“Virtual Fencing: An Alternative to Fencing Infrastructure Post-fire” is a research study starting at Texas Tech University within the Department of Natural Resource Management (NRM).
This study will focus on using virtual fencing to study the grazing patterns of cattle after disastrous fires. The department was awarded $499,351 from the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation for this project.
Cowden Land and Livestock, in Pampa, TX, are “the boots on the ground” for this project. Craig Cowden and his wife are 5th and 6th-generation ranchers who approached Texas Tech, wanting to help with this project and have volunteered their cattle for researchers to study their grazing patterns. This ranch was one of the most impacted by the Smokehouse Creek Fire in 2024, with 98% of the ranch being burned.
Cowden said last summer’s rain did a lot of good recovering the grass on his pastures.
“We're not fully recovered, but if you told me that we were this far along, I would be very pleased,” Cowden said.
The Cowdens are using Gallagher Collars that are solar-charged and use GPS technology to track the animal and set up boundaries. When a cow gets close to a boundary, an audio stimulus will go off. Once trained, most cattle will turn away at that moment. If the cattle push that boundary further, a small electric shock will stimulate through the collar.
Cowden said for his cattle, the training took about 4-7 days.
The Cowdens started putting virtual fencing collars on some of their cattle in November, after weaning their calves. Since then, they have slowly been putting collars on the rest of their cattle. In February, they finished putting collars on their herd of 400 cattle; research is expected to start this spring.
Aaron Norris is an assistant professor in the NRM department and the Principal Investigator on the project.
When looking at animal welfare and the electric shock, Norris explained: “What we've seen is relative to electric fences, physical fences. There is no stress response to this. Honestly, it's one that it doesn't matter what other traditional system you use, we're really not seeing any sort of negative response there.”
Norris, having felt the shock that is given out to the cattle, stated that it is more of a surprise than a hurt.
With this research, the team is looking at how different levels of fires affect the vegetation around livestock and wildlife. They want to give ranchers information on how their cattle will graze after fires and what the ranchers can do about the grazing when this happens. Once they get their research going, they want to invite ranchers to field days where they can see how this technology works and how they can use it.
“From the grazing perspective, it's really trying to understand how these animals are selecting these on rangelands that have been exposed to wildfire, because it is unlike a prescribed fire, where we have an idea of what the fire intensity is going to be, it really is just dependent on what the conditions are,” Norris stated. “And so we are trying to assess how animals select post-fire to these areas.”
Craig Cowden is already seeing patterns with wildlife and the benefits of the collars.
“We're seeing more pronghorn antelope. We're seeing more whitetail and mule deer,” Cowden explained. “And deer showing up in places that we didn't have them before. And so that's pretty intriguing.”
There is a time management aspect to this practice because when a rancher puts a fence up, and then decides he needs to make it smaller, the change can require a lot of resources and days of hard work.
With the new technology, they do not have to rebuild that fence, they can just reset the boundary on a computer.
Cowden said he has large pastures with different soil and rain types so they can quickly fence off exclusion zones with these collars to allow for recovery in specific areas.
Cowden said, “The flexibility is just tremendous, all it takes is 10 minutes in front of your computer, and you can change a fence line anywhere you want it.”
The Cowdens are ready to see the science behind post-fire recovery for these rangelands.
There are many programs starting within Natural Resource Conservation Services (NRCS) that will help with funding this new technology for ranchers.