Bruce M. Beehler is a naturalist and author, whose books include “Birds of Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia,” and, most recently, “Flight of the Godwit.”
Imagine a Western ranch, and it probably will include a long run of fence. Now erase the fence but leave the herd of cattle behind it. Such a scene isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem.
No matter how much wildlife advocates or vegetarians muse that cattle-ranching should be replaced with bison-ranching (or no ranching at all), the American cattle industry is here to stay. Americans love their burgers and steaks. The United States consumes 29 billion pounds of beef annually, and much of that comes from our vast Western rangelands. This approximately 406 million acres is a mix of private ranches and public property managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service. And it is crisscrossed by some 620,000 miles of fencing.
This fencing — largely posts strung with four or five strands of barbed wire — has been there so long, it has come to seem like a permanent part of the Western landscape, but of course it’s not. Rangeland fencing is an important tool for managing herds, rotating grazing areas, protecting environmentally sensitive wetlands and stream corridors, and keeping cows off highways. But it’s also harmful to wildlife populations including deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep and elk, as well as game birds such as the greater sage-grouse.
Most wild species can jump ranch fences in summer, but with deep winter snows they can be insurmountable, halting migrations to better pastures. One study in Montana found that, on average, one wild ungulate got tangled in fencing every 2.5 miles of fencing per year. The greater sage-grouse, a signature High Plains species undergoing widespread decline, suffers considerable mortality from rangeland fencing.
Is there another option? Perhaps. Think of the “Invisible Fence” invented by Richard Peck in 1973 to keep people’s dogs in their yards. Whereas that system used a buried perimeter wire, virtual cattle fencing uses GPS, cellular technology and a mapping app that allows ranchers to draw cow-proof fence lines on their computer or tablet.
This technology holds promise in part because ranchers themselves are not fence-lovers. Range fencing requires frequent repair, robbing ranchers of time they would prefer to invest in managing their herds. At upwards of $15,000 a mile, range fencing is also expensive, both to ranchers and to taxpayers. In 2018, the U.S. Agriculture Department subsidized more than $300 million of fencing on private ranch land.
With virtual fencing, a cow is adorned with a solar-powered collar that communicates with a mapping app via satellite, cell or local reception tower to warn it — by an increasingly loud tone, followed by a mild electric shock — as it approaches a virtual fence line. Cows are not terribly smart, but they can be trained with the technology within a practice pasture in a few days. The current collars are a bit clunky. Cornell University scientists are developing an ear tag that does the same thing as the bulky collar.
For ranchers, the benefits are several. The ability to draw fence lines in minutes allows them to manage their rangelands day by day to prevent overgrazing of high-quality pasturage, protect environmentally sensitive sites and foster the revegetation of non-native, low-quality pasturage. It also helps them control herds in rugged areas that are difficult to fence.
Most remarkably, with a glimpse at the mapping app, ranchers can see the exact location of every one of their cows in real time. No need to ride the range in search of missing dogies.
The technology isn’t a panacea. Old-fashioned physical fences will still be needed, especially along highways and to keep bulls from wandering into a neighboring herd. Tech failures or cell outages could create occasional headaches, just as open gates and broken fences can now. It will be expensive to remove old fences. And some stubborn cows will aways “leak” across the virtual fence lines, requiring their recovery.
And as with any new technology, adoption hesitancy is a barrier. Ranchers operate on thin margins, and start-up costs are a burden. Each collar costs a bit over $300, and deployment of the system in places without cell coverage requires base station transceiver units costing $10,000. To kick-start adoption, environmental nonprofits are offering programs to help ranchers pay for the hardware. The Ranchers Stewardship Alliance, the Nature Conservancy’s Regenerative Grazing Lands Strategy and the World Wildlife Fund’s Sustainable Ranching Initiative, in partnership with groups such as Ducks Unlimited, Pheasants Forever and the National Grazing Lands Coalition, are leading the charge.
But the long-term economics appear to be sound. Presumably, costs will decline with increased adoption, and as a result the annual cost of maintaining a herd will fall, increasing profit margins. The improved ability to manage rangeland health will further enhance ranching productivity.
And substantially reducing the fencing of the West can restore the free movement of the West’s charismatic wildlife. Ranchers can identify historic migration routes, facilitating additional conservation-friendly pass-throughs using the virtual fencing tool.
Working to reopen migration routes for wildlife is a win-win that will reduce the “anti-nature” burden borne by Western ranching. For ranchers, cattle and wildlife in America’s rangelands, fewer fences make for better neighbors.
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