Posts Tagged: cattle

Virtual fencing ‘game-changer’ for ranchers grazing cattle

Tech can save ranchers time and benefit animals and land, becoming more viable

After the Caldor Fire destroyed seven miles of fencing on their cattle ranch in 2021, Leisel Finley and her family needed to replace the fence.

Finley, a sixth-generation rancher at Mount Echo Ranch in Amador County, said reconstruction costs were bid at $300,000 and would take at least a year to build, leaving the family without summer pasture and a herd of hungry cows to feed. Additionally, the U.S. Forest Service mandates that grazing be withheld for two years in postfire landscapes. This put the family in a difficult position.

While watching a recording of a California Cattlemen's Association meeting, Finley learned about a pilot program for virtual fencing. Desperate to find an alternative solution, she registered to try the livestock containment technology, which uses GPS enabled collars to monitor each animal's location in near real time.

Livestock producers can draw a perimeter on a map of their pasture using a laptop or smartphone application and send those instructions to the collar. The collar then uses audio and tactile cues to contain the animal in the area.

Eager to discover the short- and long-term benefits of virtual fencing, Finley turned to Scott Oneto, farm advisor, and Brian Allen, assistant specialist, from the University of California Cooperative Extension office in the Central Sierra. Since partnering with Oneto and Allen, Finley said she has come to understand and uncover more of the technology's potential.

The team has consistently observed the technology's value in integrating with and enhancing traditional livestock production systems across California. Though still in its early stages of development, the location tracking and containment system appears to provide time- and cost-savings that make it a game-changer for ranchers.

Ability to monitor location of animals in real time

Virtual fencing really stands out in its ability to monitor each animal's location in real time. During roundups, ranchers can use their smartphones to see their own location relative to their herd. The system can also send alerts if an animal crosses the virtual boundary or if a collar remains stationary for an extended period, potentially indicating that the animal is sick or that the collar has fallen off.

Rounding up cattle on large, forested grazing allotments can be challenging, as the process generally requires a group of people and many return trips to find every animal. Prior to virtual fencing, Finley and her father could gather about 85% to 90% of the herd in a week. Since using virtual fencing, Finley said one of their most recent roundups lasted three days, and they located every single cow.

Something that every livestock producer dreads is the notorious call from a neighbor or California Highway Patrol alerting them that one of their cows is out in the middle of the road. It always seems to happen at midnight or while they are out with friends or family. This scenario changes with virtual fencing.

Containment based on animal behavior

The containment system that virtual fencing is built on is based on animal behavior. When the animal crosses an invisible boundary, the collar emits an audio warning, prompting most animals to instinctively turn back into the desired area. If the animal doesn't respond, the collar delivers a mild electric pulse as a secondary deterrent.

Field trials by Oneto and Allen demonstrated the system's success. Recently, the team trained a herd of 37 cattle of mixed ages that had no previous exposure to virtual fencing. During the initial six-day training period, the cattle responded to the audio warning alone about 75% of the time when they approached a virtual fence boundary, with the remaining 25% of cases requiring an electric pulse.

After about three weeks, the herd was responding to audio cues alone about 95% of the time. The field trials also showed that the collars contain the livestock within the desired areas 90% to 99% of the time when the entire herd wears virtual fence collars and their basic needs for safety, connection to the rest of the herd, water, forage, shade, etc. are met.

Opportunities for improvement

While the technology is effective in its current capacity, there are notable areas where it can improve. One limitation to the system is the current reliance on cellular networks to operate. If an animal wanders into an area outside of coverage, the collar will continue to operate based on the last instructions but won't receive updates or report locations. This is especially a concern in many areas of California with poor cell reception, including the steep forested rangelands where many livestock producers have summer grazing allotments.

Another limitation is that some companies require a solar-powered base station with radio and cellular antennas to be placed on the pasture. These facilitate the transfer of animal locations and updates to the virtual fences. A base station going offline would create the same conditions as a drop in cell signal until the base station is repaired. Some companies are currently developing collars that bypass the need for these base stations.

The other major concern for ranchers is the cost for a virtual fencing system. The average rancher can expect to pay an estimated $20,000 to $30,000 in upfront costs. The cost to set up a base station alone is $5,000 to $10,000. However, this cost is highly dependent on several factors, including the manufacturer, the number of livestock to be collared, if the livestock are large or small ruminants, and the number of GPS base stations to cover the range.

According to Allen and Finley, the high cost of virtual fencing can be offset by the unique animal and land management benefits it can provide. “While physical perimeter fencing remains essential, VF is rapidly emerging as an innovative tool to control livestock with ease, precision, and flexibility in ways that were not previously feasible with traditional fencing,” Allen said.

Finley described the technology as a “game-changer” for her family.

Virtual fencing helps control invasive grasses, installing fuel breaks

While virtual fencing is designed to contain livestock without physical fencing, it is not intended to outright replace secure perimeter fencing. Instead, it operates best as a highly dynamic and adaptable cross-fence, allowing for more intentional grazing on the landscape to meet livestock production and natural resource conservation objectives within a secure physical perimeter.

With grant funding from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, the UCCE team continues to work with Finley and other livestock producers to test these applications on California's diverse rangelands.

Within the Sierra Nevada and Coast Ranges foothills, these trials include using virtual fencing on cattle for targeted grazing of invasive grasses to support the recovery of native forage and installing fuel breaks within the wildland-urban interface to remove vegetation where the edge of a pasture meets urban housing.

Using virtual fencing, 25 cattle were successfully concentrated on a field of Medusahead (Elymus caput-medusae), an invasive annual grass. The herd respected the virtual fencing boundary 99% of the time despite nearby preferable forage. Grazing reduced medusahead seed heads from 2,072 per square meter in the ungrazed control area to just 68 per square meter in the grazed section.

In a different trial, 37 cattle with virtual fencing collars were contained within 120-feet-wide fuel breaks along the boundary of an annual rangeland and residential area. Cattle stayed within the boundaries 99% of the time, leading to an 81% reduction in fine fuel biomass and lowering wildfire risk in the wildland-urban interface.

Within rangelands on conifer forests, these UCCE trials concentrate cattle on brush to reduce the flammable plants and vegetation that competes with desirable timber species. It also can prevent livestock from entering sites that are sensitive to livestock presence.

Upcoming grazing trials will focus on how virtual fencing works with goats and sheep. In addition to Oneto and Allen, UCCE's contribution to virtual fencing research is in large part due to Leslie Roche, UCCE specialist and associate professor at UC Davis, Dan Macon and Jeff Stackhouse, UCCE livestock and natural resources advisors, Kristina Horback, associate professor at UC Davis and Lone Star Ranch in Humboldt County.

To learn more about the trials led by the UCCE team,visit https://cecentralsierra.ucanr.edu/Virtual_Fencing/ 

Fighting fire with feeding

Are cattle a secret weapon for taking on California wildfires?

California's cattle ranchers contribute a significant amount to the region's culture, economy and food supply, but do they also inadvertently help to temper the wildfires that have been plaguing the state? And if so, is it a better alternative – environmentally speaking – to letting grasslands burn?

A new study published in the journal Sustainability delves into the topic, weighing the advantages – and disadvantages – grazing cattle bring to the table. Researchers, including scientists from University of California, Davis and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, set out to calculate the greenhouse gas emissions of cows consuming vegetation that would otherwise burn in wildfires. Then they estimated the GHG emissions that would result should that forage be untouched and therefore, consumed by fire, eventually comparing the two.

Feeling the burn

Given the severity of California's recent wildfires and the belief they will continue and even escalate in the near future, it's a discussion worth having, said Frank Mitloehner, an expert in animal agriculture and air quality from UC Davis, director of the CLEAR Center and one of the researchers who contributed to the peer-reviewed article.

“Each year from 2010 to 2020, California lost on average 89,000 acres of grassland to wildfires,” said Mitloehner, who is also a Cooperative Extension specialist. “In addition to the obvious disruption and devastation they caused, the fires spewed greenhouse gases and harmful particulate matter such as black carbon into the air and into our atmosphere. Those alone threaten climate health and human well-being.”

A fast and furious gas

Cattle are adept at eliminating herbaceous fuel as they graze. However, at the same time, their specialized digestive system produces methane that is expelled most often in the form of enteric emissions … more commonly known as belches. By way of background, methane is a potent greenhouse gas that warms the atmosphere at 25 times the rate of carbon dioxide over 100 years. But it's only in the atmosphere for 10 to 12 years after it's emitted. Following that, it's broken down into carbon dioxide and water vapor.

For that reason, Mitloehner refers to methane as a “fast and furious” gas. Furious because it warms with a vengeance and fast because it does so for only a short time, especially when compared to carbon dioxide. Furthermore, because of the biogenic carbon cycle, whereby plants extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for photosynthesis, the warming of methane and its byproducts can end entirely when it's hydrolyzed and used by plants.

How researchers calculated emissions

In order to determine if grazing, methane-emitting cattle are better for the atmosphere than burning grasslands, Mitloehner and the other researchers employed a method known as “Monte Carlo simulation,” a mathematical technique used by scientists to predict outcomes of an uncertain event.

Looking exclusively at methane emissions, they found it's better to have cows eat vegetation than to have wildfires burn it. Granted, it's only marginally better, but when one considers other advantages of animal agriculture and conversely, other disadvantages of widespread, uncontrolled fire, the conversation suddenly shifts.

“Even if cattle provided no other benefit to us, which certainly is not true, we can now make the case that they are helpful to us in yet another way,” Mitloehner said.

Friends or foes?

It goes without saying that one would be hard pressed to find much good to say about wildfires, but that doesn't hold true for animal agriculture. The industry provides jobs and supports the economy in other ways as well. Plus, it is a major source of protein-rich food that is in increasing demand as the world's population continues on a trajectory toward 10 billion people by the year 2050.

Where global warming is concerned, the industry is in the unique position of being able to reach net-zero warming, also known as climate neutrality, if it continues to aggressively chip away at its methane emissions, which Mitloehner asserts is of critical importance to the planet. “Few other sectors can reduce its warming to net zero and still be of service to society, but agriculture can because of the way methane behaves in the atmosphere,” he says.

To be clear, grazing cows are no match for wildfires. Yet, in addition to everything else the sector does for us, slowing the burn and keeping relatively more methane from entering the atmosphere are not nothing.

In addition to Mitloehner, authors of the study are Cooperative Extension advisors Sheila Barry, Devii Rao and Theresa Becchetti; Rowan Peterson, Ermias Kebreab and Minju Jung of UC Davis; and Felix Ratcliff and Kaveh Motamed of LD Ford. 

This article was first published on the website of the CLEAR (Clarity and Leadership for Environmental Awareness and Research) Center at UC Davis.

Buying Livestock Drugs in California

A livestock producer recently contacted UCCE regarding a problem he was having getting livestock dewormers shipped to a California address from...

The no-tech way to preserve California’s state grass

Disappearing native is like an environmental Swiss Army knife

Though it is disappearing, California's official state grass has the ability to live for 100 years or more. New research demonstrates that sheep and cattle can help it achieve that longevity.

Purple needlegrass once dominated the state's grasslands, serving as food for Native Americans and for more than 330 terrestrial creatures. Today, California has lost most of its grasslands, and the needlegrass occupies only one tenth of what remains.

It is drought resistant, promotes the health of native wildflowers by attracting beneficial root fungi, burns more slowly than non-native grasses and speeds the postfire recovery of burned lands. For these and other reasons, many who work toward habitat restoration hope to preserve the needlegrass.

“Where it grows, these tall, slender bunches become focal points, beautiful as well as environmentally beneficial,” said Loralee Larios, a UC Riverside plant ecologist affiliated with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources. “However, identifying successful management strategies for a species that can live for a couple hundred years is challenging.”

To meet that challenge, Larios teamed up with University of Oregon plant ecologist Lauren Hallett and Northern California's East Bay Regional Park District. They tracked the health of nearly 5,000 individual needlegrass clumps over six years, including an El Niño rain year as well as historic drought.

The researchers took measurements of plant health including growth and seed production. They placed small bags over many of the grass clumps to capture the seeds and quantify the number of seeds they produced.

Their findings, now published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, were that purple needlegrass did better in places where sheep were allowed to graze. The positive effects of the grazing were amplified in times of wetter weather.

Previously, the park district spent a decade trying to assess the success of its grassland maintenance techniques. However, the district's method of applying a strategy like grazing, and then measuring the percentage of needlegrass clumps in a given area resulted in data that didn't follow a discernable pattern from year to year.

“By tracking each plant over time, rather than scanning broadly across an area, we gained much more clarity about how the grass responds to the grazing,” Larios explained. “Perhaps counterintuitively, we saw that the needlegrass generally died back when sheep weren't allowed to graze on it.”

When sheep were removed from the study sites, the needlegrass in all but two of the sites became less healthy. The researchers would like to learn whether the two sites that remained healthy have needlegrasses that are genetically distinct.

Grazing is a controversial strategy for grassland restoration. Some conservationists believe sheep eating the target grass, particularly during already stressful drought years, does not enhance their survival. As far back as the 1800s, some researchers hypothesized that the combination of grazing and drought resulted in the loss of perennial grasses.

Though drought was not beneficial for any of the plants in this study, the researchers believe grazing helped needlegrass survive in at least two ways. One, by trampling on leaf litter and other organic debris, sheep created space for new needlegrass to grow.

“Sometimes you get litter that's as deep as a pencil — so much dead, non-native grass piles up. It's hard for a little seed to get enough light through all of that,” Larios said.

Secondly, sheep eat non-native grasses that generate growth-suppressing debris and compete with purple needlegrass for resources.

When the Spanish colonized California, they brought forage grasses like wild oats that they thought would benefit cattle. Those introduced grasses spread, and now dominate the state's grasslands.

“Our grasslands are known as one of the world's biggest biological invasions,” Larios said.

California has as many as 25 million acres of grasslands, equivalent to the combined areas of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Though Larios does not believe it is possible to rid the state of all non-native grasses, she said it is possible to maintain or even increase the amount of purple needlegrass.

“It's great for carbon storage, which mitigates climate change, it doesn't serve as wildfire fuel, and cultivates a space for wildflowers that pollinators are then able to use,” Larios said. “We want to keep all those benefits.”

Once perceived as a problem, conservation grazing by cattle a boon to vernal pools

Giving 1,200-pound cows access to one of California's most fragile and biologically rich ecosystems seems a strange way to protect its threatened and endangered species.

But a recently published study suggests that reintroducing low to moderate levels of cattle grazing around vernal pools – under certain conditions – leads to a greater number and greater variety of native plants.

“We found that after 40 years of rest from grazing, reintroducing conservation grazing had – across the board – positive impacts on vernal pool plant diversity,” said Julia Michaels, a visiting professor at Reed College who led a three-year study in a Sacramento-area reserve during her time as a UC Davis Ph.D. student.

Ecologists consider vernal pools – ephemeral ponds that form seasonally – “islands of native habitat” amid California's grasslands that are dominated by exotic grasses. These biodiversity hotspots harbor about 200 native species of animals and plants, such as the coyote thistle, which germinates under water and forms a snorkel-like straw to deliver oxygen to its roots – and then “fills in” its stem as the pool dries.

Specially adapted to survive in those stages of wet and dry, many of these species are found only in vernal pools scattered across California – making those pools an urgent priority for conservationists.

“It's estimated that more than 90% of the original vernal pools in California have been destroyed due to agriculture and urban development, so management of those remaining – including those that have been re-created – is of high concern,” said Valerie Eviner, a UC Davis plant sciences professor and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources affiliate. Eviner is a co-author of the study, along with UC Davis colleague Kenneth Tate, UC Cooperative Extension specialist.

During the 1970s and 1980s, vernal pools were fenced off in parts of the state, in the hopes of protecting the flora and fauna from grazing cattle. In the early 2000s, however, UC Davis researcher Jaymee Marty found that grazing was actually crucial to vernal pool biodiversity: once livestock were removed from areas that had been grazed historically, the diversity of plants plummeted.

“Her research was critical to rethinking the best ways to protect the diversity in California's vernal pool ecosystems,” Eviner said.

The Michaels-led study, published in the Journal of Applied Biology, builds on Marty's work, by looking at scenarios where cattle had been blocked from vernal pools for decades, and then observes the rate at which biodiversity returns after reintroduction of the animals. Michaels said she wanted to provide some initial answers to the practical questions that ranchers and land managers have in potentially reintroducing cattle.

“A lot of them had these areas that had been fenced off from grazing for the last 20–30 years, and they were very concerned about what happens if we let cattle back onto these vernal pool grasslands – are there going to be negative impacts because that land had been at rest for a few decades?” Michaels explained.

In their study within the Sacramento Valley, the researchers focused on transition zones – the “battlegrounds” between vernal pool native species and the encroaching invasive grasses, where they are able to detect most readily the effects of disturbances such as grazing.

They discovered that, after reintroducing cattle to areas that had been fenced off since the 1970s, there was a greater abundance of native flora (species like the vernal pool buttercup, bractless hedge-hyssop and bristled downingia), as well as increased diversity among the plants (both in number of species and in how evenly distributed they were).

“Encouragingly, diversity is rapidly restored,” Eviner said, “providing conservationists with strong data to show that rapid action can enhance plant diversity.”

And as for potential worries about cattle making a snack of vernal pool plants, Michaels and her colleagues observed that the cattle appear to be more interested in munching on grasses.

“Anecdotally, we saw very few signs of herbivory on the vernal pool species because the timing is such that [the plants] are underwater for a good part of the late winter and early spring, and then by the time they're blooming, there's plenty of good forage around for the cattle,” Michaels said.

In fact, the cattle seem to be performing a function filled for millennia by native grazers (namely, the once-abundant tule elk), helping to knock down vernal pool species' chief competitor in those transition zones: the grasses.

Although the researchers were concerned about a loss of biodiversity, excessive nutrients in the ponds due to defecation and harmful compaction of “fluffy” soil, none of their worries materialized on the test sites where grazing was reintroduced.

Instead, microdepressions created by the cattle appeared to encourage the proliferation of native plants. Each hoofprint became a miniature basin – “a vernal pool within a vernal pool.”

“Right in those transition zones, where they could be hosting either the vernal pool species or the upland grasses, just a couple centimeters of soil topography can make a big difference,” Michaels explained. “If a cow comes and steps in that transition zone, and that lowers the soil surface so it stays inundated a little longer, you end up seeing these pockets of vernal pool species that are able to persist.”

Michaels is currently conducting a follow-up study on the hoofprints to pinpoint their role in boosting native plant abundance and biodiversity. Because the prints can last for several years, they might be able to deliver some enduring benefits – and land managers might not have to bring cattle in to graze the pools as often.

“If it's really the hoofprints making the big difference, maybe we don't need to graze every year – only during certain times of year when we know the hoofprints will form well and harden, and then we're good for a few years,” Michaels said.

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