Herds of cattle in Colorado are roaming nearly free. They are penned in not by physical fences, but virtual ones – part of a test by the US Bureau of Land Management to use virtual fencing on thousands of cattle across more than 2000 square kilometres of land in the state. These virtual fences enable farmers or ranchers to direct the movement of their herds with an app connected to GPS-enabled collars, and they could one day be combined with AI to help ranchers better manage their herds.
“We’re dealing with computers, and we’re dealing with cows”, so everything doesn’t always go as planned, says , a rancher at Gerard Family Ranch in Colorado. Still, the virtual fencing system he has used for about the last year to track and manage his cattle grazing on public lands in the Rocky mountains has mostly been a success.
Each cow is fitted with a collar that makes warning sounds when the animal approaches a virtual boundary and delivers an electric shock to deter them from crossing it. Farmers and ranchers use an app to draw and re-draw these boundaries to drive cattle to more evenly graze the range, which can reduce soil erosion. Users can also set the virtual fence to automatically herd animals from point to point.
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Training ornery, older cows to respond to the virtual fencing has been difficult, says Gerard, and the system would be too expensive for his operation without government support. But “it’s going to be a major tool”, he says.
Gerard’s cattle are just some of the more than 90,000 cattle, sheep and goats in countries around the world now being managed with virtual fences.
The concept has been around for decades, but improvements in GPS, batteries and cellular networks have made it a reality, says at the Bureau of Land Management. Even in an industry as slow to change as ranching, virtual fencing is catching on.
Norwegian company Nofence has sold around 50,000 collars, according to , the company’s CEO. He showed żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ a map displaying the real-time location of every animal using their collars, ranging from clusters of sheep in the UK to cattle in nearly every US state and parts of Europe.
The Colorado project is using collars from US company Vence. , the company’s CEO, says 40,000 animals across 10,000 square kilometres of land in the US and Australia are set up with the collars. Vence also installs radio towers to connect collars to cellular networks in places with poor reception.
The shock collars come with animal welfare concerns, says at the Technical University of Denmark. As with electric fences for dogs, such systems are illegal in Denmark and several other countries. But properly trained animals can learn to respond to the sound emitted by the collars alone, thus minimising shocks, and her research has shown that .
One of the biggest benefits of virtual fencing is the ability to adapt to changes in the environment on the fly. For instance, at the US Department of Agriculture found that virtual fences kept livestock out of an area in south-east Oregon burned by fire, helping sagebrush to regrow. He says it is especially useful for areas that need temporary fencing rather than more permanent barriers. “It’s not an iron gate,” he says. “If you’ve got cattle next to an interstate [highway], you don’t want virtual fencing.”
Still, these collars could potentially eliminate the need for many physical fences, which can block migrating wildlife such as elk and pronghorn, says at the University of Washington in Seattle. Virtual fencing has not yet been paired with any widespread fence removal – the US West has around a million kilometres of fencing – but the Colorado programme has led to the removal of a few kilometres of old fence and avoided some new ones.
“We’re not about replacing the cowboy,” says Wooten. “We’re replacing the part of their job they like the least.”
