Fences I Have Known

Fences I Have Known

Robert Frost said, "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors" and my life growing up on an Iowa Farm certainly supported that idea. I'll tell you later how my fence work shared another aspect with Robert Frost.

Our farm of 272 acres was comparatively large in the 1940s in south-central Iowa. Like all the other farms around us, we had a diverse collection of livestock and crops. We had chickens, actually chicks and hens, hogs, sheep, dairy cattle, and horses in our livestock array. Our crops included corn, oats, clover and alfalfa hay, a small acreage of government-controlled wheat, and soybeans which had been first grown in our county by my father, a 1914 graduate of Iowa State College in Animal Husbandry, who identified himself in a book of the Wallaces and McKees published in the 1920s as a scientific farmer.

Our standard fence included woven wire about 3-1/2 or four feet high topped off with three strands of barbed wire. The woven wire was needed to contain the hogs and sheep; the barbed wire was a necessary addition to keep the cows and horses from just pushing the woven wire down and walking out of the field. For most of our fields this construction was adequate. We sometimes had hogs that decided to root who discovered that they could burrow under the fence, a behavior that we controlled by putting rings in their noses which were apparently painful enough to prevent additional rooting. Some of the neighbors who had only cattle were able to use a single strand of electric fence for constraint but although I later found a great use for such, we had none on our farm.

The real fence challenge that we faced came with the farm terrain. In the gently rolling southern area where we were, the grass waterway development that my father created in some of our fields had never been implemented in our largest pasture. As a result the water run-off had created some rather deep ditches. To complicate matters further, the water flow in these ditches achieved such high flow after a major rain that a fence across the ditch that functioned effectively to stop stock when it wasn't raining could be washed out or away. Repairing such crossing was a real chore. We couldn't use the tractor mounted post-hole digger; all work was manual. I understand that some farmers were able to create gates that swung free with the water; we never did. We just repaired several times a year. There were interesting sidelights; I never saw any fish in our stream but on these repair trips, I was my first crawfish holes.

The most fun that I ever had fencing was an exercise to create a lane along a field just for cows. With the tractor mounted post-hole digger, I simply drove in a straight line an approximate distance for post-separation and bored a hole. I repeated the process for the quarter-mile length of the lane and then dropped a post in each hole, tamped in the dirt and ran a strand of barb wire which I attached with staples. I felt pleased that I had constructed the fence in such a short time.

These fences which kept our stock in also kept them from infringing on our neighbors' crops when they ran along a line separating farms. We agreed with Robert Frost. My other thought of Frost came when I moved a stone fence in New Hampshire for an interim job before reporting for ROTC summer camp. It took only a little bit of stone fence work to make me appreciate the fencing I had grown up with in Iowa.