The Sheep Fence that saved us $8,120
Back in February of 2024 I had just started my journey with dairy sheep. The first thing to contend with? Making our perimeter fence sheep tight. Now, one year has passed, our flock has grown and I want to share with you our fence material of choice and how it saved us over $8,000.
After I brought sheep home, we knew we had to do SOMETHING to our perimeter fence. While there are a ton of fencing options, for us, it really came down to 3 things: barbed wire, sheep fence (4-6” squares of wire) or electric fence.
While I loved the idea of electric fence, Jayce ruled it out rather quickly for a couple of reasons. One, we have 80 acres to fence, and that is a lot of fence to keep hot! Two, we can get extremely dry here and prone to drought, which can make getting a good ground to ensure your fence shocks, tough. Lastly, we just don’t know anything about electric fence and we didn’t have much time to figure it out because I had already brought the critters home.
This left us with two options: barbed wire or sheep fence. Sheep fence is an ideal choice because the squares are small enough to keep sheep or even lambs from crawling through it. However, after pricing it out at over $8,000 we quickly looked back to the first option – barbed wire. Another deterrent from using sheep fence is that our perimeter was already fenced with barbed wire… meaning that we would have to remove some of the wire in order to stretch up the new sheep fence. No thanks!
Barbed Wire Fence for Sheep
What drew our attention to using barbed wire in the first place was our neighbors. You see, they raised sheep for practically their whole lives, so they know a thing or two, you know?
One of their pastures borders us on the East side of our property. That fence is an 8 strand barbed wire fence. Ah ha, we can do that too! Remember earlier when I told you our whole perimeter was already fenced with barbed wire? Anywhere from 3-5 strands? For this plan, all we needed to do was add a few more strands of barbed wire until all of the fences had a total of 8 strands.
Jayce began calling around and was able to find us a whole pallet of brand new barbed wire for HALF PRICE! He went and picked it up and got straight to work. Our back pasture (about 15 acres) only took two days to fence.
We turned in the sheep and watched as they grazed happily, never even bothering to go near the barbed wire.
Barbed wire fence for sheep after one year
Like I said back at the very beginning, we started this project back in February of 2024, which means we have been using this fence for one year now.
The fence is in great shape and it has done exactly what we needed it to do. My flock has since grown from four woollies to over twenty and nary a single beast has escaped under this fence. Not even the lambs!
Barbed wire fence for sheep specifics
A couple specifics for you if you are interested in using this type of fence for your sheep.
We started our bottom wire almost on the ground, just my boot can slip underneath it.
Then, we added extra wires clear up to about the middle of the fence line, so they are only about 4” apart.
Would I use barbwire fencing again?
We ended up fencing our entire 80 acres for the sheep, including two cross fences. We spent $1,480 on barbed wire. This was half the cost of new. We still have half a pallet left, meaning we actually only spent $740 for 80 acres worth of additional wire. Extra expenses included staples, fencing gloves and fence clips at $160, bringing our total to $900.
One roll of sheep fence in our area runs $280 for 330’. We would need at least 29 rolls (likely a little more but lets keep it simple) fence our perimeter and two cross fences which totals 9,401 feet. That would cost us $8,120 – almost 10X more than we spent!
Even if we hadn’t come across a smoking deal on the barbed wire, if we had had to pay full price, it still would have saved us over $6,000 versus putting in sheep fence so…
YES I would most certainly choose to do this again! It was absolutely worth it and it has worked very well for us over the last year.
FAQ’S:
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It might deter them slightly, but no this fence will likely not keep predators out.
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For us, yes! We never had any problems with lambs, ewes or rams getting out over the last year.
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The weaknesses are definitely the gates, which really have nothing to do with the barbed wire. We also have cattle, and all of our previous fencing and gates were for them. Due to that and the fact that we get a lot of snow and drifting, our gates are hung very high and some of our sheep learned how to crawl under the gates. After a while we cut a cattle panel down to the size of the gate and wired it to the gate to lessen the gap between the bottom of the gate and the ground.
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I have found no evidence of wool on the fence anywhere after a year, so I would say no.
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