Hardware cloth, not chicken wire
Chicken wire keeps chickens in. It does not keep anything out. This is the most expensive dollar ever saved on a homestead.
What it is
Welded hardware cloth — ¼ to ½ inch, rigid, galvanized — in place of hexagonal poultry netting anywhere the job is keeping something *out*.
The numbers
- A raccoon tears chicken wire, a weasel walks through it, and a determined dog ignores it entirely.
- ¼ inch is the number that matters for rodents: a house mouse passes through a gap of about ¼ inch, a rat through about ½ inch.
- For rabbits, 1-inch mesh — a juvenile cottontail goes straight through 2-inch mesh as though it were not there.
- Hardware cloth costs roughly 2× poultry netting and lasts several times as long.
Why it's here
Because this one substitution silently causes more losses than any other on a small farm. It looks like wire. It's sold beside wire. It costs less than wire. And it fails at the exact moment it was bought to matter — at night, against something with hands.
The automation angle
None, and that is the point worth repeating: a camera will show you the raccoon that got through the chicken wire, in excellent detail, six times. No sensor has ever closed a hole.
The catch
It is stiffer, harder to cut, and harder to work with, and the galvanized edges will cut your hands — wear gloves. For buried aprons use the heavier gauge; thin hardware cloth rusts out in a few seasons in wet ground, which turns a permanent fix into a five-year one.