 Welcome. Good afternoon. Thanks so much for joining us today. This is our second of four webinars, our horse management series from NDSU Extension. So we're really glad you're here today. We are today talking about fencing, a little bit of grazing stuff, and then of course we can't do any of that without talking about winter. And so you get to hear from me again today. So I'm Mary Keena, the livestock environmental management specialist at the Research Extension Center here in Carrington. And so I will be talking later about manure management and such. With me today is my co-host Paige Brummond. And so Paige is our extension agent in Ward County. And Paige is managing the chat. So if you have any questions, if you have concerns of anything is going on, you can either private messenger or just put it up for everyone to see. And Paige will be running the chat today. With that, I also said don't feel bad if I mute you, if you unmute yourself to talk, if I mute you, don't feel bad. We'll get to your question after a while. We just want to make sure that everybody can hear. And so we'll go ahead and turn your mics off for you. Up on the screen right now is the demographic survey. And then Paige also put that link in the chat. And so that helps us to do our federal and state reports if you fill it out. Awesome. If you don't, that's okay. We're still glad you're here today. So like I said, this is a second of four that we're going to have in the series. And so we're talking about fencing. So let's see if I can move this on. Okay. Okay, and so first up today, we're going to have James Rogers talking with us. And so James has not been on this webinar series before, unlike the rest of us speakers that you've heard. And so we're excited to have James with us today. He's our forage crops production specialist at the North Central Research Extension Center. And so that's located in my not. And so James is going to talk to us about fencing or fencing specifically. And so I'm going to go ahead and turn this over to James. I'm going to share my controls with him. And then he'll take over from there. And like I said, if you have any questions, certainly feel free to put them in the chat and Paige will make sure she takes care of you there. Okay. Thank you, Mary. Appreciate that. Pleasure to be here with you today. And we're going to talk about, as Mary mentioned, horse fencing. So if you think about a horse as being a giant two year old kid that weighs a thousand to whatever plus pounds. And if you think about protecting your house from a two year old of all the things that they can get into and you do all that. And then you think about everything else that they couldn't possibly get into. Well, a horse probably can. So that's kind of the background for fencing. And there's lots of ways to do fencing. This is not going to be all inclusive of every method or methodology into fencing. But hopefully it'll give you a good basic framework for fencing for horses that will protect them. Keep them from getting injured if they were to run into a fence and also keep them in the place that you want them to stay. Just to start off with the truth test of a fence is worth is not when horses are peacefully grazing. But when an excited horse contacts the fence in an attempt to escape or because he never saw it during a playful romp. And this is from Penn State Extension. This is a really nice quote because it points out a couple of things about horse fencing to keep in mind. One, they need to be visual so the horse can see it. The other thing is if they do come in contact with that with that fence, it's going to restrain them or give somewhat so that if they do hit it hard, it's going to minimize or prevent any injuries. Here's some pictures of horses that have got themselves into a bit of a predicament or in the case down here on the left about to get into a wreck. So this horse here is scaling this gate. You can see he's not clearing it. He's going to get tangled up in that gate. One good thing about the gate area here is that it looks kind of old. It's beginning to come off the hinges. So when he hits it, it's probably going to collapse. So that's not what we want, but it probably is going to minimize injury. This horse here is crawling through a high tensile fence. Obviously, this is not an electric high tensile fence and he's crawling through it. I really like high tensile fencing. It's fairly economical to put up. Once you get into it, it's fairly easy to install. It's a smooth fence. So you can see that this one doesn't have any power going through it. So he's crawling through it fairly easily. It will give. If an animal were to hit it hard, it does give. What's nice about high tensile fencing is when it does give and you get slack in the fence, it's pretty easy to go back in, tighten it back up and off you go again. This little dude here is crawled over a gate. I guess he was trying to jump. Didn't quite make it. Apparently he was a little bit more confident in his athletic abilities than what he actually was and he's hung up here. This is just an old board fence. It's probably seen better days and just needs to be repaired. I've been staring at this at this picture down here in the right hand corner for for a little bit of time. And I have no idea how he managed to do that and remain on four feet. I cannot figure that one out if anybody wants to put in how they think he got this accomplished in the chat. I'd be more than interested in learning. I do like the commentary here from the from the bovine here on the right. So just some real basics to keep in mind on fencing. We want to keep the horses and keep undesirables out. If you live on a busy highway or any kind of road, keeping the animals in and keeping them off the road is going to really help you with any liability issues should animals get out. Another basic about horse fencing is it needs to be smooth. As I mentioned earlier, sometimes we don't anticipate things that horses can get in and get hurt on. So we want to keep that fence smooth. In relation to that, no barbed wire. Barbed wire works great for cattle fencing, but it doesn't work well with horse fencing. They can really get cut up if they were to get tangled up in in barbed wire fence. Making that fence visible is very important. Extremely important. It's important with electrical fencing. Making that fence visible for high tensile fencing and electric fencing. It's very important to introduce those animals to that electric fence so that the first time they have an experience with it. It's not in a paddock that you're wanting to contain them in. Just practical experience with high tensile fencing or polywire fencing. We've actually put ribbons, plastic ribbons or something tied onto a fence. Just so those animals will come up and they're curious about it, maybe grab it, get a little bit of a shot. So that they know it's there and that they know what it's going to do to them if they come in contact. Fencing should be strong and flexible. It should be smooth. In terms of paddock shapes, we really would like to avoid V-shaped corners if we possibly could. If you think about that, think about a horse running down a perimeter fence and into a V-shaped corner. They're just going to get stuck in that, could get injured, maybe get trapped. So if we can avoid V-shaped corners, that would be ideal. Keep it smooth. A woven wire, I really like woven wire for perimeter fencing. It makes a very nice, attractive horse fence. You should limit the size of the woven wire to about 3-inch spacing. This is going to keep that horse from pulling through and maybe getting a hoof caught in that woven wire fence. So the smaller the opening on the woven wire fence, the better it is to prevent that hoof from going through. It should be durable, built to last a long period of time. Fencing is expensive. Cost per foot has really risen in the last 15 years, 15, 20 years. But if we do it right, make it where it's durable and last over time, you're going to spread that cost over a period of years. So we really want to do it right when we initially build it. Again, smooth. If you haven't picked up on that, a big emphasis on smooth fencing to eliminate or prevent as much injury as possible. Some common issues and mistakes and solutions or preventions to those issues. Very first thing, whether you live in North Dakota or another state, be familiar with the fencing laws within that state. It's very critical that it's especially important if you're sharing a perimeter fence with a neighbor, what your responsibilities are, what his responsibilities are. If you're initially putting up a perimeter fence, you might be able to share cost with your neighbor if it has benefit to them as well as you. North Dakota Fencing Boundary Laws can be found online. You can consult the North Dakota Century Code, or if need be, you can contact Legal Aid. The most important part of a fence is going to be the corners. Building a strong corner brace is going to be key to the strength, durability, longevity of that fence. Many times, many mistakes that I've seen, we just don't get those corners built correctly, get them built strong enough. We use two-lighter materials. This is just some guidelines here. So if you're using net wire, probably a minimum 8-inch diameter post for your corner post. For 5-6 strand high-tensile wire, you can go down a little bit smaller on post. You don't have to. You can maintain the same 8-inch diameter post for all applications if you want to do that. But as you decrease the number of wires in general, you can decrease the diameter of the post. Your brace post, if you're making an H brace, in general, the longer that brace post is across the top, the more strength you're going to have in that corner brace. So at least 8-foot length, 4-inch brace, you can also use an 8-inch brace and a brace post. And I've got a picture of that later on. But really, that top brace is very important to the overall strength of that corner post, corner brace. For our power fences, sometimes we come up with an energizer that's just too small. We're not pushing enough voltage down that fence for it to be a deterrent to the animal. So on our electric fences, we're not really looking at the wire as being the barrier for the animal. It's the power. It's the voltage. It's the shock that they receive. It's the deterrent for them to keep them from going through that fence. Energizers have really, really improved over time. The most common type now and the type that I would recommend would be a low impedance energizer to go with a high tensile fence. The amount of power that those energizers are putting out is measured in a term called joules. And just to have a rule of thumb, when you look at an energizer, you want one joule per mile fence output. Many of these energizers will give you an output of stored output joules or output stored joules or output joules. You want to look at output joules and that's how you're going to compare one energizer to another is in terms of output joules. The voltage that they're putting out and pushing down that fence about two to three thousand volts is plenty for horses, beef cattle, people. I've been hit by these high tensile fences and it will rattle your teeth for sure. So two to three thousand volts for horses and beef cattle. Post spacing. This is just kind of a general rule of thumb here. Line post about every 10 to 12 feet on your perimeter fence if you're using wire high tensile high tensile fence. I'm not going to use just a high tensile fence alone for a perimeter fence. I will use it for interior cross fencing. If it is used for perimeter fence, I want it to be in combination with another type of fence and I'll show you some pictures later on for that. But on interior fencing, if you're using high tensile, remember that the shot going through that wire is the deterrent for that animal. So we're just using, we're just using posts to kind of keep that wire up off the ground. So you can kind of use your own judgment for how often you need to put a high tensile space post in 25 feet. If you're going on straight, straight level ground is probably adequate. If you're in hillier type ground, you're probably going to use more more space post on a rail fence. Your main post, you're going to be 8 to 10 feet, depending upon your board length. This is probably the most common problem with electric fencing is the grounding. You want to make sure that you have adequate grounds and follow your controller instructions for that. In general, we want at least three ground rides. They're at least 8 feet long, faced out 10 feet apart, connected with copper wire if we can. And we want one lightning arrestor per ride. That's very important as well. Many times these high tensile fences or fences in general will get hit by lightning. And a lightning arrestor can really save your energizer from getting burned up. The galvanizing on the wire is also important. Galvanizing generally is going to be classed from 1 to 3. Class 3 galvanizing will have three times more galvanized coating than a class 1. It's going to cost you more, but the more galvanizing that is on that wiring, the longer it's going to last for you. So in my opinion, I would go with class 3 wiring if you can. The other thing about class 1, whenever you wrap that wire, that galvanized coating is going to crack as you wrap it around. So that's going to be a weak point eventually in that wire is where that galvanizing cracks. Speaking from a voice of experience, I can be kind of cheap and when I started out, you know, newly married and trying to build stuff and I didn't have any money. I tried to do things as cheaply as possible and I did that with fence too. And it wound up costing me just from personal experience. I tried my darnedest to build as cheap a corner post as I possibly could. And I wound up rebuilding it too in a very short period of time because it just didn't last. So it wound up costing me more than if I just figured out how to get the funds or just build it the right way the first time, I would have been much, much better off. So lesson learned from me, build it right and build it one. Paddock design, I need to watch my time here. I've already gone down too many rabbit holes but Paddock design, your gates in your corners, that's the best location for ease of use, ease of access to get livestock in and out of. Make sure they're wide enough that it's easy for you to get equipment in and out of and it's easy enough when they're open and you're trying to move livestock through that they can see that opening. Your lanes, if you're using lanes, make sure that they're wide enough for the equipment that you're going to get down 14, 16, 20 foot lanes or nice. Don't think about them as being wasted space because you can also graze those lanes as an extra paddock as well. For your gates, avoid potential wet areas and that's tough to do because over time, traffic in and out of those gates, they tend to wear down and you'll get a wet spot there. But now when it is wet, it's a good time to see where your water pools or how it flows so you can avoid those spots or do some grading if needed to get those gates up and out of those wet spots. I prefer square or rectangle paddocks over to polygons. One, my forage utilization is going to be a little bit better. The other thing too is going to cost me less to fence a square or fence a rectangle in terms of materials than a polygon. Polygon is just going to have more surface area that I'm going to have to fence. If possible, make curved corners rather than square. So if your horse is out exercising himself or running down a fence line, he just makes a general curve rather than running into a corner. In general, I'm going to size my paddocks in terms of forage production and utilization of forage. I'm going to size my paddocks based on forage production and I'm going to think about forage demand and try to get my paddocks may be different sizes, but they're going to be somewhat equal in the amount of forage produced within each paddock in general. If not, kind of a general rule of thumb in terms of space for a horse, one acre per horse rule of thumb. When you're initially designing your paddocks and fencing, start with a map. That really makes things a lot easier. There's lots of places that you can get maps now. You can get a map from your NRCS or USDA service center, Google Earth, WebSoul Survey. You can use maps from. This is just kind of a general place here to start with and kind of some general ideas and how I would go about fencing this piece of land. You've got native grasses. You've got introduced grasses here. Start with a perimeter fence. I'm going to begin to separate out my native from my introduced forages. Water points are important to have a water point within each paddock. You can see some of these paddock areas here don't have water points, so I'm going to develop them. I'm initially going to use my ponds as a water point initially. Then over time, I'm using a well here and adding a water point in this paddock and another water point here. On this side of the road, I'm busting up this into three paddocks, but I'm still using the single source pond here as a water point. But I'm putting a lane in so that I can have access from these two paddocks here to walk down the lane for access to water. Then over time, I may add another water point here just to improve my utilization of my forage and general utilization of the paddock as well. Here's another way to kind of look at initial paddock design. We have an area here that, again, we have a water point, a pond water point up here, and some native introduced. Break it into where we have access to our pond here for a water point and separating our native pastures from my introduced. And all of a sudden we have a four paddock rotation going on here. We're using a lane up to this pond for water access. And then over time, we can, as we see how this system works, we can add more paddocks as needed. I've extended the lane down here to provide water for these lower paddocks here as well. And over time, you might want to put in an additional water source to supply water to these lower end paddocks here and continue to use the pond up here on the north end. This is a real simple formula for determining, well, how many paddocks do you need? And this takes into consideration grass recovery or regrowth after grazing, the length of your grazing period in terms of days. And then you add one because livestock always have to be standing somewhere. So if we think that we need during the great, during the active growing season, 30 days of recovery and we want to rotate every three days, then our paddock number, we would need 11 paddocks. Just kind of a good general rule of thumb formula and it works fairly well. If you do have ponds, you might consider limiting the access to that pond to do a couple of things. One, to maintain your pond edges to keep them from eroding from just livestock coming in and out of the pond, keeping livestock out of the pond and improving that water quality. So this is something that we've used in the past where we actually go in and we fence out the pond, but we put in a limited access point here for livestock to have access to the water. Here's what it looks like. We've got a, we have a very, this is a fairly steep ramp down into the water, into the pond here. And then this is an electric fence that's floating out here on this pond surface. So as they walk in, the idea is that we want them to walk in, get a drink of water and move back out. We really don't want this to be a point here where they can relax and stand in the water. We want them in and out. This works pretty well if initially the only access for water you have is a pond. Fence height for perimeter fencing, we would want to discourage that animal from jumping out. So the height of the fence around the width of a mature animal should be adequate. Cost, this is not actual cost, but a comparative cost index. So the lower the number, the deeper the cost is going to be relative to a higher index number here. So you can see there are high tensile fence. Single strand is going to be the cheapest to install. Our controller is not included in this cost compared to a board fence using two by six treated boards. It's going to be very expensive. Life span over here is also an important consideration. I've seen high tensile fence last even longer than 25, 30 years. If it's good quality, put in white with a good charger. I've seen high impedance fence chargers last 15, 20 years under a five gallon bucket. They're built to last pretty well. Again, you're not going to use this for perimeter fencing, but this kind of gives you an idea of comparative cost between different materials. Estimating the amount of material that you're going to need. A common measurement in fencing is a rod. So a rod is equal to 16 and a half feet. A quarter mile is 1320 or 80 rods. And you can see how this comes all the way up to a mile being 320 rods. And how many rods it would take to go around or fence a perimeter based on acreages and shapes. Again, a comment about energizers and jewels. Voltage is the is the generic energizers ability to deliver a power or shock. When we test the fence and you have a fence tester that you hang on to the fence wire, it's going to measure the amount of voltage that's in that fence or going going down that fence. A jewel is the amount of power or shock that the energizer can deliver. And it's it's the push that's going to push that voltage down the fence. So as I mentioned earlier, it's going to compare compare energizers based on output jewels. This is a really nice illustration here between two tractors. We have a long tractor here. It's putting out 2700 RPMs. They're both putting out 27 RPMs. But this one in terms of jewels would have much greater horsepower or jewels compared to this long tractor cost wise. Whoops cost. As you go up and out the jewels, the price is also going to go up. There's going to be variations in warranties between between the energizers. So look for a dealer. That's important to who your local dealer is where you can get this equipment from who's going to stand behind it. What the warranties are, compare your output jewels and price and get what you need for the fencing that you're trying to power. Energizers. There's going to be three basic types. One is just going to be the plug in main. This is probably the most reliable one of the three here. Just a plug in fence charger works great powers a lot of fence. The MBS is going to be a main plug in with a battery backup or solar option is very versatile in application. I have not used one of these. I've used the main in plugs and I've used the solar powered energizers as well. Solar solar has really improved over time, but you still run some risk with extended periods of cloudy days. You can lose charge also help and sometimes damage these solar panels. And it's a good idea to have a battery backup for insurance materials. Here's here's a role of your high tensile wire. Typically, I really like to use the 12 and a half gauge. This is class three, so it's got the class three galvanize on it. Here's a V match role 100 to 200 feet per roll is fairly common and what you're going to get high tensile. You can you can get various links of this. A common one is 2640. This is coated high tensile wire, which is going to be a little bit more visible to the animal. It's probably going to last a little bit longer with that with that coating on it as well. I threw this up here. This is this is not Bob wire. This is smooth twisted wire. If you put barbs on it, it would be barbed wire. You can use this. I don't really recommend it. I would much prefer going with the high tensile over this 12 and a half gauge smooth wire. This is great stuff for temporary cross fencing. There's all different types that you can get here. These things will pull quite a bit of voltage. You can see that it goes everything from about a two inch three inch wide poly wire up to strands of poly wire. This stuff is as I mentioned great for cross fencing. If it's temporary cross fencing and you're using it year after year, if you keep it up out of the weather, you can use this stuff for years and years and years. Materials. This is a combination of board and high tensile. Works very well. Pipe, down in the oil producing areas, you see a lot of pipe fencing. It's attractive. It looks good. It will weather. It will rust. You've got a lot of extra labor in keeping this stuff painted. You also need somebody to come in and weld this up. The other thing about pipe fencing, if something hits it, it's not going to give very much. Wooden fence post. I really like these. A well treated, good treated wooden fence post can last a long time. I know of some treated fence posts that have been in the ground about 50 years and they're still, they're still good strong post and holding that fence up well. I don't recommend a T post because if you're going to use it, make sure you do cap these in. I have seen some real rats with animals trying to go over or scale over the top of T post and get hung up on the tips and really some pretty bad injuries can occur. I don't recommend a T post for horse fencing. Hourglass fence post. I like these a lot with high tensile fencing. I don't have to worry about insulators. I can just put a pen in here and carry my fence. If something hits this, they will give. They will come out of the ground. The problem with these is over time they will weather. You need to handle these with gloves. You need to get them pre-drilled because they're like drilling through concrete. They're very hard. If they do break, they tend to splinter, but they work very nicely in combination with the high tensile fence. These little step-in posts are very easy to use. You just step them in. They work great for cross fencing and temporary fencing. They will bend, they will break, they will come out of the ground, but they're purely economical. Remember the high tensile fence is the power. It's the voltage coming down through there. It's going to keep the animals in. These are just to keep the wire up, keep it straight. Materials I really like standoffs on a perimeter fence. This is a standoff with a wooden fence here with a high tensile line going down through it. This gives a couple of things. It gives some protection to your perimeter fence, keep the animals off that perimeter fence. And then also you have a power source here that if you want to do any cross fence in with a temporary fence, you can tap right into this line coming down through here with the standoff and off you go. Candles, gate handles, and electric voltage. There's quality variations in these electric handles. They will weather and crack over time, but the more solid they are, the longer they'll last and tend not to crack. Some of the cheaper ones don't last, they'll crack, and you can get a pretty good shot going through these. This is kind of an interesting little deal here. This is just a garden hose reel, but if you're using a lot of temporary fencing like this, you can roll a lot of cross-fencing material up onto these reels and then pull it right back off. Works really well. I like these spring fencers on high-tensile. It just kind of gives you an idea of how much tension you're putting onto this. Also, you're going to need electric insulators. Here's another view of an insult tube. These work very well. A garden hose is not an insult tube. People get by with those, but they don't get by very long. Garden hose will crack, will weather, and it will short your fence out and cause you problems later on. This is a spinning genie here. I would not use high-tensile fence without a spinning genie. High-tensile fence, if you're trying to work with it without a spinning genie, it can turn into a slinky really quick, so it keeps it restrained, keeps it in a roll, makes it very easy to spool off or rewind. Additional tools here. This works very well to get an initial tension onto a high-tensile fence. This is a little tool here that you can use to take the slack out of a fence if it gets hit. I've used these in the past. I'm not hugely wild about them, because as they roll that wire up, once it's kinked in there, it's forever kinked. The other thing is that it can kind of crack to galvanize, which can be a problem later on. If you use these, get the tool that goes with it as well. You can't have enough cut-off switch on a power fence that really helps you isolate shortages. This is another tool that you absolutely have to have with an electric fence is a tester. Spicers work very well to splice fence together, splice broken wires back together. If you use these, get the tool that goes with them. This is a high-tensile fence stretcher as well. I mentioned corner post and corner bracing. This is just kind of a schematic of a very well-built corner brace. One thing I wanted to mention that if you're obtaining cost share from natural resource conservation service, it will have specifications that you have to follow in order to get your cost share money from them. Whatever specs that they have, you will need to follow. This is kind of based off of those NRCS specs. This is an inline cross brace. How many of these you need will vary based on the length of fence that you're putting in and the terrain that you're putting that fence on. Level land you can get by with fewer inline braces, curves, rough topography you're going to need more. Some variations of braces. This is kind of a dead man here, another dead man version here. This is an extremely well-constructed brace here. You can see the length of the post here. They're using the same diameter post as they're doing here. This is an extremely strong brace. This is a pipe H brace as well here. With electric fencing on these, you really have to make sure that you have tube type insulators to keep from grounding out with these posts, with the metal posts or pipe fence. I'm going to skip through this just because of time. A couple fencing systems here. This is a combination of power pipe wire and ground wires. So you can do a combination of those. You can see the grounds here down here on the bottom. This is an example where all the lines are hot. And then finally, gates. If you're using electric fence and have inline gates, you've got to get the power from one side of the gate to the other. A lot of people will go underground underneath that gate. If you do here in North Dakota, make sure that you get it deep enough that the shrink swell of the ground when it freezes, falls, it's not going to cause you issues here. Another option is to go up and over and then back down. So put the wire instead of underground above and then back down. Two examples of board fencing here. If you have trees that you want to protect, you might consider putting a small fence around those as well. High tensile with the standoffs again. Very nice perimeter fence here with the v-mesh. This is a really nice fence here with an inline gate. I like this gate because they've also put the mesh fencing over the gate as well. And I wanted you to see how well the braces are around this gate. That's a huge problem with gates, especially the longer they are, the stronger this brace needs to be to keep that gate from dragging. Some examples here. This is a woven wire or a chain link rather. I don't really care for chain link fencing at all. It's very expensive. It has some rough points on it. I don't really recommend it at all, but showing it here because you can use it. I don't recommend it. There are woven electric fences available for horses as well. A lot of this application is used with sheep, with goats, with smaller log stock. This is a good example of the insulating tube, insulating a hot wire around the post. And then finally, a list of resources here. Most of these power fence companies also have materials for sport and how to install their material. And it's all really quite good, quite good information because if you buy their products, they want you to have success with their products. So most of them do have a very good fencing guide along with their materials here. But with that, I am done. And I'll be happy to answer questions too. All right, thank you, James. We are going to move on into Mary's presentation, and we will follow up with some questions at the end. There we go. Okay. Awesome. Thanks so much, James. And yeah, there's a bunch of questions. And so I know Paige is managing those, and we'll get to those after a little bit. So with that, we are going to switch a little bit over to why manage manure and how does this go along with fencing? Same way it went along with grazing last week. If we're doing anything with our animals, if that's in a paddock or out on a pasture, we're going to have to manage that manure. And so why manage manure? I'm always going to start with this slide. So for me, I want you to manage your manure because it contains valuable nutrients. If the nutrients are not used and they become a pollutant, and they're essentially wasted. So I don't want to waste, but I also don't want you to pollute. So improper manure storage and land application leads to excessive soil nutrients, surface runoff, leachate, and then water contaminated with manure. And we don't want that. Okay. Reasons maybe you would rather manage your manure. External parasites such as flies, bacteria and pathogens, rodents, odors, internal parasites, weed seeds, and then of course just visual appearance. Who wants to see a pile of manure sitting there? So all of these are reasons that you might more so want to manage your manure. We went over this last week. And so I'm going to link last week's because I'm going to go a little quick here just so we can get to questions. But just quickly, short-term and long-term. So short-term stockpiles in North Dakota may not be for more than nine months. So you can stack your manure in one place for nine months. And then you have to spread it and then move to a new location. If you're going to have a permanent stockpile, you can do that. That's for more than a year. So forever permanent. But it involves a little bit of soil investigation, some regulatory oversight. Again, that's just in North Dakota. There are rules in every state. And so if you contact your extension person in your state, they'll be able to point you to whoever that is. Of course, no matter where we're at, we're going to want to protect our surface water and our groundwater. And so we're not going to put manure in gravel pits along streams or lakes right now. We're flooding. One side of the state has five inches of snow right now. It's snowing and raining on them. The other side of the state is flooding right now. And so floodplain, don't put your manure there because we're going to lose some of our nutrients as well. All right. So I'm still going to do, I know I went over this last week, but I'm going to go over it again. Wanderer management this spring, we need to assess where manure is currently stored. If it needs to be moved before becoming inundated with flood waters, if you can still move it and you know those flood waters are coming, let's move it. It might be too late, might be too muddy. I know all of the mites. I totally understand. But if you can do it, let's do it. Turn, turn that snow bedding pile to keep it heating. Let's not leave snow in there until June. You might say, but Mary is not going to heat their snow in it. It's cold enough to keep snow. That's okay. It is heating. I guarantee if you open it up, you're going to feel some warmth in there. Let's keep it heating by turning it clear, and now get it out of your lot. And then James said this, and Paige mentioned it in the chat, and I'm going to tell you again, it doesn't matter what we're talking about, plan for next year. Look right now. Where's the snow? Where is the, where is the water flowing? If it's raining outside, where are we having issues with ground and footing? Plan for next year. So take some notes. I know it sounds crazy. Like I'm going to go out and take notes about where this mud puddles at Mary. Yes, that's what I want you to do. Plan for next year. So that next year at this time, you're not saying, well, I should have addressed that last year during the summer. Okay. So manure snow piles and safety. So they're, they're not necessarily the same thing, but I'm going to talk about them at the same slide. So on the one side, I just put the snow mountain up snow, winter mountain. So you might have a little bit of hay, some bedding, some leftover snow, just a little bit of everything. Some manure. Turn that pile. I promise you it'll heat. There's another one there on the right side of the slide. You can see my arrows randomly pointing to the sky. I did that because there's power lines up there. And while in this picture, it does not look close, but if you bring your tractor and your loader over, I can tell you from experience, it's pretty darn close once you open up the grapple. Okay. And so initially when this pile was starting to be built, it wasn't an issue. We weren't close. It was far enough away. Winter was early. It didn't matter. And now this weekend as we were clearing out corrals, we were very close to being dangerous. And so just think that if you're going out to clear to move, to turn, do any of the things that we're talking about today think, oh, where are we going to, we're going to look up. We have to look up. And then page put in the chat too. I want you to look down. So call before you dig and then look up to see where your power lines are. Okay. And I put this here. So managing mud on horse farms. There's a university of Minnesota has a whole webpage about this that I put this picture here to remind me to tell you about this. So this looks like just mud and water, but very likely in North Dakota underneath of that, there's a nice layer of ice. And I can also tell you that from experience. I had to wash some clothes this weekend. Cause I ended up in my hind end because of ground that looked like this. It just looks like mud and water. And then there's a nice layer of ice under a lot of this still. So when you're out there, not just for your own sake and your own non-smelliness, but also for your animals, whatever animals you're managing, let's just be careful and understand that there's probably still some footing issues there. Okay. So I said, let's turn those snow mountains. We're not going to go into a whole bedding lecture here. I have that on the next slide. I have a link to our workshop for that. So I just want to remind you, if we're going to compost, not only are we reducing the volume and managing that manner, we're also reducing weed seeds. You guys don't like weed seeds. You don't like pathogens. We for sure don't like parasites. We're reducing nutrient loss. So that's the first slide when I said, why care about managing manure? We're reducing nutrient loss by increasing our nutrient stability. So let's go ahead and turn our, our manure compost it so that we can have a lot of benefits from that. Okay. Dry lots, sacrifice areas, exercise pads. They're probably all called the same thing. And so James, again, James touched on some of this in his slides too, as far as space and footing and shelter and water, what we need to make sure that those animals have everything they need. Sometimes, where did I put it? Oh, here we go. Sometimes this is why we need a sacrifice area. Okay. So I know this doesn't look good. The horses are dirty. They're, so here's a couple of positives. Okay. One, yes, they're tearing up the ground, but it's just in that area. Okay. That's why we're calling it a sacrifice area. We're not going to go any farther out on that grass. We're going to give everything time to dry up. We're going to feed them hay. And I know it looks bad because it's on the ground. Maybe we're thinking we're wasting it, but we actually have it in a feeder and it's up off the ground. That's good for parasite management. Okay. It's going to look like this for a while, but it will get better. So I'm going to go back here. Things to consider location, soil characteristics and structure, ease of use. So when James is building his pad ox, he's going to use the hay. He's going to build his dog. That's really important for the animals. Something that he considers in there is where is it easiest for us to come back to, whether that's back to water. If we're not completely developed in all of our areas, we don't have water development in all of our areas. Where is an easy place that all of our animals can come back to. Is there a central place? Is it better on one end or the other? So ease of use. And then also ease of use for storing. If we're going to have a sacrifice area or a dry lot where And so we want to make sure that it's easy for us to access with our type of equipment that we have. And then where are we going to put that manure? Space. Is it enough space? Miner collection. Can you get in there? Can you do that? If you're going to have somebody else come in and haul your manure, if you're not taking it out of your pen yourself, can they get their equipment in? And so how big are your gates? What is your accessibility there? And then fly control. If we're taking our manure out of those areas, we're doing a better job of managing that manure. But if we're going to put it right beside our pen or sacrifice area, maybe that's not a great place to put it because of flies. If you're going to put it there, let's turn it to make sure we're killing those flies and keeping that cycle going. So I just highlighted one thing here. So compost manure rather than spreading it raw on fields where horses graze. So last week, this was a big question and we're going to skip ahead to that question. Here's some pasture drag examples. So people had asked last week, can I use a harrow? What kind of fanciness level do we need? We can go anywhere from unfancy, right? So we have a chain link fence with some bricks on top of it, just enough pressure to kind of break up some of that horse manure all the way up to something fancy. Just like what we would call a harrow. And so basically we're just trying to drag across and break that out. We want to break up the manure. It gives the manure more access or surface area to sunlight. And then that sun is going to help kill our parasites. Okay. So there are no restrictions in North Dakota as far as when to spread manure. But like I said last week, we all almost all of us have a smartphone. We have a weather app. We know when it's going to rain. Don't be crazy and spread three minutes before it's going to rain on us and be like, I had no clue. We have a clue. We totally know. Okay. And so just common sense. Don't spread it before during or after a large rain event and don't spread where water quality is going to be compromised. So we have those valuable nutrients. Let's not waste them. Composting helps us reduce weed seeds, pathogens, parasites. It also reduces the volume, which is important for us. The goal of a dry lot areas to sacrifice the small part so that we can have more healthy productive land over here. So we're going to sacrifice a small part of land to make sure that everything else is really good. And especially in a year like this, when we feel like we're a month behind. Let's, let's make sure that we're not, we're going to be really excited when the sun comes out next week and we're going to try to turn stuff out. Let's just hold off a little bit and have that, that one smaller area that we're messing up for a bigger area that'll be better later. Proper management can lead to parasite load reduction and then just use common sense when you're spreading. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Paige. Paige is going to go through the questions that are in the chat. I know you guys have been answering and she's been putting a load of good information in there too. We'll just verbalize some of that for you who are not reading it. Alright, so now's a good time to throw those questions in. I'm going to scroll back up to the top and ask some questions of James verbally. James, one of the questions was how deep do our fence posts need to go into the ground, both our brace fence posts and our line fence posts. I believe I had a slide on that and I believe it was at least two and a half to four feet. Yeah, that's what I remember seeing as well. So four feet for those corners and two, two and a half for the others. Also, if they're getting cost share, NRCS does have depth recommendations that you have to go by. Yes, correct. One of the questions was what if you're having horses in with other livestock like our small animals like goats or sheep, what would be some good options that would work for both species? The mesh fence, the woven fence would work well. That's probably going to be the best option for sheep. Goats as well. It's probably about as good as you can do with a goat. How about some considerations for what type of fencers to use to keep predators out? I would definitely lean toward the low impedance high voltage fencers like we talked about that would go with the high tensile fence. I would probably also use that in combination with some type of a mesh fence as well. So I might run the mesh fence, but underneath the mesh probably run a high tensile electric wire. So if they try to tunnel underneath that mesh wire, they're going to get hit. Thank you. I think that kind of wraps up the questions. There was some discussion about our tough winters here in North Dakota and just keeping that in mind when you're selecting your fencing materials as well as where you're putting your fences. Some of those materials are maybe a little less winter hardy than others. So keep that in mind when you are planning your horse fences for sure. And then just another reminder about calling 811 before you plan to install your fence. It is the law as well as staying safe and avoiding any buried utility lines. All right. I'm not seeing anything else pop up into the chat. So with that, we are going to wrap up this webinar. Thank you all for joining today. There's a poll popping up on the screen. If you fill that out for us, we'd appreciate it. Also as a reminder, you'll be getting an email with a recording for this week's webinar, as well as a link to the resources that we referenced today. I also want to invite you to join us next week where we're going to talk about traveling with your horse. So whether you're going an hour or two down the road or you're hauling across the nation, what are some things to consider both from, you know, the paperwork and legal side. What about overnighting? How often do we load and unload? How do we plan for those long trips and those short trips? Just how to best manage your travel with your horse. And then also in two weeks, we are going to cover a footing topic. So arena footings have popped up as something we wanted to visit about from past webinars, as well as footing around the horse facilities. So we mentioned a little bit today about those dry lots. How do we make those drain correctly? How do we deal with footing in high traffic areas? So just a little heads up on what's coming up over the next couple of weeks. Also want to invite you to give us suggestions on what you want to hear about in the future as well. So we are basing these webinars off of what previous attendees have told us that they want to learn a little bit more about. So we're always looking for feedback for suggestions for the future as well. All right, I don't see any more chat questions or pop questions popping up into the chat. Mary, do you have any last final words before we log off? No, I think that's it. You covered it all and so we'll see you all next week. All right. Thanks everybody for joining us today.