The Cost of a Cow: Part 4 - Fencing
So far, we've addressed feed, vaccinations, minerals, ear tags, and butchering. This post will attempt to characterize fencing costs. Fencing costs can be all over the place depending on how secure you want your animals, wildlife pressure, whether or not your fence will be electrified, and what shape your field is. So, we shall make some more assumptions as a starting point.
Let's say that we're fencing 30 acres and it's such a shape that it will take a mile of fence to get around the perimeter. This is going to be a two-wire high tensile electrified fence and we will assume the fence is pretty clear of weeds and obstructions that would cause us to lose a lot of voltage.
Each corner brace post is going to cost us $40 in materials so $120 total. We will use 6' steel t-posts every 45 feet so we have 29 posts per side of the field or 126 in total. You can get these posts for about $4/apiece so we have $504 in posts. Insulators are $6/25, and we'll need a total of 252 or $66 for insulators. Finally, we'll need three rolls of high tensile wire, which is $115/4000' or $345.
Our total cost to fence that 30 acres is $935 in materials. We also need to energize it, so we'll budget $100 for a fencer. $1035 in total to fence the pasture. Note that if you want to run cows here in snow, you'll need to add a ground wire, too.
I'm no accountant, but I would assume the life of that fence would be around 15-20 years. If it's 15 years, the straight line depreciation is $70/year.
If you rotational graze, you also need to include the cost of temporary fencing. You'll have $180 in geared reels (3@$60/each), $90 in polywire (3@$30/each), $270 in temporary posts (90@$3/each) . You have a total of $540 in temporary fencing which will last no more than 5 years of heavy use or $108/year depreciation. So, for a field fully fenced and equipped for rotational grazing, we have a cost of $170/year.
How many animals will that 30 acres support for your six months of grazing? Let's assume it's a good producing field at 3 tons of dry matter per acre, or 6000 lb of dry feed per acre. If each animal unit eats about 35 lb/day, you can support 28 head for six months on that pasture.
So now we have a cost per head of $170/28 or $6/head for fencing. This number now goes into the cost of our steer. Not much, you say? Not for one cow, but if you have 200... The number starts getting larger. What isn't included here is the facilities required to handle cows: corrals, squeeze chute/head catch, loading docks, trailers, scales, feeders (for winter), etc. I used $10/head/year for fencing maintenance in a business plan for direct marketing beef and I think that's probably a good number to start with. I hadn't justified that number before writing this post, so I'm actually feeling pretty pleased with my guess.
Our steer was at $2002 at the end of part 3. Now our steer is $2012 when we add in $10 for fencing in Part 4.
Please comment with your experiences or if this is helpful/enlightening. I'm going to push labor into a Part 4.5 because this post is getting too long!
Be blessed!
-Kenny
PS. One key note here is that if you have no facilities, you obviously can't use $10 per head as your initial cost for fencing. You'll need to fully fence all your pasture, you'll need at least a way to safely load your cattle into small stock trailers, and probably a head catch. If you're going to make your own corrals, shop hard for your fencing material, and be pretty innovative with upcycled steel or wood, figure at least $3000 for a 30 acre field and small loading gate and rotational grazing equipment. $10/head is a maintenance number, but it is probably biased towards an operation that has a lot of dilapidated fences.
Lewis and Clark. My first pair of bulls. Clark is no longer with us, but his ground beef is for sale!