Corral panels or a permanent pen: what a small place should build first

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Research. No panels here yet and no pen built. What follows is how panels are specified, what the specification leaves out, and the arithmetic for how many it takes to make a pen that works. When cattle have been through a pen on this place, the page gets updated with the date.

The first pen you build is in the wrong place. Panels are how you find that out cheaply.

The gauge number runs backwards

Panels are sold on gauge, the wall thickness of the tubing. Lower number, thicker steel. A 20-gauge rail has about 0.035 in of wall. A 16-gauge rail has about 0.065 in — near enough double.

Then there is outside diameter, usually 1.66 in or 1.90 in. A thin wall in a fat tube and a thick wall in a thin tube can carry the same headline and behave nothing alike.

The honest number is weight, because weight is hard to fake. A 10 ft, 5-rail utility panel runs roughly 45 to 60 lb. The same length in heavy 6-rail runs 90 to 130 lb. If a listing gives rail count and length but no shipping weight, assume the light end.

Light panels are fine for sorting quiet stock in an open pen. They bend the first time a cow decides a corner is the way out.

Height, and the gap at the bottom

Sixty inches is the working height for mature cattle. Fifty-inch utility panels are a holding fence, not a crowding pen — an animal under pressure will try the top.

For calves, height is not the issue. Rail count is. A 60 in panel with five rails leaves roughly a foot between rails and a similar gap under the bottom one. Calves go through, then the cow goes through the fence after the calf. Six rails closes that to around ten inches. If there will ever be calves in the pen, buy the extra rail rather than the extra height.

How many panels a working pen takes

Do the arithmetic before you shop. A round pen 30 ft across has a perimeter near 94 ft — ten 10 ft panels, and that is only somewhere to stand them.

A pen you can work in is three things: somewhere to hold the group, something that funnels, and a straight run at the end. Allow roughly 40 to 50 sq ft per cow-calf pair where you hold them and about half that where you crowd them, because a crowd pen filled to the brim stops working.

On a small place that lands at twelve to sixteen panels plus a gate panel. Then the costs nobody puts in the headline:

• A gate panel typically costs two to three times a plain one. You need one and probably two.
• Pins and clips. Some panels ship with them, some do not, and some ship with the cheap ones.
• Anchoring, below. Not optional, not included.

What panels will not do

A panel pen is not a fence and not a squeeze. It also walks. Freestanding panels crab sideways when a group leans on one corner — a foot at a time, and then the corner is open. Drive a T-post inside every corner and at the middle of any long run and wire the panel to it. Which post belongs where is its own piece.

They also do not fix ground. A panel pen on bare dirt in Middle Tennessee in February is a mud hole, and mud is where people and cattle get hurt.

Why portable comes first

You do not know where the pen belongs until you have moved cattle a few times. It goes where they already want to go and where you can back a trailer in soft ground. Both are learned afterwards.

Panels hold resale and re-arrange in an afternoon. A welded pipe pen in the wrong corner is a cutting torch and a weekend.

Permanent starts earning its keep somewhere around twenty-five to thirty head handled monthly, or the day you want concrete underfoot and a chute bolted to something that does not move. Below that, panels are not a compromise. They are the answer.

What we are buying

The portable question is settled above, and we are not reopening it: panels first, permanent only if the head count on this place ever gets near the figure that justifies it. What is not settled is the order form. Rail count against height is the live choice — six rails matters more than sixty inches if there are ever calves here — and the number sits somewhere in the twelve-to-sixteen band worked out above, which is a range and not an order. Footing has not been priced at all.

The day panels are unloaded here, this section gets length, gauge, rail count, weight and cost for each, the gate panel, the pins and the anchor stakes, and the date. The layout does not arrive with them. The first pen is in the wrong place and ours will be too, so where it ends up, how many moves that took, and what the footing ran are later entries. The Research tag at the top holds until cattle have been through a pen on this place.

Before you buy

• Ask for the shipping weight per panel. It tells you more than gauge, rail count and the photograph together.
• Order the gate panel and the anchor stakes with the panels. Both get skipped and both get bought later anyway.
• Lay the pen out in baler twine and walk it before spending anything — walking in from the direction the cattle will come.

— Chris D., McEwen, Tennessee