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Our hoop run is still standing strong after 7 years. I don’t have chickens anymore but it has served as a greenhouse, and when we built our new house this fall/early winter we needed a place to house our Golden Retriever and our Irish Wolfhound. We were living in a small camper and much of our fence had to be removed, and we sure couldn’t afford months of boarding them. Cattle panel hoop to the rescue. We still haven’t made any repairs at all to it.
We’ve learned that the stiffer and more reinforced the structure, the more it fights the wind and weather. Ours flexes with those forces and bounces right back. We’ve had winds officially recorded by the National Weather Service at 90 mph one January, and even with the snow load it handled the wild Wyoming weather with ease.
I know I was late coming into this thread, but working with Cattle panels and all of the possible applications for them is still so interesting to me. Every time we think it’s time to tear ours down, something else comes up for us to put it to use. The new house is built, the dogs are back inside with us, but when I look out the kitchen window there’s the hoop run just waiting for its next assignment. I think I’ll plant flowers around it and use it for housing the riding lawn mower, pop-up camper, and yard tools. Obviously it’s not one bit tired yet!
Yeah, my wife jokingly suggests cattle panel may replace cinder blocks as the love of my life.
It is great, tho - the alpaca shed I built (still unpainted because we hit rainy season, but it's in the pics) was 'easy' by construction standards, but I put up a cattle panel woodshed and a cattle panel rain free 'feed zone' (both 2 cattle panel structures) in the blink of an eye. My only fear is wind, though I think I solved those two via placement.
I still have 35 cattle panel sitting in a pile. Most of them are dedicated to the other runs, but I'm excited to figure out new projects for the rest.
