The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Goats => Topic started by: moody_mare on December 03, 2011, 05:25:09 pm
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Hi,
Any suggestions on a good cheap penning for goats? I am looking at partitioning off half a stable for my girls and want some good penning, gate for them that doesn't cost a fortune. The Kid seems keen to leap and squeeze through things!
Any ideas?
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Buy some plywood and 2 by 4's and build it yourself?
The only other suggestion I have is Modulamb- who make hurdles and sheep handling system's. They also make hurdles that are swing gates, and can make them to pretty much any size you want. They also can provide galvanised metal screw hurdle pin holes, which you screw into a wooden wall (like a stable) and you can use them to put a hurdle pin down to attach the hurdle to the wall. I don't think I have described that very well!
http://www.modulamb.com/ (http://www.modulamb.com/)
Here's a pic of the gated hurdles we use which Modulamb made specially for us, as we requested them to be 4ft tall instead of their standard 3ft high.
(http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b340/ballingall/DSCF3141.jpg)
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ohhhhh I like your pens. we have a wood merchant down the road. I might try building my own :-)
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I have a friend who started off with goats by keeping two rescue goats in a loose box. He got a lot more into his goats, and had to convert all of the stables into goat pens! He split two looseboxes into 3 pens each. Each pen was smallish, but he split them by building half a hexagon at the front as an entrance, the pen in the middle was smallest and rectangular, and the one at either end had a triangluar edge to make it slightly bigger. What helped the size was that he made head holes in the door, and brackets for their food bowl and water buckets outside the pen door.
Haven't got any pics I'm afraid, but it did work quite well. He built it all himself out of wood.
Beth
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We made our own too - I'll take pics in the morning :)
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what height r ur pens? my bagots vault over the stable door which is about 4 ft.
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We have just created pens in a 12 x 12 wooden building, using sheep hurdles on top of salvage scaffold boards to divide them. This made them higher and stopped bedding, poo and draughts at ground level crossing from one pen to another. My husband then dismantled free pallets ( from nearby engineering works, lots of businesses will give them to you if you ask) and rebuilt them into wooden doors with holes for buckets on outside.
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Yes ours are homebuilt out of wood too, but our whole shed was specifically built for the goats. The partitions are about 110cm inside, but we also have a pen with a higher partition as one goat we re-homed for a while jumped out from standing....
Take into consideration that if you are deep-bedding yours you will build up a good 30cm of muck over the winter.... we normally have to lift the waterbuckets higher by February, as suddenly the goats seem to put their droppings into them ::)...
Also ALL our woodwork is screwed together - makes repairsquick and easy to do, and if you are needing to change the layout you can re-use all you bits and pieces of wood.
Beth - I like your rogue squatter in the goat house... do they lay eggs in there? When mine were free-raging they tried...