Assessing the Efficacy and the Conservation Benefit of Virtual Fence on Rugged and Remote Landscapes
By Retta Bruegger 1 and Allegra Waterman-Snow 2
1Colorado State University Extension
2Eagle County Conservation District
For producers and those outside agriculture, virtual fence provokes hope, novelty, and interest. But how does it work on rugged, mountainous terrain in remote areas?
Our recent project, Managing Rangelands with Virtual Fencing for Grazing Lands Conservation in Western Colorado, aimed to assess this question. Funded by a Conservation Innovation grant starting in 2022, this project is initiated and managed by the Eagle County Conservation District, with around six participating ranchers and anywhere from 1,500 - 3,000 collars on cows per year from 2022 to 2025. The project spanned private, Bureau of Land Management, and U.S. Forest Service lands, and provided collars and base stations to ranchers, covering an area of approximately 640 square miles. Each rancher decided how they were going to use virtual fencing. This project was a pilot aimed at testing this technology in remote, rugged, and mountainous terrain, while assessing any conservation benefit to the rangeland.
First, I will discuss the question of efficacy of virtual fence on rugged and remote terrain, which we assessed via interviews with each participating rancher every year of the project. In these interviews, challenges and issues that impacted the efficacy of virtual fence were a prominent theme. These included: collars falling off, issues with using the user-interface for the system, challenges with connectivity and coverage, and time-lags. All this contributed to a lack of trust in technology. For example, in response to “what needs to be in place for more people to adopt it?”, one participant said:
“Oh the surety that's going to work (…). The guarantee. I don't know how you get that, nothing's a guarantee but that it works 80, 90% of the time.”
While challenges were prominent, it is also notable that the trust ranchers had in the technology grew over the first three years of the study. When we asked participants to rate the reliability of virtual fence over the first three years of the project, 100% of participants said that it worked 50% of the time or below in 2022, compared to 2024, when 100% of participants said it worked 75% of the time or more.
Ranchers also highlighted benefits with virtual fence, like being able to find cattle, time savings in gathering cattle, increased flexibility, and access to forage on areas that lack infrastructure or where there is high recreation use. For example,
“It's helped a couple of times to keep [cows] out of the private ground because, there's a ton of private ground there with these little 40-acre homesteaders that they don't want the cows around and they don't want to fix the fence.”
Our terrain and remoteness posed challenges for the technology. However, all ranchers did see worthwhile benefits, and improvement over time, despite the challenges.
We approached the question of conservation benefit from two main angles – interviewing ranchers over the last three years on the benefits they saw with virtual fence, and collecting rangeland management data on several plots in each producer’s lands.
Our preliminary analyses on both data sources reveal that the value of virtual fencing depends on how it is applied.
When we analyzed ecological variables – from livestock utilization to bare-ground, forage production to native bunchgrass cover – whether someone was using virtual fence or not was not a significant predictor of rangeland conditions. But, this does not tell the whole story.
We found that individual management significantly influenced multiple variables, including utilization patterns, litter, and bunchgrass abundance. This makes sense because producers in our study used virtual fence in distinctly different ways - from simply tracking location of cows, to complex rotations based on weather and ecological signals. This underscores the reality that virtual fence is a tool, and it matters how you use that tool and for what purpose, not simply whether you have it or not.
Additionally, range data alone can only capture part of the conservation benefit of virtual fence. Through interviews, ranchers described using virtual fence to defer grazing in treatment areas (i.e., mastication) or areas that had been burned, without losing access to the whole pasture. Some increased the flexibility and fine-tuned the timing of their grazing. For example,
“The success for the grass, rotating and the options you have there has surpassed my expectations a hundredfold.”
These benefits are hard to capture in a landscape-scale study because of scale (small plots in a big landscape), sample size (never enough and lots of variability), and the relatively short three-year timeline of the rangeland data collection so far.
Not all ranchers had the same feelings about virtual fence. As with many innovations, some absolutely loved it, and others were more ambivalent, and a couple even opted out of the project in the fourth year (2025). This underscores an essential point about virtual fence: for both efficacy and conservation benefit, the manager matters more than access to the tool itself. Instead of asking “does virtual fence work?” we need to ask, “for what? Who is using it and how? What do you want it to do, and is that a reasonable expectation? What can you put into using the tool? Virtual fence is an important and exciting tool. However, outcomes depend on how one uses the tool – not only on the tool itself.
