Virtual fences mooove cows online

Technology guides many facets of our daily lives. The same is now true for cows. Well, at least their management. At Trout Creek Ranch we’re testing innovative ways to manage grazing on nearly half a million acres of private and public lands. New technology may offer multiple benefits for high desert communities.

In summer of 2021, ODLT established one of the state’s largest conservation projects by purchasing 16,645-acres of private lands throughout the Pueblo and Trout Creek Mountains. This project helps connect several conservation areas, including national wildlife refuges and wilderness areas.

Trout Creek Ranch has multiple public-land grazing permits in this climate-resilient area. Managing these permits in partnership with neighboring ranchers creates opportunities for adaptive livestock management across a vast landscape that includes spring-fed mountain streams, wet meadows, extensive quaking aspen and willow stands, and diverse native grasslands.

This year we’ll begin testing a novel livestock management tool called virtual fencing. Virtual fencing uses electric collars (similar to dog training collars) to manage cattle behavior in riparian areas and other sensitive habitats. These collars communicate with geographic position system (GPS ) satellites and reception towers strategically positioned on the landscape. When cows move close to or enter virtual boundaries, the collars emit a series of auditory cues (beeps) and can progress into electrical pulses. Cattle can be tracked in real time, even in hilly or rocky terrain. Using virtual fences, managers can manage cow movement in sensitive and priority areas without using traditional structures. Our hope is that virtual fencing may eventually replace physical fences, which create physical barriers to wildlife movement, and also help us adapt grazing to changing climate conditions.

“The really neat thing about virtual fence technology is it’s well suited to adapt over time. I keep continuing to be surprised at how well it works at managing grazing in different ways to accomplish different objectives.”

Dustin Johnson

Oregon State University Rangeland Outreach Specialist

We and our grazing partners are interested in this technology for multiple reasons.

Reduce the wildlife impacts of traditional barbed-wire fencing
Reduce fence construction and maintenance costs
Adapt grazing to drought, fire, or other factors
Reduce the labor cost of moving cows
Exclude cattle from sensitive areas
Identify sick or injured cows by tracking individual cow movement
Target grazing to reduce fuels and fire risk

“Our high-level objective is to restore ecological function. Ultimately, we want to maintain wildlife habitat quality and connectivity using grazing as a tool.”

Brandon Palmer

ODLT Regional Stewardship Lead

California bighorn sheep, pygmy rabbit, greater sage-grouse, pronghorn antelope, and Lahontan cutthroat trout are among many species that will benefit from conserving and restoring Trout Creek Ranch’s abundant wet meadows and high-elevation areas. Virtual fences promise to reduce management efforts while increasing desired results and positive impacts on the landscape. This technology has already proven effective in a variety of use cases, among them excluding cattle from riparian areas, areas of management concern, recently burned areas, and areas with regenerating saplings, as well as encouraging grazing on undesired/invasive species. All of these tactics align with our conservation plan goals for Trout Creek Ranch and are vital in restoration efforts.

Virtual fence allows managers to control cow movement by changing the “fence’s’” digital coordinates. This technology could be especially helpful in large pastures like those in the Pueblo Mountains—two of which exceed 80 thousand acres. Using virtual fence to create use areas within these massive pastures will allow managers to tailor grazing to the varied terrain, protect wildlife habitat, manage fuels, and make the most efficient use of water sources and forage.

Another exciting aspect of virtual fence technology is that it will reduce the need for fences or other structures that impede animal crossings, especially along migratory pathways. Traditional fencing can heighten wildlife stress, particularly in pronghorn, who do not jump fences and need modifications to pass beneath them safely. In southeast Oregon, pronghorn migrate between two key wildlife refuges: the Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge in southern Oregon (278,000 acres) and the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge just across the border in Nevada (575,000 acres). Over their seasonal migration, herds travel more than 100 miles in rugged terrain, so reducing barriers can increase their survival rate.

Virtual fence has also shown promise in managing the threat of wildfire. Fire plays a natural role in shrub-steppe landscapes. However, the wildfire cycle has accelerated throughout much of the West owing to an increase in invasive grasses and a changing climate. This makes it vital to adapt habitat management to wildfire threats and impacts. For example, cattle are generally excluded from burned pastures for two years after a fire on public land grazing allotments in the western sagebrush steppe.

Traditional wire-based fencing is seldom a viable option for protecting burned areas due to expense, conflicts with wildlife management objectives, and extensive procedural logistics. While additional work is needed to evaluate virtual fence technology in larger rangeland settings, a study in eastern Oregon suggests virtual fence can effectively limit cattle grazing in burned areas.

Dustin Johnson has been involved in rangeland research for 20 years and took part in the study of these attractive areas. “Most of the time, those recently burned areas are like ice cream patches for livestock and wildlife. You have new plant growth after a fire and it’s really tasty, really palatable,” he described. “Cattle will spend most of their time in a recently burned area because it’s just better forage. It can be a real big issue that grazing permittees, land management agencies and landowners have to deal with.”

Post-fire grazing was what first came to mind when Dustin thought about virtual fence. “It’s an option that will be taken pretty seriously in the event that only parts of an allotment burn. That’s just gonna be a problem into the foreseeable future with fires.” The flip side is that it can also help with fuels management by strategically guiding cows to eat vegetation in certain areas, thus creating fuel breaks for when fires occur. Dustin notes that the technology won’t solve all challenges, but can be effective in many applications. “It does open us up to think more creatively about how we could manage grazing on rangelands and allows us to be more experimental and adaptive.”

While exploring the utility of virtual fence, we met with land managers using the technology in western states to get a sense of their best practices and lessons learned. Brandon Palmer and others visited a Colorado ranch that uses virtual fence on public land grazing allotments in partnership with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). These managers, like many others, were initially skeptical about virtual fence and making wholesale changes to traditional operations. Over time, they’ve been convinced by the flexibility it provides. Seeing this application first-hand opened Brandon’s eyes as to how valuable virtual fence could be in the Trout Creek Ranch setting.

“This trip allowed me to really see what was going on on the ground at the ranch scale, on the landscape scale,” he reflected. “It was cool to see how much it was being used and the flexibility that developing a virtual fence affords you, as someone who manages a herd of cows, to maintain proper ecological function.”

While our project goal is to conserve and restore critical habitat, we will only achieve this by supporting the unique cultural and economic values of this area. This includes continually learning from partnerships and collaborations, sometimes beyond the high desert. We’re grateful for the overwhelming community support that helps us manage such a large, special area and shares a positive vision for these wild and working lands.

Feature image: A herd of cows wear electric collars in a test for a virtual fence program at Trout Creek Ranch.

Published March, 2024

Learn More

USDA provides a virtual fence overview with benefits and challenges.
Learn ways virtual fencing excludes cattle from burned areas in sagebrush steppe and can be a compelling adaptation with a changing climate.
EOARC’s video explains how virtual fence use can potentially meet wildlife management and cattle production objectives within pastures containing riparian areas, and there’s a 2-year study of this method.