While some areas of the country are seeing relief from severe drought, it persists for others in the West. Ranchers across Arizona, where they have raised cattle for hundreds of years, have learned to navigate desert conditions along with the occasional drought.
At the Bar T Bar Ranch of Winslow, Ariz., for example, cattle and water management over its 100-year history consisted of clearing thousands of acres of juniper, building miles of ditches and canals, and expanding lakes. Today, they’re exploring advances in technology, or “agri-tech,” to advance water management on the large ranch.
Consider that Bar T Bar Ranch has several ranch locations and spans thousands of acres. The infrastructure to get water to every pasture is extensive, with multiple wells, storage tanks, and miles upon miles of pipelines. A ranchhand can spend a lot of time and fuel driving around to manage this vital natural resource.
“We used to spend quite a bit of time checking water, starting generators and opening valves,” explains Devin Hovey, a ranchhand at the Bar T Bar, “before Ranchbot.”
Real-time Visibility
Ranchbot is a remote monitoring solution using satellite technology. It provides two-way communications, enabling ranchers to have real-time visibility of their water assets and their water infrastructure.
“If a rancher is looking to improve efficiency, an advancement like Ranchbot is a huge opportunity to improve communication on a landscape-size operation at a very reasonable cost,” says Bob Prosser, owner of the Bar T.
Andrew Coppin, CEO and co-founder of the U.S.-based Ranchbot, explains ranchers can now manage water and pumps in real time. The remote system sends alerts when there’s a problem and lets anyone with the app know if issues pop up and need addressing.
“And animals without water — that’s a major issue,” Coppin says.
Having grown up ranching in Australia, Coppin knows water is the most valuable resource on a ranch. Without sufficient water, cattle can perish in days. Even with limited water, the resulting heat stress has detrimental effects on the health of cattle.
Coppin and his business partner Craig Hendricks started Ranchbot, or Farmbot as it’s called in Australia, in 2016 during a major drought. The goal was to conserve and closely monitor their water supply. The company now serves roughly 4,000 ranches in Australia. It also launched in the U.S. earlier this year, and the Texas-manufactured systems are already on ranches throughout the Southwest.
Bar T Bar was an early adopter to the technology and serves as a think-tank of sorts for the U.S. market. Today they have multiple Ranchbot water solutions throughout the ranch, including monitors, a rain gauge, and well generators with remote switches.
“The satellite connectivity allows us to connect super-fast to any of the monitors,” Hovey explains, “And it’s very reliable. I can change things, start things, stop things — whatever I need to do — straight from my phone.”
“We’re also saving money on fuel and labor, and wear and tear on vehicles,” he adds. “We can monitor our water, we can monitor our fuel and our generators, and we can change valves remotely. In the time we’re saving, we can do other projects on the ranch and try to make more improvements.”
“It’s a tool that enables our people to get home to their wives and family; it’s a huge relief in my view,” Prosser says.
“I would recommend it to anybody who has storage and water and needs to monitor. It’ll make their day a lot easier.”
“I think technology like this will help a lot of ranchers in the future,” Hovey adds.
In the desert and arid conditions of the West, it’s not lost on these ranchers that they might have to defend their water usage at some point. Data from a monitoring system, such as Ranchbot, can provide landowners with historical records. In addition, the agri-tech provides insights into seasonal water usage and rain patterns.
