years.What the "experts" fail to understand is that the speed of the flow needs to be controlled before it enters the the drainage line proper...T.O.R.

BTW on the chicken thing our hybrids have just started laying for there third season,we purchased a new lot today to replace them once they are laying fully.

 

[Baymule]

I see a bunch type grass in your pictures. What kind of grass is it and does it perform well for you?