Ben, 

I had a similar experience recently. Brought some at other than my usual local source to "save time"  coming from a different direction. Boy was that a mistake. I don't want to blame China for these since I don't really know where they were made. But did not have the same USA sticker as my usual ones.

Well these COST me much more in time than the price difference. The main problem is that they were twisted! would not go in straight. Also appeared to be softer than the usual. Bent a few.

As part of our strip till experimental work I have fenced off a part of our strip till corn on corn field that was harvested a week or so ago and am pasturing cattle on the stalks to check how the spring made strips in corn on corn work out on the pastured vs non pastured stalks. And I really have some stalks!

I don't know if anyone else feels the same but I have been really struggling since the time change - seems like I have had a lot of trouble getting projects done before dark. Maybe it has something to do with the time change coming later in the fall this year from past years. Don't remember it ever seeming like daylight is so short and we are still in early Nov.

Anyway, I am rushing around last weekend to get electric fence up around a couple acres of corns talks and the cheap twisted soft posts definitely did not help. I need a refresher I guess in my usual "quality pays for itself"...but who would have thought that a simple thing like a steel T post could vary in quality that much that it affected your whole day?! I took a vow out in those stalks to never buy anything but the top quality product in ANY type product. Time is incredibly valuable. Low quality (and not necessarily just cheap) products seem like they always cost far more in the end than the "savings". jmho.

On the grazing corn stalks. This is my first time doing this and it was amazing to see how those Herefords appreciated those stalks. My neighbors did a good job of harvesting so there was not a lot of grain that came out the back of the combine but we did plant a very tall triple stack Kaltenberg that yielded well. I asked them to leave the stalks as tall as possible for strip tilling. The cows and heifers looked like kids on Christmas morning! I have another area of the field where some of the corn was blown down in a very severe storm (part of the MN/WI flooding) and just impossible to harvest. I may let them try that area too.

Hope the ground doesn't freeze up too soon. And I have already bought more T posts from my regular source. I decided to keep a stock on hand from now on. By the way I did use the fiber glass posts you suggest in between the t posts at corners and rises/dips. The seem to work well. Like anything there is a learning curve on even simple things. I found a simple little t post brace kit ("speed brace" www.farmproducts.com) makes real good t post corners quickly from two t posts. I put a Gallagher pin type insulator on the outside, tighten it with Gripples and it works well - IF your posts are not twisted!

I did rush and get the single wire up....only to find that one of the calves quickly found a hillside dip under my wire and thought she'd like the stalks on the other side of the wire...well then had to go around with a second wire! Whole "simple" project took about 4 times as long as I had planned...the poor quality T posts just were not needed.

Do you pasture any stalks in CA? I see a lot of baled cornstalks, more than I remember ever seeing, but not many fields with cattle pasturing on harvested stalks....maybe they heard about the soft twisted posts???

Jim at Dawn