Fencing

When we moved to Prends Y Garde, the farm had some rudimentary sheep fencing and barbed wire on the external boundaries. however, on close inspection most of the posts were either rotten or missing and the sheep fencing that was in place was totally inadequate for keeping llamas. We sat down with a plan of the land and the position of the new llama stable block and then based on our experiences we set about designing a new fencing plan based on how we wanted to use the land for our llamas.

Whilst designing fencing for creating separate paddocks may sound easy, it needs a good deal of thought and planning to ensure that you can easily and safely contain and move your llamas between different areas of your farm.

Something that is important to remember with regards to the positioning of fencing and gates, is that:

* The positioning of gates will dictate how the llamas can be moved between and beyond these boundaries.

What we came up with was a plan for creating a central 6 gated area created using railway sleepers in the middle of the fields, from which all the internal fence lines would run and a walkway running from the stables up to the central catchment area. This meant that we can access all the fields from a single point and also provides us with an area in which we can easily separate specific llamas from a group if need be, without having to get all the llamas into the stables. Once everything is completed we will also have a standpipe and hose sitting just inside the central pen so that we can provide fresh water to all the fields from a single source (less manpower intensive) . There was no point in putting in automatic water feeders as the temperatures here during winter can go down to -24 degrees and so all surface mounted water pipes and taps freeze solid.

Fencing can be both time consuming and relatively expensive and so it is important to get it right first time. Pre-planning and re-checking is critical if you want to save yourself the time, effort and cost of having to revise all or part of your fencing at a later date. Also of great importance for us was ensuring that the llamas have no means of jumping any fences and escaping from the fields into the adjacent woods as these are privately owned and used purely for private hunting parties during the winter months and an escaped llama running through dense woods would almost certainly be mistaken for one of the many deer which occupy them with disastrous consequences.

Having decided on the layout of the paddocks, we then decided on the best type of fencing for our needs. Based on previous experience we used strong 120cm high sheep fencing topped off with a double strand of 2.5mm high tensile wire. These are fixed to 2mtr acacia posts with 150cms above ground and spaced at 4 mtr intervals. This provides us with a system whereby llamas in adjacent fields can still communicate through the fence but cannot break through or jump the fence. The use of a high tensile top strand also means that should llamas lean on and stretch the wire (which can happen when we have stud males in adjacent fields) we can easily tighten them again using the tensioners inserted on each run of wire.

The reason why we specifically opted for a 2.5mm top wire is that if a couple of llamas decided to try and jump the fence or fight up against the fence line, there is a possibility that by using thinner gauge wires, the llamas could cut themselves, whereas although .25mm wire is thick enough to prevent this happening.

We strongly advise llama owners never to use barbed wife fencing (if you have barbed wire fencing cut it down and replace with non barbed wire) as there is a possibility that the dense fibre could become snagged on the barbs and in its struggle to free itself, the llama could cause itself injury. If you are using plain wire fencing you also need to consider what type of wire and the thickness you should use.

Why did we not use electric fencing? The reason was simply that at our last farm we found that some llamas seemed totally unaffected by the electric fence (we had an adaptive energiser pushing out 7.9kv ) and on occasion they would simply push through it without them appearing to get any shock at all (we believe that this may be due to the hollow fibre of their coat). We know the system worked because after watching Yoda simply push his way between to electrified stands of wire, Mike touched the wires and got a heavy electric shock (best method of telling if your fence really is working!).

For gates we selected 5 bar gates which are fixed to support posts with a system that has a slit pin inserted through the top of the support pins to prevent the gate from being raised off the pins. The reason for this is to prevent a llama from deliberately or accidentally putting their head between the bars and simply raising the gate off its pins as we have seen Yoda do exactly this and lift a 12 foot metal gate off its holding pins in Wales.

Pictured above are the tools we used for fencing (From left to right): Bolt croppers for cutting wire, Wire Strainers for tensioning sheep fencing, Bucket of fencing staples for fixing the fencing to the posts, Hammer for knocking fencing staples into the posts and for causing extreme and long lasting pain to ones fingers when you miss the staple.

We used 250 acacia posts which took 2 hours to lay out and then thanks to Gui and his tractor and post knocker only took 3 hours to knock in place. Erecting the fencing took 3 days and another day for placing the top strands of wire.

This is the plan we drew up for the fencing and this setup has worked very well for our purposes.

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Last modified: Dezember, 2011 .