Technology is taking down fences on American cattle ranches

Last spring, Alan Williams received a federal grant to replace some fencing on his cattle ranch in southern Idaho. His outfit is based in Delta, Utah, but he and his brother, Jared, who are fourth generation ranchers, move their herd north every June after calving just in time for greener pastures.

The total grant was for roughly a quarter million dollars — new fencing can cost as much as $30,000 a mile — but he decided to do the work in sections, only spending some of the money at a time.

Come July, he spent $27,000 to replace two sections that were up to the government’s wildlife specifications. That’s big money, too, as ranching operates on a 1% to 2% profit margin. Every dollar counts.

Just two weeks later elk had run through both sections, destroying the new fence. Williams only learned of it when a neighbor called to let him know his cows were out.

“That was when I said, ‘I can’t keep doing this’. When you haul your family up there and you take four or five days and put in nice, brand new fence and do it right and within two weeks it’s destroyed? I’m like, there’s gotta be something better than this,” Williams said.

For Williams, there is another option, one that thousands of ranchers around the U.S. have adopted. It does not require relying on the same costly materials their forebears had to install over and through thousands of miles of the American West.

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.”

A virtual fence

Every year, Williams attends a farm show called Husker Harvest Days in Grand Island, Nebraska. Walking around the booths the last few years, he encountered vendors offering what they called “virtual fences.”

There are four different operators in the states at the moment — Nofence, Vence, Gallagher and Halter. Each of their systems are slightly different, but the overall concept of the livestock management tool is the same.

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, but it’s similar in concept to the invisible fences some dog owners use to prevent the family hound from leaving their property.

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 are able to 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’ unfenced 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.

Which was why by August of last year, Williams had contacted Halter, one of the vendors from the farm show. He liked that their collars were less clunky than some of the other brands, but he also appreciated that there were built-in solar panels.

By December, he joined thousands of other ranchers, and put collars on his cattle and put up virtual fences all around his pastures.

Win-win for ranchers and conservationists

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 the Property and Environment Research Center, a nonprofit think tank that focuses on making conservation voluntary and economically sound.

Brammer authored a report that PERC published earlier this year called “Virtual Fencing for Conservation.“ He was excited to learn more about virtual fencing because it represents a rare alignment of the usually disparate priorities of ranching and conservation.

“It’s one of those very few situations in the world where there is a real win-win outcome where ranchers can keep ranching and conservation can thrive,” he said. “It means that ranchers can create these really interesting conservation outcomes while still being ranchers and doing what they love and feeding and clothing this country.”

He was also pleased to see that the tech passed the “early adopter” phase that’s used to describe technology.

“There’s enough pilot projects on the ground that people are looking at their neighbors and seeing what’s happening, and they’re going to conferences and they’re learning,” he said. “Interest is growing.”

Which was better than two or three years ago, when Brammer’s organization had to “beg, borrow and steal” to learn about the few virtual fencing pilot programs operating in the United States.

“Two years ago, three of the companies only had maybe one or two projects nationwide,” Brammer said. ”Those three companies have all gone to hundreds, if not thousands."

And while his report details the success of the technology across the West’s ranches and ecosystems, Brammer — who grew up on a ranch and started his career at the Wyoming Stock Growers Land Trust — said that, first and foremost, it has to work for producers.

“We’re really excited to see that the companies have worked really hard to make sure that it can and does work for the producers,” Brammer said. “Once we can confirm that it works for the producers, then we can start having the really exciting conversations about conservation benefits and wildlife and everything like that.”

A blank canvas

Halter, the company that the Williams brothers chose, is based in New Zealand — a country with more than 23 million sheep and 5.3 million people — and has been operating since 2016. Its founder, Craig Piggott, grew up on a pasture-based dairy farm but studied to be an engineer. Just like Williams, he knew that there had to be a better way to manage cow pastures.

By 2020, Halter had broken into the U.S. market. Theo Beaumont, the company’s senior enterprise sales manager, said the best way to think about the technology is by imagining a “totally blank canvas.”

“Pretend you’ve got this tool that gave you an unlimited fencing budget, that enabled you to draw fences and build them anywhere with no maintenance and no capital outlay — and elk didn’t run through them every summer," he said. “What would you do in order to graze and manage that land in the absolute best way you could think of?”

The idea is one that resonates with a lot of ranchers. Halter has customers in all the Mountain West states, with the most in Montana, Wyoming and Colorado. The first were in Oregon, Beaumont said, but today the company is just about to pass 100,000 cattle collared.

While each company has variations on its payment structure, Halter is a subscription model. There’s no charge for the collars themselves, but there is an annual fee of $72 for each cow using one. The rancher also has to pay for the required wifi towers, which are $4,500 each plus a yearly $600 charge.

With some herds in the thousands, the cost can be high. But Beaumont thinks there are three areas where his customers see enough value to justify the investment. One is the capital expenditure for rebuilding and maintaining fences, which was the factor that pushed Williams to look for a better choice last year.

Another is time. Fencing takes time to maintain and rebuild, as does finding and gathering cattle, especially when they’re grazing on public lands. Ranchers can lose a lot of time — days even — just finding their cattle before they rustle them up. With collars, they show up as dots on a map.

But the single biggest factor, he said, was grazing management and the blank canvas that’s possible with virtual fencing. By being able to decide exactly where cattle graze, Halter users can utilize more of their property, maximizing every acre — every blade of grass — so they can lift their carrying capacity or save some money.

For Williams, it costs around $26,000 to get set up. Just slightly less than what it cost him to replace those two sections of fence. That cost wound up coming out of his pocket, too, since he decided to forego building fences.

Even without factoring the costs of replacing and maintaining fences, Williams said that the collars were mostly paid off by his ability to manage how his herds graze. In the first few weeks alone, he thought he saw significant savings.

Rather than buying and putting out feed, Williams said with the collars, that “we were able to graze our fields off for another three to four weeks.”

“Next year, when we bring them home, we’re going to be able to utilize that grazing better because we can just graze them in little segments and move them around instead of just turning them out on the old fields,” Williams said. “We can do better grazing practices.”

Are there downsides?

The cost is still a major factor. While Beaumont said that Halter is willing to work with each interested rancher to find something that works, there are some granting agencies, like the LOR Foundation and PERC, which are trying to make wider adoption possible.

Last year, PERC granted just shy of half a million dollars in direct payments to ranches for virtual fencing. This year it will offer $200,000 but is partnered with the Ricketts Conservation Foundation which is also contributing a few hundred thousand to the same fund.

Another is the fact that digital connectivity in wide open spaces can be a challenge. Any necessary service for ranchers that relies on connectivity, cell phone service or wifi to be rock solid can be problematic.

But it’s important to remember that even if virtual fencing is passing the early adopter phase, it’s still quite early in the adoption cycle.

Williams, for example, already has ideas for how the technology needs to advance. He’d prefer the collars be connected to GPS. He’d like his irrigation system and the Halter app to integrate so that he can move the cattle towards the pastures that have the greatest saturation and see it all on one screen.

That sense of its potential is for Brammer and PERC, one of the most exciting parts of the technology. Could sage grouse habitats be closed by virtual fences, leaving the wide open spaces around them available for grazing? Could the federal government use cattle to repair dried-up riparian areas on BLM land? That’s already happening in Colorado.

“This technology is not a one-way street, but instead an opportunity for conservationists to show, not tell, ranchers that they care about agricultural viability and keeping livestock on the landscape,” Brammer wrote in his report.

Describing it a few weeks later, he said, “The capacity that this technology has to be flexible, adaptable, ever-changing, opens doors that we can not ever possibly imagine until we get out there and try and open them.”