Electric poultry netting

[Gary Kenyon]

It sounds like you have solved the big problem, grass and weeds growing up in the electric netting/fence and shorting it out when wet. Another issue you can have with netting is that trash like leaves in the fall or cut grass might blow against it or get washed against it in a heavy rain and short it out. You still have to do maintenance.

I have Preimier1 netting. Baby chicks can walk through electric netting until they physically get too big to fit. Their down/feathers insulate them. I would not expect an electric fence to keep adults in. Instead of netting the right solution for you might be to add some inexpensive mesh fencing/netting to your existing electric fence to stop the chickens from walking through.

My netting is 48" high. Chickens can easily fly over that if they want to. Mine don't want to with an exception. When I have a bunch of cockerels in there, they get into fights. On extremely rare occasions a pullet or hen gets desperate in trying to get away form an amorous cockerel or rooster. If a cockerel or female get trapped against the fence and are desperate to get away, they go vertical. Sometimes they land on the wrong side of the fence. It's almost always cockerels, very seldom a female with my flock.

I found a couple of things that make a big difference in how many get out this way. I keep my corners pretty flat. A 90 degree corner works pretty well, anything sharper tends to trap chickens. Flatter is better.

One time I set my netting up with a narrow corridor to get to from the coop to an area where I spread it out. I was getting two or three cockerels a day escape until I reconfigured it into a wide area. When I flatten corners and use wide areas the escape goes way down to pretty rare even with a bunch of cockerels in there.

If a chicken learns it can fly over the netting and wants to, they may get in that habit. I had three hens learn that, probably trying to escape an amorous rooster, when I had them in a 5' high wire mesh run. Those three got out every day once they learned. But other than the problem with fighting or escaping chickens, my 48" netting keeps them in. I've had it over five years. The only chickens I've lost top predators was one to an owl and one to a hawk.

Thank you. I will look into netting instead and see if that might be a better option. I have noticed that even when they duck under the wire it doesn't shock them unless it hits their comb. I saw a guy on the internet that swore his electric fence worked great for his chickens. I don't k ow what he did different, but my luck has been much different.

 

[aart]

Can you post some pics of what you have now @Gary Kenyon?
@Howard E might be able to offer some solutions for your present set up.