Fences are a key part of managing livestock on rangeland. But physical fencing is expensive, maintenance-heavy and potentially harmful to wildlife. Virtual fencing could solve some of those problems by offering a more flexible way to manage grazing herds. It could also help ranchers and rangeland managers adapt to the effects of climate change, including more frequent and intense wildfires. As recently reported in the Capital Press, a project in Wallowa County is testing the potential benefits of virtual fencing in a community forest that supports grazing, recreation and sensitive plant species.
Pete Schreder is a Wallowa County extension agent with the Oregon State University Extension Service. He joins us with more details on the emerging technology.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Fences are a key part of managing livestock, but physical fencing can be expensive to install and to maintain, and potentially harmful to wildlife. Virtual fencing could solve some of those problems. The Capital Press reported recently on a project in Wallowa County that’s testing the effects of virtual fencing on grazing, recreation and sensitive plant species.
Pete Schreder is a Wallowa County extension agent with OSU Extension Services. He joins us now to talk about this emerging technology. Pete, it’s great to have you on the show.
Pete Schreder: Thanks, Dave, appreciate you having me today.
Miller: What are some of the limitations of traditional fencing?
Schreder: Well, I think, as we know, once you build a hardened fence, you’re stuck with that design and that structure for the life of the infrastructure. That hopefully is gonna be 15 to 20 years. And so one of the primary limiting factors is just being bound to that constraint and that permanent structure for a number of years, and not having the flexibility to manipulate or change, in our case, livestock grazing patterns.
Miller: Well, why might a rancher want to change that? We can talk about cost in a second, [but] let’s say they put up the fence and if it ideally lasts for 10, 15, 20 years – although maybe that’s too hopeful – why might they want to be able to move it?
Schreder: When we have our perimeter fences on our property lines, unless you’re adding to your primary base ranch or base property, your external fences are solid and you keep those indefinitely. But internal fences, especially in the landscapes that we manage, we deal with seasonality and drought, wildfire, things that change on the landscape. If you have the ability to respond to that primarily with our livestock grazing in different patterns, it’s nice to have that flexibility. And when you have a hard fence, you’re really bound to pastures and internal infrastructure that can’t be changed. So that’s one of the primary limiting factors when you have a hard fence, dealing with just environmental and seasonality changes throughout the year.
Miller: So that’s from the grazing or agricultural perspective. How does traditional fencing impact recreation and wildlife?
Schreder: Well, in the project we have here in Wallowa County … we have a community forest. It’s a piece of property that was purchased by the county about five or six years ago. And when it was purchased, the idea was that it was going to become a common area, community forest and it would exercise a lot of different uses, not just agricultural or forest. But we would incorporate recreation, mountain biking, trail hiking, horseback riding. And in that situation, we want to provide a good experience for all the users.
And by having a lot of internal fences, that becomes an obstacle for people that are recreating up there and creates a lot of gates or barriers that people can’t feel like they can experience the landscape naturally. So we really looked at this virtual fence option because we still maintain this as a working landscape. And livestock grazing is a piece of that. It provides an opportunity to control the livestock, but also allow those other uses, to enjoy that environment in as natural a setting as is possible.
Miller: In simple terms, how do virtual fencing systems work?
Schreder: Most everybody now understands GPS technology. We have them on our phones and in our cars. Basically it’s a GPS receiver and it works with the satellites. Cows are equipped with a collar and the collar has a GPS receiver in it. It also has some other technology that you can download, basically maps or coordinates, and you can set boundaries. As the animals roam around on the landscape, if they approach some of the boundaries that we have set, they’re cued.
The cues start off with a beep. Then as they approach the boundary that they’re either supposed to stay in or away from, it will increase in frequency until they hit a point that they’re too close. And then they’ll get electric stimulation, basically, a shock, like touching an electric fence. So they get a small zap and that deters them. Typically, livestock learn really quickly by the audio cue and they don’t usually exercise the shock stimulation. But it’s there and that’s the final deterrent.
Miller: You say typically livestock learn pretty quickly. So how long does it take for the average cow to learn, “All right, don’t go past this invisible line because if I do, first there’s a sound and if I keep going I get a shock?”
Schreder: There’s basically a training protocol. What we do is we take the livestock in an area they’re familiar with, a home pasture, a boundary that has some hardened fences around it that they’re used to. We will overlay the virtual fence on those boundaries. And then we’ll set the bandwidth or the distance a little bit out from that. Then we’ll turn the animals out into that pasture that they’re familiar with. And we’ll let them kind of graze naturally. In about three days, they’ve wandered around and encountered the different stimuli to the point that they start to equate, “All right, if I get close to this fence, it beeps. If I get too close, I get shocked.”
After about the third day we’ll, for instance, take and put a division in that pasture where there is not a fence. So we may take the pasture and cut it in half, and when the animals are on one side and they try to cross, then they get the cue. We find that within three to five days of training, they’re pretty much conditioned to those cues. Then you’re ready to turn them out into an environment where they’re not as familiar and they’ll pick up on those cues relatively quickly.
Miller: What are the aims of this virtual fencing pilot that you’re doing, specifically in Wallowa County? I mean, what do you most want to find out?
Schreder: Virtual fence technology is not brand new, but it’s newer, and it’s to the point now that the technology is becoming cost effective and readily available. So we’re getting a lot of livestock operators/producers who are intrigued and looking at how they can implement this technology on their own property or in their own management structure. So what we looked at is taking this technology and putting it on a working landscape that we want to protect. So we have areas of sensitive plant species we want to protect from grazing. We wanna be able to manage the grazing throughout the growing season so we can rotate livestock. We want to protect some areas where we have some riparian vegetation. And so we put up exposure to that virtual fencing to keep animals out of that.
But we wanted to do this in this community forest where we have a lot of interaction with the general public and let them experience the fact that they can still recreate, while we’re still managing livestock in a relatively intensive way, without the traditional hardened fences. The goal over the next couple of years is to monitor how effective it is in keeping animals in the areas we want them to be and out of the areas we don’t want them to be. How [does] that basic livestock, recreational interaction occur throughout the grazing season? And what is the feedback from the recreationists on their interaction on the landscape not being impeded by the physical fences? [We also want] to educate other producers in the area with this demonstration project to show them and talk to them about what we’re learning, and have them come out and see firsthand how this technology can be applied.
Miller: This sounds, in some respects, a lot like what I now think of as a relatively old technology – given that it existed when I was a kid in the eighties or nineties – to keep a dog in the yard without a fence. But in those cases, people would actually put wires underground. So there was still a physical installation. It was just invisible if you weren’t a beetle. But what you’re talking about now involves satellites or cell towers. How does the price compare, mile to mile, whether it’s a virtual fence or a traditional one?
Schreder: You’re right in the fact that basically it’s taking that technology that we knew years ago with the wire in the ground that’s now evolved actually to the same type of technology for cows. You can buy those virtual fences with GPS collars that react the same way. So it’s very similar. It’s just on a larger landscape with a little bit bigger collar for the livestock.
So, in terms of mile per mile cost … that’s a little tricky question because fencing costs vary. But in the rugged landscapes that we run – I refer to rugged as more range land, large grazing pasture-type situations – you could be looking at $18,000 a linear mile to build four-strand barbed wire fencing. And typically, you’re talking several miles, not one or two. Most of our pastures require three or four, and sometimes 10 linear miles of fencing. And it goes up from there. So in terms of cost, it’s relatively expensive to put in your hardened fences.
The virtual fence right now, the only cost for the equipment … well, you purchase the tower. So for our system that we’re using, it’s a GPS collar that talks to the satellites. So we can have a live-time interface with the animals. I can call them up on my phone and see where they are on the landscape. I can manipulate the virtual fences so I can change them on my phone, to rotate those pastures or eliminate or add virtual fences. That requires a tower and that tower then talks to the collar and also then links it to your cell phone. The towers cost around $7,000 to $8,000 depending on how big of an area and how rugged the landscape is. That dictates how many towers you need.
For instance, one tower would do the 1,800 acres we’re running livestock on right now on the East Moraine Community Forest. We have two just for redundancy to make sure that everything’s covered. And then we lease the collars right now. The collars are about $48 to $50 a year. Part of the lease cost is because technology is changing so rapidly. They don’t want you to purchase a collar that’s gonna be outdated in a year or two. But I think the technology is advancing to the point that, in a few years, you’ll be able to buy that hardware, you’ll own it and then they’ll probably just be software updates. So that’s your breakdown depending on the tower number of towers. And then how many collars you need.
Miller: Just briefly, is it your best guess that 20 years from now this is going to be standard for ranchers in the BLM West, or just a tool that some ranchers use but is not particularly common?
Schreder: I would say it’ll be a shorter window than that. I think we’re moving there relatively quickly. We have several grazers around the western part of the United States that are trying this on large allotments like that – Forest Service, BLM allotments. So I would say in the next 10 years … I won’t go and say everybody, but a large percentage of our livestock will probably be managed on our open landscapes with some type of a virtual fence technology.
Miller: Pete Schreder, thanks very much.
Schreder: You bet. Thank you.
Miller: Pete Schreder is a Wallowa County extension agent for OSU Extension.
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