MONTANA — This year, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) initiated a project in Montana implementing virtual fences as a tool for ranchers in an effort to collect data on the practice and encourage new policies and management in the future.
Virtual fencing (VF) is an up-and-coming technology providing a unique opportunity to both increase conservation and support ranches and livestock. There are a number of organizations and initiatives exploring the potential for VF in the American West as a tool in the bigger picture of improved public lands management.
Jim Berkey, High Divide Headwaters director for TNC, is leading the Montana project in partnership with eight different ranchers. He tells Buckrail that the inspiration for this experiment stemmed from a desire to help both public and private landowners manage the land better, and to improve conditions on the landscape with grazing practices.
“Virtual fencing was a tool that came out of those questions,” Berkey says. “It’s pretty powerful from a standpoint of really using your cows as a management tool instead of just putting them out in a larger pasture.”
According to Berkey, VF is a tool for targeted grazing, which is critical for improving range condition, promoting weight gain on livestock and tracking livestock, among other things. He notes other tools that can be used with or without VF include temporary electric wiring fences, more intensive herding with increased cowboy numbers, mob grazing (where an increased herd of animals graze freely over a larger-than-normal area for a short period of time) and GPS ear tags.
The project accepted plans submitted by all eight ranchers, seven of which include the implementation of VF in addition to other tools like remote water sensors.
Currently, three of those plans are up and running in the Centennial Valley, and those three ranches encompass a footprint of about 12,000 acres and 1,700 cows. Once all eight producers are working, the experiments will encompass approximately 250,000 acres in southwest Montana.
“Our theory of change is that we work with this cohort of producers, identify what they would like to achieve through targeted grazing, write grants to offset the upfront costs to de-risk the cost of innovation and really clearly document if it is achieving our goals,” Berkey tells Buckrail.
While baseline data was collected this year to capture a “before” understanding of rangeland conditions, Berkey says it’s still too early to collect “after” data. The vision for the project is that it will unfold over five years to better view how VF affects resource conditions and economic impacts on producers.
While Berkey emphasizes the long-term goal is collection of measurable outcomes related to VF, he says the project is still in a phase where everyone is learning the nuts and bolts of VF implementation, like how many cows out of a herd should be collared and the logistics around moving towers from spring to summer pastures. Uniquely, while three ranchers may have separate pastures, they can share a tower if it’s in line of sight for all of the cows.
“It’s really just the tip of the iceberg,” Berkey says.
Berkey comes from what he calls a “purist” background, where as a conservationist he primarily saw the ecological impacts of ranch land grazing, but he now acknowledges that ranching is one of the most important economic drivers for sustaining open lands in the U.S.. He also believes in the need for vibrant rural communities, which depend on ranchers keeping their businesses.
“From a super purist standpoint, I would love to see [the land] all re-wilded, but I don’t think that’s very realistic,” Berkey says. “Is there a middle ground there where we get most of what we want? I think there’s a lot of potential in these questions of, ‘Can we reward good stewardship, can we de-risk innovation to those stewards, can we identify our common ground and really build those practices that feed families but really improve biodiversity?’”
The cows with collars in the Centennial Valley will be out until about the end of November. Going forward, Berkey says he’s aiming to solidify the VF technology and enter into contracts for the rest of the producers experimenting with VF, in addition to hiring a range ecologist.
TNC has also formed a partnership with Montana State University, where a monitoring coordinator has come on board to help manage and collect a robust dataset across all eight pilot experiments.
“We would like the results to identify practices and tools that are super helpful and figure out ways to make sure those are affordable,” Berkey says. “We also want to figure out all the policies on public lands that need to be tweaked slightly so that we could be more flexible on our grazing and achieve better results. Right now, there are a lot of ‘no’s’ that producers get when they want to do something different.”
