Can Improved Fencing Make Ranching Country More Friendly?

Tonight, I found an article that interested me and that takes my mind off the war in Iran, politics, and other such subjects that keep pounding like drums in my ears. This article has to do with ranchers, stock, fences, finances, conservatists, and numerous other topics.

Technology is helping ranchers and conservationists to work together rather than be antagonists. According to an article by Kevin Lind in the Deseret News, ranchers across the West are adopting technology to help control their animals. 

Most people know that dog owners use collars and virtual fencing to control their dogs. Now ranchers have an upgraded and much more useful version of that used with dogs. Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars for fencing that is destroyed with the next elk herd or moose moving through the area, ranchers can use virtual fencing to keep their animals in an area, while allowing wildlife to move freely through the area. Lind reported, “Ranchers are using virtual fences to cut costs and use every inch of available acreage.”

Instead of wood, steel and barbed wire, all ranchers need are a hearty collar, some transceivers and a digital connection. It’s a tool one purveyor called an “unlimited fencing budget.” …

Rather than having to build miles and miles of expensive barriers that neither stock nor wildlife can get through, they manufacture variations of a collar that is affixed around a cow’s or sheep’s neck that carries a transceiver connected to a cloud-based software system. The collars emit light, sound, vibrations and – when necessary – a small shock.

Ranchers and the technology companies don’t love the comparison [with fences used for dogs] ….

In this case, however, the stock’s exact location is tracked and compared to the predetermined boundaries of a virtual fence. As the animal gets closer, it gets warned on the side of the boundary – the stimulus is delivered on either the right or left side of the collar – by sound, then vibration and, if ignored, shock.

The digital software part of the platform, however, really leaves that dog collar analogy in the dust. While it does many things, the platform’s most important function is to create virtual, uncrossable boundaries that ranchers can then set from the comfort of their own home, truck or horseback.

Almost like a video game, ranchers can design, change and move pasture boundaries with a few clicks of their finger in a user-friendly app. So long as they have a phone or tablet handy with a healthy wifi or cell signal, they can determine where to – and where not to – graze their herd.

The flexibility means that, depending on where there is healthier grass or more water, ranchers can move their “fences.” If there’s a particular parcel with great grass that cows don’t often frequent, they can ensure that the cows settle there. If there’s an overgrazed parcel, they can close it off. If they want to keep their cattle next to but not in their neighbors’ unfences silage patch, they can.

Virtual fencing is not cheap, necessarily, but some ranchers are penciling it out and finding the costs – considering fence maintenance, material, feed and time – are in the new technology’s favor.

The implications are not just exciting for ranchers, either. Conservationists and wildlife advocates also like the technology.

With 620,000 miles of fence criss-crossing the West on public and private land, there’s the potential to remove barriers that kill a large number of ungulates every year and disrupt the ecosystems reliant on those large mammals’ migrations. On public lands, cattle wearing collars can be corralled to help repair riparian areas, kept away from camping sites or used for various other regenerative efforts.

For the first time, virtual fencing allows livestock managers to manage only the animals in their keep, said Travis Brammer, the director of conservation for the Property and Environment Research Center, a nonprofit think tank that focuses on making conservation voluntary and economically sound….