Like many ranchers in the West, the Thompson family manages cattle on large Bureau of Land Management (BLM) allotments of public land. Located in southwest Idaho, they experienced two wildfires within 10 days of each other in the summer of 2024, which burned approximately half of the fields used for winter grazing. Jessie Jarvis and her husband, Justin, ranch with her folks, Allen and Kim Thompson. Jessie worked with their local field office to utilize Vence virtual fencing to allow grazing on part of their allotment.
“Because we have BLM permits, putting a traditional five-wire fence wasn’t an option and due to the landscape, temporary fencing doesn’t make sense,” Jarvis says. “We were left with trying to find another place to run cows or feed them hay and supplement through winter. The cost of feeding the amount of cows we collared would have been about $26,000, so it’s far more financially friendly for us to use Vence than it is than any of our other options.”
This technology also allowed Jarvis to keep the cows in locations they were already familiar with.
“Virtual fencing allowed us to run our cattle in two fields they already know and do really well, which was a lot easier than putting them in a completely different field,” Jarvis says.
When it comes to fires on public lands, the BLM has two weeks from the date of containment to put together a fire recovery plan.
“The BLM office was under the clock to make decisions about the recovery and whether it will be seeded or it won’t be seeded, if it can be used, and how all that works,” Jarvis says. “We had less than two weeks to make our decision and how we were going to operate.”
The family worked with their local field office in Twin Falls, and the Shoshone office to borrow a base station, which had been used for a previous virtual fencing project. They purchased the collars and batteries themselves.
Installing batteries and preparing collars to use for virtual fencing.
Jessie Jarvis
Easy-to-install collars are adjustable to fit each cow.
Jessie Jarvis
The Jarvis family uses virtual fencing collars and a base station on their BLM allotment to keep cows off area burned in wildfire.
Jessie Jarvis
The base station would be moved three times within the allotment to communicate based on where the cows were located.
Jessie Jarvis
Computer software shows where the virtual fencelines were and the movement of cattle throughout the boundaries.
Jessie Jarvis
Jarvis admits the first two weeks were a big learning curve as they had to work with Vence to determine where the base station would be located in relationship to the cows.
“We are moving the cows three different times, so there will be three different base station locations and they had to be predetermined so we knew we had the right amount of coverage for grazing that area,” Jarvis says.
All this took place during the fall and one of the busiest times when the family was gathering, weaning, processing different sets of calves, and preg testing. While learning new technology on top of all the fall work was a little overwhelming, Jarvis explains it was completely worth the extra effort.
“I think for us and other ranchers in our situation, being able to use this tool and continue grazing after a fire has such a positive impact,” Jarvis says. “I look around at all the fires that happened last summer, and I know how many people have had to liquidate their herds or completely sell out, and that breaks my heart. It takes so much time, energy and effort into building the genetics that are in your cow herd, and to have to completely get rid of that, that is life changing for all of us. We probably would have been faced with some of those very same difficult decisions had we not had this technology available to use.”
Vence Success Manager, CK Wisniewski, joined the Jarvis’ to help collar cattle and set up the system. She says every ranch has different goals for using virtual fencing.
“Some ranchers are wanting to track their cows more easily even within interior fencing,” she says. “Barbed wire fence is not fun to build, especially if you’re in very tough terrain. Sometimes that fencing cost can be $15,000-$50,000 a mile. When you have all those wildfires that are happening and it’s eight miles of fence, rebuilding is too labor and cost prohibitive. There are lots of different types of stakeholders who are always wanting to get engaged with our Vence system.”
Gary Tiller, director or commercial operations with Vence, which is a U.S.-based company owned by Merck Animal Health, says Vence focuses on three pillars — profitability, sustainability and legacy.
“Your first consideration is going to be, ‘how do I intend to make money using this technology?’” Tiller says. “That could be improved stocking density, saving on replacement or maintenance costs for fencing or replacing the cost of an employee to move fence.”
Tiller also notes what’s unique about virtual fencing is the ability to utilize ancillary benefits, which provide support to the main purpose of the operation.
“Ranching properties can also utilize wildlife habitat,” Tiller says. “For example, if fishing is an income stream to the ranch and protecting your stream sides is something that will make you more money in the end, you can exclude those cattle from going into the water and eroding the bank, which can improve your fishing population. That’s an ancillary profit center.”
Tiller points out, the second pillar — sustainability — can have multiple definitions.
“As a ranching community, we recognize wildfires aren’t going away,” he says. “When you look at the western states with a majority of ranchers relying on public lands grazing, if you don’t have fencing or funding to rebuild fences and you can’t keep cattle contained and manage the landscape, will we even have access to that land?
“It’s not only sustainability of the resource, but also of our industry,” Tiller adds. “We can’t lose 50% of our rangelands and still have 28-29 million cows needing to graze.”
Legacy is the third pillar that virtual fencing provides.
“Most everybody on the ranch has a dream of passing it down to the next generation and the only way we’re going to have the right to operate is by being really good stewards and making sure that the public understands how we are taking care of the land,” Tiller says. “I think most ranchers in general, prefer to pass on land at a better state than they inherit.”
Vence was designed for big remote areas to incorporate LoRa (long-range communication) through a system of base stations and collars that work autonomously once the directions are set. They utilize a high-density lithium battery mill spec battery designed to operate in the worse conditions, from hot and humid in Florida to below freezing in Montana.
“We designed a robust system around cattle and rugged conditions and landscapes with very minimal communications that we can magnify,” Tiller says.
The concept of virtual fencing technology has been around for decades but continues to evolve. Virtual fencing uses behavior modification based on audio and electrical cues from a collar device to keep cattle within a virtual boundary using GPS. This geospatial technology uses satellites to pinpoint a location. A virtual fence can also be used to keep animals out of certain areas. The collar can be controlled by a phone, tablet or computer using cellular data.
This is part of a four-part Smart Farming series on virtual fencing companies available in the U.S. — eShepard, Halter, NoFence and Vence.
