JACKSON, Wyo. — Virtual fencing (VF) is an up-and-coming technology that provides a unique opportunity to increase conservation while supporting ranches and livestock.
According to the Greater Yellowstone Coalition (GYC), VF consists of cows wearing collars with battery-powered transceivers that use GPS, wireless signals and radio frequency. Cows will receive auditory signals that increase into electric stimuli the closer they get to an established virtual boundary, much like an invisible fence that’s already a common practice with dogs on private property.
Travis Brammer, director of conservation with the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) based out of Bozeman, MT, has been working on exploring the potential for VF on both the conservation and ranching side of the American West. Since last year, he’s been part of the development of a project in Montana’s Crazy Mountains to test VF as a tool and a VF workshop this past June cohosted with Beyond Yellowstone and sponsored by World Wildlife Fund, the GYC and the University of Wyoming’s Haub School.
Brammer tells Buckrail that there are multiple benefits to moving toward VR technology, including a critical reduction of risk and mortality to wildlife struggling to adapt to traditional fences.
“There’s no more wildlife-friendly fencing than no fencing at all.”
Travis Brammer
“The biggest opportunity we see many years down the road is the removal of traditional hard barbed wire fencing,” Brammer says. “There’s no more wildlife-friendly fencing than no fencing at all.”
VF also has the potential to reduce labor for ranchers and increase efficiency in gathering and moving cattle. Brammer notes that preliminary feedback from project partnerships suggests the timeframe for gathering cattle can be reduced with the GPS collars from two weeks to as little as one afternoon. VF could also present a lower maintenance cost than traditional fencing that needs to be fixed due to wildlife or landscape disruption, like a deer collision or flooding.
Most uniquely, VF has the potential to reduce predator-livestock conflict through directing cattle away from areas in which they’d more likely encounter a grizzly bear, like dense willow zones. Keeping livestock away from poisonous plants, like tall larkspur, can also reduce carcass numbers on ranches and deter predators from being attracted to the area.
“We think it’s important to keep these ranchers doing what they’re doing, they provide so much habitat for the wildlife we love and care for,” Brammer says. “If the ranchers weren’t on the landscape, the next biggest competitor for that land would be development.”
In terms of questions of cost, Brammer says a VF tower from one of the biggest providers costs roughly between $12,000 to $15,000, and $50 per collar. He compares this to the average cost for about a mile of traditional fencing, which he says also averages out around $15,000.
For PERC’s project in the Crazy Mountains, they needed six towers (roughly $90,000) to cover 75 miles of fences (roughly $1,125,000).
Aside from cost, there are still some major barriers to implementing VF technology in Wyoming. As a fence-out state with a policy that landowners are responsible for fencing out unwanted livestock from their own properties (as opposed to ranchers being responsible for keeping their cattle out of private land), Brammer says the long-term vision would require legal changes to that policy; however, internal fences that subdivide large ranches could still be replaced.
Additionally, Brammer says some of the VF companies rely on a degree of cell service to relay info from the collars, but he anticipates that obstacle changing as cell service continues to expand throughout the state.
Even with the challenges, Brammer feels optimistic about the potential for VF. He emphasizes that the USDA spends up to tens of millions of dollars a year retrofitting fencing to be wildlife-fencing, and suggests that money could go to establishing VF in the future.
“It’s a great win for conservation and a great win for agriculture,” he says of VF. He says he’ll be spending the next couple years establishing more trial projects and prioritizing the answers to the questions still surrounding the reality of scaling up the technology.
