Move over barbed wire and electric fences. A “friendlier fence” to wildlife is gaining footing in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
For the second year in a row, the Bozeman-based think tank Property and Environment Research Center has awarded grants to ranches in the region to make virtual fences more accessible.
“It allows a farmer or a rancher to better and more precisely manage their livestock without the need for physical fences on the landscape,” said Travis Bramer, the organization’s director of conservation.
Across Wyoming and Idaho, eight ranches have received grants to purchase and maintain the costly equipment that’s altering the ranching industry. This year, Bramer’s nonprofit partnered with the Ricketts Conservation Foundation, which contributed a third of the $600,000 fund.
American billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade, Joe Ricketts, has large landholdings near Jackson Hole and founded his namesake conservation foundation in 2013.
Where there’s cell service, and soon satellite, ranchers can use an app on their phone to determine where their livestock can roam.. Cattle collars are hooked up to signal towers that send electric pulses when an animal strays too close to a boundary set on a mobile app, which also allows individual cattle tracking.
It’s less labor intensive than setting up and removing barbed wire or electric fences. But that’s not the only part of the technology that land managers find exciting.
“Hard fences are fairly difficult for big game animals to navigate,” Bramer said. “If you can continue to manage your livestock effectively without the need for physical fences on the landscape, that can create a lot of benefit for migratory ungulates like elk and mule deer.”
Sage grouse are also set to benefit from alternatives to hard fences, a native species on the decline, in large part, because of fatal collisions with wire.
In the last four years, cell service expansion in the West has led to virtual fences’ slow take-off in cattle and land management. The momentum is about a decade behind countries like Norway, where virtual fence company NoFence is based. New Zealand and Australia are also on the pioneering front of this budding industry, according to Bramer.
