Where Have All the Fences Gone?
Seen any fences lately?
And I don’t mean the decorative, split-rail variety around the flower bed.
Or the electrified netting to deter the garden-raiding deer.
I’m talking about woven wire topped with three strands of barbed wired clipped to a steel post every rod (16 ½ feet.) Fence builders often talk in “rods.” On the small farm of my youth, most fields were 40 acres, or ¼ mile – 80 rods - on a side.
“Woven wire” also was sometimes called hog netting. That’s what kept the pigs confined to the pasture. Unless, of course, the pigs rooted under the fence – as pigs are prone to do if the farmer doesn’t put rings in the piglets’ noses.
As a kid on the farm in the 1950s and 60s, I helped build many almost hog-tight fences. After chasing hogs that had squirmed through those fences, I quickly figured out why I also got to help put rings in the noses of other hogs to deter their rooting and fence squirming.
Which brings me back to the fences you hardly ever seen any more. Hogs in a pasture are a rarity – even in Iowa with our 25 million swine. The vast majority of those animals are farrowed and fattened in CAFOs – confined animal feeding operations – huge buildings where they never see grass or a fence, and their feces and urine fall through slatted floors into manure pits.
But what about cattle? The fences I helped build needed those three strands of barbed wire to corral the cattle in the pasture. Cattle on pasture, you say? Yes, there still are some. But they’re also becoming less common. Some dairies now confine hundreds of animals in barns where they’re milked robotically whenever the cow feels the need. Feed is brought in, and manure is hauled out. Thus, who needs a fence?
Back to building that fence:
My grandfather, Homer, started farming in 1919. Fences don’t last forever, so 4 decades later, when I was getting strong enough to heft the steel post driver, there was no shortage of new fence to build. Although the posts were getting too heavy for Grandpa Homer, his eye was as keen as ever, and his job was to sight down the fenceline to make sure I drove the posts in an arrow-straight row. We couldn’t have the neighbors driving by and seeing a crooked fence!
Then came stretching the wire between the hefty corner posts we’d previously set in the ground. Often, they were Osage orange, or “hedge,” as Dad called them. Hedge because they’d been cut from the iron-hard trees planted in southern Iowa as windbreaks or “hedgerows.” We’d fasten the wire to one corner post, then hook the other end to the model C Allis Chalmers and pull - very carefully to avoid breaking the wire. When Dad and Grandpa agreed that the wire was taut, they’d secure it to the opposite corner post, then pluck it like a guitar string.
A few of those fences are still standing and corralling the neighbors’ cattle. Others have been bulldozed by the new landowners who felt compelled to grow just a couple more rows of corn or soybeans. Along with the posts and wire, the dozer probably grubbed out a few scraggly mulberry trees and a strip of bromegrass and weeds that had provided just enough shelter for cottontail rabbits and the occasional quail or pheasant. Groundhogs dug burrows in the fencerows, too, and red foxes sometimes moved in when the groundhogs left.
Even the barbed wire attracted wildlife: meadowlarks, red-winged blackbirds, and goldfinches perched on the strands. Loggerhead shrikes used the barbs to impale insects for future meals – just as they more typically stuck their food on locust tree thorns. Rarely, an upland sandpiper might light atop a post to gracefully fold its wings.
Some of the old fences we were replacing had been built with red cedar posts, which rotted and let the wire sag. Our new steel posts cured that problem – but eliminated the cavities where bluebirds could nest. The late Gladys Black, Iowa’s bird lady, partly blamed the decline of the bluebird on those *&%#@!$ steel posts!
A 1941 map of the Iowa Conservation Commission’s pheasant study area in Winnebago County dramatizes how the need for fences has changed. In 1941, there were nearly 100 different plots on the 1520-acre site. They included small fields of corn, oats, hay, and soybeans, along with pastures, trees, marshes, farmsteads, and idle ground. In north-central Iowa today, it’s possible to find single, fenceless corn or soybean fields of 1500 acres!
Those fields are probably weedless, too, given the preponderance of genetically modified crops that can tolerate large doses of herbicides. No weeds and no fencerows add up to no wildlife, either. Simple math.
And while we’re lamenting the disappearance of fences, let’s get even more philosophical.
Has the demise of fences hastened the demise of neighborliness? In “Mending Wall,” poet Robert Frost told of the annual spring walk with his adjacent landowner to repair their stone boundary wall. “Good fences make good neighbors,” his cordial neighbor observed.
If only we had more fences to patrol with our neighbors, perhaps we’d communicate more, and our society would not be so polarized? Just sayin’ . . .
I’m an Iowa farm kid who has never outgrown playing in the “crick.” Every kid should have that same opportunity to go outside and get muddy. And I can easily wax nostalgic about the wild places we have lost in my seven-plus decades on this planet. For more about where those times, people, and adventures have led me, here’s a link to my website.
Thanks to the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative for reconnecting me with several old friends from my 25 years as outdoor water/photographer with the Des Moines Register from 1972 to 1997. Plus the group has helped me discover the talents and insights of a new (to me) set of writers. I enjoy sharing my Iowa roots, memories, observations, frustrations, and joys with those folks - and with readers.
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Spot on, Larry. And, try to find one of those Osage hedgerows in Southern Iowa today that produced those stout corner posts (and provided habitat for pheasants and quail). As I drove to our farm in Wayne County last weekend for the opener, the question begged by dozens of miles of nothingness was "where in hell does any wildlife nest anymore, let alone spend the winter"?
Very nice, Larry. It's been a long time since I've seen an Upland Sandpiper land on a wooden fencepost and raise its wings. I'd like to see that again.