Funding to finish the fence
Exciting news! We’ll be able to finish building our 13 km long boundary fence soon! We’ve already completed just under half, and this year we have funding to finish the remaining 7.6 km. Our entire 490-hectare conservation property will be protected from over-grazing and damage by goats, pigs and kangaroos. Sensational!
We expect to see a huge response as rare plants return, habitat improves, and we won’t need to individually guard every tree we plant!
Our "Big Electric" fence is supported by the Victorian Government through the Community Volunteer Action Grants, the Australian Government through the Murray-Darling Healthy Rivers Program, a Gallagher - Landcare Australia grant, and with help from the Jesse Chaplin-Burch Trust and Bio·R. Thank you!
The fence design we have chosen is a Gallagher Westonfence. It’s an electric fence with plastic (HDPE) suspension droppers for insulators. We run three hot wires in an eight-wire fence. Our fence is 1.4 m high, and we find this is high enough for kangaroos. We’ve noticed that most of the time they’ll poke along and look for a spot to go under a fence rather than jump over it.
We have a mains-powered Gallagher M28i energiser for our 13 kilometres of fence, but solar energisers are also available. A feature we really like is that the energiser has a hand-held fault finder which points you in the direction of the fault and pinpoints where the problem is. It’s generally a bit of loose wire that we haven’t picked up from the old fence.
We’ve also started using stainless-steel Gallagher Mega ground anchors in sensitive areas because they cause minimal ground disturbance. We also like that the Westonfence plastic droppers are 90% recycled including materials from drumMuster.
For us on our conservation property, the Westonfence protects native vegetation and habitat from overgrazing by kangaroos, pigs and goats. But importantly, it is not a barrier to the critters we do want, like echidnas and lizards. I’m glad to see the old netting fence go.
More information:
There’s more on the fencing project here
This story ran on our local ABC radio on 20 September 2021: https://www.abc.net.au/.../conservation-fencing.../100469838
Fencing is exciting fun for the whole family! We’re working with a lot of recalcitrant wire, so silly-looking safety glasses are a must.
