David

If you keep more than a handful of sheep, the shears decide how the job goes. A clean fleece comes off in one pass with a sharp, powerful machine, or it drags out for hours and leaves a ragged second-quality rug on the animal. After looking through owner reviews on r/sheep, The Farming Forum and … Read more

The best livestock scale depends on your animal types and operation size, and saying that up front saves you from buying the wrong architecture. A 300 pound platform is the wrong tool for a bull and the right tool for a potbellied pig, while a load bar set drops into an existing chute without a … Read more

The best cattle prod is the West Thorne Pro 43.7-inch stick for most people, because it pairs the longest reach in this roundup with an integrated LED and by far the deepest review history. Experienced stock handlers rarely talk about voltage numbers first, though. They talk about reach, whether the handle stays dry in a … Read more

A round bale feeder is any device that holds a round hay bale off the ground so animals pull hay through openings instead of trampling it into mud. The best round bale feeders in fall into two very different camps: heavy ring, cradle and panel feeders built for cattle, and mesh hay nets that keep … Read more

A livestock feed trough is a rigid, open-topped pan set at feeding height that holds grain, pellets or mineral supplement so cattle, sheep, goats, horses and hogs eat without putting feed on the ground. A longer version of the same idea is usually called a feed bunk, and the two words get used interchangeably in … Read more

If you have ever tried to string up a wire fence around a herd, you know the failure point. It is not the wire. It is the fact that a loose animal can put a shoulder through a gap, a calf can get a leg caught in a low strand, and a whole run has … Read more

A heavy-duty welded steel tube gate is the best type of farm gate for most operations, because it carries animal pressure and machinery weight without flexing, and it holds up in weather that eats cheaper hardware. The exceptions matter too: electric and portable gates win where you move fence lines every week, and stall and … Read more

Short answer: the Yardgard 3-Prong Chain Link Stretcher Bar is the best fence stretcher for most people in , because it handles chain link and field fabric, survives real come-along loads, and has more owner feedback behind it than anything else on this list. But the honest truth is that fence stretchers fall into five … Read more

Most fence lines go up the slow way. You dig a hole, drop the post in, pack dirt around it, and tamp it solid. Do that two hundred times and the digging is not the fence anymore. The digging is your whole afternoon. A post driver removes that step entirely. Also sold as a post … Read more

A fence post that has been in the ground for fifteen years does not want to come out, and the reason is almost always the soil around it. Every season of rain and freeze-thaw cycles packs the ground tight against the shaft, and a surprising share of older posts were set in a concrete collar … Read more