A recent study by Oregon State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service found that the use of virtual fencing to manage cattle grazing on sagebrush rangelands has the potential to create fuel breaks needed to combat wildfires.
Virtual fencing involves the use of collars on animals. The collars communicate with GPS and reception towers to create the rancher’s virtual fence. When livestock get close to the edge of the virtual fence, the collar makes sounds, and if they cross the edge, they get a mild electric shock.
David Bohnert, director of Oregon State’s Eastern Oregon Agricultural Research Center in Burns, remarked, “We’re observing the challenge posed by wildfires to land managers in the western United States, particularly on public lands.” “They simply lack the resources to manage these public lands in a timely manner, particularly in relation to wildfires. This new research should start to change that. ”
According to USDA statistics, wildfires on sagebrush landscapes, which cover much of the interior landscape of the western United States, have increased dramatically in recent years, with more acres burning, larger fires, and more federal dollars spent fighting fires.
The researchers note that the expansion of non-native annual grasses on the sagebrush landscape is partially responsible for these changes. The more of these non-native grasses there are, the more fuel there is for wildfires. This is because they dry out earlier in the growing season and grow faster than native perennial bunchgrass.
The majority of methods for reducing fuel for wildfires have involved cutting or burning shrubs and trees. In recent years, people have been working to strategically place a network of fuel breaks across sagebrush landscapes so that firefighters have a safe place to stop fires from spreading.
Scientists from Oregon State and the Agricultural Research Service did a new study that was published in Rangeland Ecology & Management. They looked at whether cattle grazing and “virtual fencing” could be used to create fuel breaks by eating grass that wildfires use as fuel.
Bohnert stated that virtual fencing has existed for decades, but in recent years, due to advancements in satellite, battery, and GPS technology, it has attracted more interest in the agricultural community. It lets ranchers control where their animals go on rangelands without building expensive and possibly dangerous physical fences.
In this study, the researchers constructed a 200-meter-wide by 3-kilometer-long fuel break in a roughly 1,000-acre pasture on the Northern Great Basin Experimental Range of Oregon State University, located approximately 35 miles west of Burns in southeastern Oregon. Four virtual fences, each 35 meters apart, surrounded the refueling stop area.
In June 2021, sixteen cows and twenty-three cow/calf pairs were placed in a fuel break area with multiple water sources. All the cows, but not the calves, were fitted with virtual fence collars that use GPS positioning to contain them within the boundaries of the fuel break and record their locations every five minutes. In thirty days, the cows were removed.
The researchers then analyzed the collected data. Results included:
- On any given day, 98.5 percent of the cows in the fuel break area were devoid of calves.
- During fuel breaks, the daily percentage of cow/calf pairs present was 80.6 percent.Researchers believe the difference is due to the absence of collars on the calves, which makes them more likely to forage outside of the fuel break. Then, their mothers were likely to follow.
- The cows consumed 48.5% of the grass fuel within the fuel break and only 5.5% outside the fuel break.
The findings, said Chad Boyd, a research leader with the Agricultural Research Service in Burns who has a courtesy appointment at Oregon State, add to a growing body of evidence indicating that virtual fencing can be used effectively for a variety of livestock management applications.
Additional research being conducted by the authors evaluates the effectiveness of virtual fencing in preventing cattle from entering riparian areas in order to protect vital salmon and steelhead spawning habitat. Also, they are looking into the possibility of reducing the risk of wildfires by using remote sensing to find high fuel load areas on rangelands and then using virtual fencing and grazing in a strategic way to meet fuel management goals.
Boyd stated, “Grazing should not be viewed as an absolute.” “It is a tool that can be utilized in conjunction with everything else. It requires knowledge of the land management objectives and appropriate grazing management. “Virtual fencing assists in achieving this objective in a sustainable, strategic, and defendable manner that benefits not only the producer and land management agency, but also society as a whole.”
In addition to Bohnert and Boyd, the paper was written by Juliana Ranches and Dustin Johnson of Oregon State’s Department of Animal and Rangeland Sciences; Rory O’Connor, Jon Bates, and Kirk Davies of the USDA; Todd Parker of Vence Corp., a San Diego virtual fence company; and Kevin Doherty of the U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service.
