The sight of cattle mobbed behind invisible fences could be a very real if slightly surreal one when a new technology pioneering fenceless farming becomes commercial.
Australian company Agersens was moving rapidly to the commercial proving stage of its fenceless eShepherd technology that controlled cattle by satellites rather than posts, wire and electrified plastic tape.
Prospects for the company getting to market sooner than later were accelerated by a successful $2 million fundraising round, letting New Zealand family company Gallagher take a strategic stake in the business.
Gallagher had a track record for recognising innovative start-ups and investing in their disruptive technology early on.
Most recently the company’s Flashmate cattle heat detector provided an alternative to traditional tail painting methods for detecting cows on heat in dairy herds.
Agersens managing director Ian Reilly said the concept of fenceless farming had been kicking around for the past 30 years.
“But it has only been in the past decade and particularly the last three years as satellite networks have become even more sophisticated that GPS use for this has become more of a reality.”
The eShepherd had a GPS-enabled collar to replace fences and posts with the ability to incorporate other assorted animal health and production indicators found on existing livestock collars including oestrous detection, EID and production recording.
An internet-connected base station on the farm talked to the collars, relaying GPS co-ordinates off a farm map loaded into the eShepherd app, for where the stock were to be grazed.
“Once the collars are loaded with the co-ordinates they do not need to stay in wireless contact with the base station and can be autonomous,” Reilly said.
“The farmer can access mob and animal location at any time via a tablet, smartphone or computer.”
The collars had a training algorithm built into them. When the animal approached the virtual fence determined by GPS co-ordinates an audio cue cautioned them to stop.
If the animal didn’t stop and broke through the virtual fence it would receive a single, mild electrical shock, significantly less than through an electric fence.
Reilly said in trials stock typically took a couple of days to be trained, with 98% of animals contained by the system.
Much of the work on the eShepherd system was initiated by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) between 2005 and 2010.
“Since then farmers have had an expectation that this technology will appear.”
While still to be trialled in NZ, work on large-scale northern Queensland and New South Wales cattle properties indicated a high level of farmer interest.
Often covering hundreds of square kilometres with few fences, farmers there had been interested in trying to manage cattle over set blocks for set periods, essentially block grazing cattle that had typically free-ranged at will.
“Some larger properties could be looking at $10m to fence, when the eShepherd system could be installed for about $2m on a 20,000-head property and the level of cost savings and efficiencies mean you can see a payback within a year.”
In the expansive Australian context, a system that identified where the cattle were in such large areas meant significant reductions in mustering costs and the stresses and risk that accompanied that task.
Reilly said the merging between the extensive properties and conservation areas of national significance was also driving a lot of interest in the technology.
“Often you cannot put up fences because they interfere with the movement of wildlife across regions.
“The collars can keep livestock in defined areas and out of waterways and wetlands, something that is also increasingly important for NZ farmers.”
So far trials had been on 5-10ha areas with larger-scale riparian protection trials scheduled this year.
Reilly said NZ farmers facing stock exclusion regulations on waterways through regional plans and national freshwater policies might find a better return with the system than physically fencing off difficult country.
A survey done by Federated Farmers and AgFirst late last year on Waikato hill-country farms found a typical 450ha hill-country farm would cost about $500 a hectare for fencing to keep stock out of waterways and meet the Healthy Rivers regional plan requirements.
Reilly said Dairy Australia had shown interest in trialling the technology for strip grazing, with a federal government grant of A$5.6m put towards trials on sheep, cattle and free-range pigs.
“We also have a number of interests who want to run trials in NZ and that is on our horizon.”
Agersens held rights to the patented algorithm used in the collars developed by CSIRO.
Reilly said the collars’ data capturing ability meant they could generate useful information for farmers, not only on stock location but also activity and movements.
That could help, for example, in identifying areas more vulnerable to stock camping where nutrient losses might be higher on soils or areas of the farm that were vulnerable to leaching and run-off.
Gallagher marketing manager Mark Harris described the technology as having the potential to change the game for stock fencing.
“Lots of people have tried to develop a system but we now have a convergence of technology that is making this more possible than ever.”
