Fixing Fences After Flooding
|  Video
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| Retha Colclasure |
| 4/17/2009 |
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| The challenges are piling up for ranchers this year. Yesterday, we told you how the harsh winter, followed by springtime flooding, is killing calves at an alarming rate. But that`s not their only problem. In a normal year, ranchers would stop feeding their cattle at home by now, and let them graze in a pasture instead, but that`s not even an option yet for a lot of producers. Underneath all this water lies a big mess waiting for Wayne Green, a Stanton-area rancher, to clean up. "I`ve fixed fence all my life, it`s just more fence," says Green. Still, he admits, it`s not his favorite thing to do. "It`s going to take a lot of post, lot of wire," says Green. Debris and ice from overland flooding caught on miles of fence line, dragging it down and breaking it. "It took a lot of fences that have to be completely tore out and rebuilt," says Green. And he`s not alone in facing the tedious task. "You always look forward to spring, green grass, getting the cows out, but a lot of these guys are going to be stuck because their pastures don`t have any fence around," says Craig Askim, the Mercer County NDSU extension agent. "A lot of labor involved before you get them out of feed yards." It`s a secondary loss for many producers, who first have to deal with increased calving deaths this year. But it`s still a big loss. "If you don`t have a fence, you don`t have anywhere to put your cattle," says Askim. Green rented pasture from someone else so that he has a place for his cows to go, and rented out his farmland, which is also under water, so that he can focus all his attention on the four or five miles of fence he has to fix. "Two years of labor, $40,000 to $50,000," says Green. But he says, the water will go down, and life will go on. Green says the high water isn`t all bad news. He says he had a tremendous crop after his land flooded in 1997. And he says he had to replace all of his fences then, as well. |
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