The Negative Spaces

Fencing out, not fencing in

Well, we've officially entered the part of the season where every time I step outside, it feels like I'm walking onto the surface of the sun. Triple-digits are a regular occurrence, and I am already sick of it.

It's the time of year when I yearn for a giant snowstorm. Of course, I have to remember that during massive snowstorms, all I want is a good scorcher.

Because of the weather and generally harsh conditions, hay is at a premium this year. Factoring in the price of diesel (to run the equipment to cut and bale the grass, and then run the trucks to transport it) - the cost of a bale has almost doubled.

I have two choices: 1) sell more goats or 2) decrease food costs. Even though I only have a small herd of dairy goats, these are the hard cuts that real farmers have to make on a grand scale these days.

I can't imagine what it would be like to have my entire living reliant upon the cost of feeding livestock right now. It must be insanely stressful.

Because the goats only eat the portion of the property to which they're fenced and relegated, we have several overgrown areas. I've been trying for years to perfect the art of moving around the electric fence I bought to allow for rotation around the yards.

Our soil, though, is so compact that whenever I think about stabbing the little fencing posts into a new area, my hands start throbbing at the prospect. It's like stabbing spikes into concrete. In theory, we change the fence location every week, but I hate moving it.

Mark, my husband, watching me trudge out into the heat to move the fence again a few weeks ago, mentioned that maybe I was looking at it all wrong. By the way, if you want to make a woman really happy, tell her she's doing her most dreaded chores wrong. It's sure to go well.

Mark went to the University of Wyoming. Like me, he can't remember the PIN of our ATM card, but he can remember pedantic lectures from his western legal studies classes over 20 years ago. In the west, there’s an old legal principle called the "Open Range Law" that Mark referred to as "fence out, not fence in."

Essentially, the idea of the Open Range Law is that it's the responsibility of the landowner who doesn't want something on their property ruined by livestock (namely crops) to keep roaming livestock off their land with fence rather than laying the onus at the feet of the animal owner. It's a legal recognition that animals ruin everything in their wake, and owners should fence in that which they don’t want destroyed.

Maybe Mark was onto something.

I always looked at the fence as a tool to keep the goats eating what was inside, but hadn't thought of it as a tool to the prevent their access to those things I didn't want eaten.

That shift in perspective felt like I had been looking for years at a photograph just to finally see its negative. Holy. Moley. The possibilities were endless.

(By the way, if you’re not old enough to remember, we used to get photos on actual paper from actual film and when we picked them up from the store there were things called negatives tucked into the envelopes.)

Anyways, Mark was onto something (don't tell him I wrote that.)

For the first time I thought about fencing those things I DON'T want eaten rather than trying to require the goats to eat a very small area inside the mobile fence.

I made my first "negative pasture" by putting the electric fence around the fruit trees. As they had many times before, the goats got up to the wires and tested to see if it was live. It was. As they had many times before they ran away from the wire - the only difference was that this time the goats weren't surrounded on all sides with an electrified mesh - the tasty trees were instead.

So, these days are now not only the surface of the sun, we're currently stress-testing the negative fencing system.

I'll let 3 or 4 goats out a day to see what they try to eat and destroy. Right now, in addition to the electric netting around the trees, I am in the process of watching goat-locusts get into trouble and prevent it further.

Bella got into my strawberries three times this week. I was losing it. I finally took a translucent storage tote container and flipped it over the plants to make a mini greenhouse/protection scheme. She got it off within seconds.

Next I put the tote back on with a big rock on top. She flipped again.

After she ate all the strawberries down, I fashioned a post and wire goat prevention system. We'll see how it goes. Hopefully the strawberries will recover.

Once I realized that looking at our space differently required a perspective adjustment and creativity, I started to look at it all that way.

We have a blackberry bush that looked extra tasty to the goats. I pulled an old playpen from the kids out and flipped it upside down to surround the blackberry to prevent its consumption. It worked (briefly) to keep the human kids in, and now it's workng to keep the goat kids out.

When it came to space, I had been so focused on using fence to keep things in, that I missed the opportunity of the negative spaces. Thanks to Mark's weird memory for coming up with the idea of fencing out, not fencing in. Now if we can just figure out that PIN.