Some Montana ranchers are trading fence posts for smartphones, using virtual fencing technology to manage their cattle herds remotely and revolutionize how they use their land.
The technology allows ranchers to control where their cattle graze by putting special collars on the animals and drawing virtual boundaries through a smartphone app. For many, it has become a game-changer that frees up time and lets them focus on other parts of their ranch or life outside of it.
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"This has freed up a lot of time. I can check where the cows are from my phone, from my desktop, from my laptop. I can find out where they're at and what's going on and see if there's any issues," Justin Okes said.
Okes is a rancher and business owner in Great Falls who spends 12 hours a day, six days a week at work. Virtual fencing allows him to manage his herd remotely, eliminating the dreaded phone call about escaped cattle.
"Nobody wants to get the call that the cows are out, and it always comes at an inopportune time," Okes said.
The technology also enables ranchers to make better use of their land through intensive rotational grazing, a practice where cattle are frequently moved from one area to another.
"Intensive rotational grazing is a practice where you're going to frequently move the cattle from one place to another. By tomorrow morning, we're grazing a different piece of ground. And this ground actually gets a longer period of rest and it gets to recover, rejuvenate, and perform better," Okes said.
Rancher Dannette Fredrickson says this approach has transformed her land and reduced expenses.
"The more times you can move, the more pressure you can put on a piece of ground at any given time, the better productive that ground's going to be. When your cattle are on the ground, they're doing what cows do. Eat, drink, pee, poop. So, all of those nutrients go into the soil, and they're spread much more evenly than if your cattle have got, just open range of an entire pasture. And so, it reduces your expenses on fertilizer," Fredrickson said.
Both ranchers use a service provided by Halter, a New Zealand company with over half a million cows globally and more than 200 ranches across 18 U.S. states.
"There's a collar that goes on the cow that sits right on the upper neck. Very comfortable. Our collar is solar powered, so there's no need to replace any batteries. There's no need to take it off. Once it goes on, it stays on and continuously charges itself," Justin Wells said.
Wells is Halter's U.S. country manager. The system works by having ranchers draw virtual fences or borders through the app. The collar then uses audio cues to guide the cattle. If a cow doesn't respond to the beeping, it receives a low-energy pulse.
"The beeping will get faster the closer they get to that boundary. If they choose to go ahead and cross it, they will get an electrical shock correction. But that's only in the training process," Fredrickson said.
Halter offers the technology as a subscription service rather than selling the collars outright. The company says the system is user-friendly, even for those who aren't tech-savvy.
"I am not a techie person, but this is very, very simple. If you can look at Facebook or Google Earth or YouTube, you can do this," Okes said.
"That's really easy. Yeah. You can do it from anywhere," Fredrickson said.
The technology has impressed many customers who were initially skeptical.
"There have been so many customers of ours that have said, they've come back a week later, days later, of putting collars on their cows, and they say, holy cow, like, this works," Wells said.
Instead of fixing fences or chasing cows, ranchers can now manage their herds with just a few taps on their phones, proving that even in agriculture, there's an app for everything.
This broadcast news story has been lightly edited for online publication with the assistance of AI for clarity, syntax, and grammar.
