can anyone tell me how many feet are in an acre? My wife wants to fence in pasture and we don't know how to figure how much fencing. thanks!

-- David (nelson3@bright.net), April 08, 2000

Answers

43,560 square feet. Which, by using the handy-dandy square root key on my calculator, comes out to something like 208.8 X 208.8 feet.

-- Polly (tigger@moultrie.com), April 08, 2000.

Polly is absolutely right (except where they have a "building acre",usually 200' x 200', adopted by some municipalities that are mathematically challenged). But your question fascinates me. Do you have some reason for fencing a precise acreage? And while a "square" acre would require 4x208= 832' of fencing, any other layout would be different. A "round" acre would be the most efficient as to length of perimeter (I'm not going to do the math), while a very long narrow acre would be very inefficient. For instance, if your acre were 43560 feet long by 1' wide, you"d need (43560x2+1x2) feet of fencing, or about 16.5 miles! Is there some reason you can't take a 100' tape and just measure what you have in mind? Anyway, good luck, and come back if things still aren't clear.

-- Brad (homefixer@mix-net.net), April 08, 2000.

The others have given the correct square feet, 43,560, but as a farmer we typically figure acreage a different way, well at least where I grew up in Kansas. Since most land is sold in quarters, that is a quarter of a section (a section is a mile by a mile and is 640 acres), and since a quarter is a half mile long, we figure our acres on that half mile distance figure of 2,640 feet. An acre is this distance by one rod wide. A rod is 16.5 feet, and if it matters or helps any, there are 4 rods in a chain. I'm not sure, but I think that some rolls of barbed wire are sold with so many rods contained in them. There are 160 rods in the half mile distance of 2,640.

-- greenbeanman (greenbeanman@ourtownusa.net), April 08, 2000.

Field fence and barbed wire are sold in feet or rods. Field fence, (sometimes called Amreican wire or stock fence) usually comes in 330' rolls. Barbed wire is sold in 1320' rolls. Last winter, I strung 20,000' of barbed wire and druing the summer put up about 2,000' of stock wire and another 6,000' of barbed wire.

I use a mearsuing wheel along my perimeters to come up with my footage for construction.

-- Hendo (OR) (redgate@echoweb.net), April 09, 2000.

I word of warning about using rods and chain for measuring. When G. Washington had Ohio surveyed the broke their chain and made a repair to it. Hence it was no longer 16.5 feet. This is why Ohio has over 16 different standard measurements for rods and chains. As always mistakes in the past reappear in the future.

-- Rich (pntbeldyk@wirefire.com), April 09, 2000.

countryside, while working construction, we always measured 208 ft 8 inches square as the way to locate concrete flatwork inside of an acre area. we very seldom had a problem locating our form using this math.

-- sherman spratford (spratfarm@centurytel.net), April 15, 2000.

greenbeanman, I know that in the areas that were settled later, especially via the homestead act, the land was laid out in sections like you say -- but you won't find it that way in New England!!

-- Kathleen Sanderson (stonycft@worldpath.net), April 15, 2000.