Lifestyle fencing is all part of the job

Some would say that Peter Preesman, the owner-operator of PKP Fencing, lives and breathes fencing and farming.

As a teenager, Peter began working on farms – milking, managing stock, and maintaining pasture quality. For a short time, he ventured into the construction industry, producing and engineering concrete products. He then decided to take the plunge into becoming an independent fencing contractor and, in 2022, started PKP Fencing, securing a few jobs in the Whangarei area through word of mouth. Those jobs allowed him to get his foot in the door and establish himself in the district.

Peter particularly loves the challenges of designing and building rural fences and stock yards – taking careful consideration of stock movements and behaviours, as well as maximising land use.

Working in Northland creates its own set of challenges with varying soil types, land uses, and most importantly, working around the ever-changing weather. Peter says the biggest balancing act is timing jobs around the ongoing wet season and how it can impact the way heavy machinery is used on a job site. “No client wants to have their pasture damaged, and I don’t want to deal with a stuck tractor.”

Stock yards project

One job Peter completed recently was custom designing and building stock yards for a customer’s lifestyle block. In Peter’s experience as a farmer, the priority was always animal welfare and having streamlined systems.

“When I was designing the stock yards, I prioritised having curved pens with no areas where cows could get blocked in, or gates that swung the wrong way, causing cows to have to back up and become stressed.”

The functionality of the gates also had to be designed to keep the farmer safe. “Not only do they need to open and close in a way that avoids anybody being crushed, but they also need to have strong enough latches to be fit for purpose.”

There were a number of subterranean obstacles on this job site, which also affected the layout of the yards. “Using the rock spike on my post rammer made short work of some of them, compared to the days of digging holes by hand and changing the plans one post hole at a time”

Working with the smallest livestock

Peter has also completed projects on lifestyle blocks where people farm goats, sheep, and chickens, where consideration needed to be had for the size of the animal and how that affects the design of the fence.

One property was a goat farm in a valley with very little flat ground to work with. All of the fences were seven-wire with wire placements being closer together on the lower half. The undulating land created spots where wire was either touching the ground, or gaps were created between the ground and the bottom wire. These fences had to be stepped out in specific sections to suit the contour of the land, yet still created a good-looking fence.

This property also had streams and waterways to work around. One part of the property was a swamp, so a digger had to be brought in for drainage. “I couldn’t put up a fence on swampy, unstable land, and the clients wanted that area to be usable.”

A post & rail challenge

In another memorable lifestyle fencing project, a client required a steep 50m hillside driveway to be fenced with post and rail. It had recently been cleared and was on the south-facing side of the hill.

“When I first looked at the job, it was the very beginning of Autumn, so conditions were still dry, and the job site looked reasonable. Unfortunately, weather conditions changed quickly, and by the time I got there to do the job, I was looking at a whole new set of challenges.”

The hillside was slick from being cleared, and there were not enough dry days between heavy rain, so getting tractor work done was a nail-biting experience. “Ideally, jobs like this would be saved for the summer, but that’s not how this industry works, and that’s part of what makes it so enjoyable,” said Peter.

Written by the team at PKP Fencing