In November, when Anna Shadbolt traveled to her family ranch in the Nebraska Sandhills for the holidays, she kept noticing opportunities to incorporate a new technology she is studying as a research associate at Colorado State University: virtual fencing for cattle.

“I was looking around,” Shadbolt said, “and I was thinking, ‘It could help us graze these corn stalks.'”

Shadbolt, a CSU graduate and sixth-generation Nebraska rancher, joined the University’s AgNext program in January 2023 to investigate grassland management and the environmental, economic and social impacts of cattle grazing systems. One of her focuses has been running pilot projects to explore the viability and effectiveness of virtual fencing, an emerging technology that allows ranchers to quickly create and manipulate virtual barriers across thousands of acres of grazing land.

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If it is proved feasible for widespread use, the high-tech fencing could improve both food animal production and land conservation.

The technology is similar to invisible fencing for dogs. But instead of keeping pets within the boundaries of their yards, virtual fencing corrals cattle on moveable plots of land so their grazing may be closely managed to improve grassland health and ecology — while also eliminating the cost and impracticality of stringing traditional barbed-wire fencing, or even simpler electric fencing, across vast swaths of land.

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Notably, virtual fencing could potentially be used on both privately owned land and public land, which is typically either poorly fenced or not fenced at all. That means the fencing could offer a new approach to grazing management on public lands without impeding public access. Utilized for grazing and hunting, rangelands spread across roughly 405 million acres in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In the West, much of this land is federally owned and leased to cattle producers.

“A lot of people are interested in this,” Shadbolt said. “When people find out I work on virtual fencing it immediately becomes a topic of conversation.”

Although virtual fencing technology has been around for a while, it has started to gain more traction in the U.S. during the past few years as awareness spreads and new companies pop up, Shadbolt said.

The system allows ranchers to section off areas of land using a computer program. The program communicates with small control towers, or “base stations,” situated on the land, and those towers then interact with digital collars worn by cattle.

Ranchers can use the system to create virtual boundaries that will keep their animals confined to — or out of — specific areas. If the cattle get close to one of the boundaries, the collar emits a noise to deter the animal. If the cattle continue toward the barrier, the collar produces a small shock, similar to the invisible fences used by dog owners.

“We’ve been able to do a lot with this so far,” said Steve Wooten, a fourth-generation rancher in southeastern Colorado who has collaborated with AgNext on other research and is in the early stages of designing a virtual fencing project. “I think this is really going to have a lot of upsides for the industry over the next several years.”

BENEFICIAL MANAGEMENT

Shadbolt started working with producers last year to begin testing the viability of virtual fencing. The first project involved AgNext partnering with a 70-year-old Colorado rancher and the USDA Agricultural Research Service’s Central Experimental Range in northeastern Colorado. The idea, Shadbolt said, was to do what she described as basic “ground truthing” — putting 240 collars on cattle across the two sites, seeing how the system worked and testing some simple opportunities to improve grazing efficiency.

“It was really fun to work with this rancher and teach him and his family how the technology worked,” Shadbolt said.

In 2023, the year they tested the technology, there had been plenty of moisture, and grasses were particularly abundant on the rancher’s land. Shadbolt and the family took that as an opportunity to use the virtual fence to section off a high-quality grassy area. That way, if drought hit, the family would still have that land to graze. They also used the technology to keep cattle away from a sensitive riparian area. “There’s definitely a learning curve,” Shadbolt said, “but these products are getting better and better.”

Shadbolt will launch a project this year that is more environmentally focused, partnering with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The idea is to use virtual fencing to graze cattle in southeastern Colorado in a way that creates optimal habitat for the lesser prairie chicken, which utilizes grasses at different heights to lay and hatch their eggs.

“We’ve identified a few producers that are in lesser prairie chicken areas,” Shadbolt said, “and we’re going to try to graze cattle in a way that specifically creates this habitat.” She added, “I think in general our ranchers are a really important resource for our natural systems.”

Jordan Kraft Lambert, CSU’s director of agricultural innovation and partnerships, is in the process of creating a kind of shareable menu of new technologies that can be helpful to producers in Colorado and beyond — and she sees virtual fencing as one of the more exciting items on her list.

“I want to make sure ranchers have the tech that is best for them profitability-wise, as well as for the welfare of the animal and ecology,” Lambert said. “I think we’re still at the beginning with this, but there are some really exciting potential uses.”

One opportunity Lambert highlighted has to do with regenerative agriculture, an increasingly popular land management philosophy that emphasizes the importance of soil health. One of the tenets of regenerative ag is to incorporate livestock grazing on farmland. But, Lambert said, a corn grower might not want to go through the trouble of erecting traditional fencing just to get cattle out to graze corn stalks.

“What virtual fencing allows,” she said, “is to run cattle on corn ground that hasn’t seen a cow in hundreds of years — without putting up a fence.”

LOOKING AHEAD

Wooten raises cattle on two large ranches in southeastern Colorado, tens of thousands of acres. He tried using virtual fencing technology for the first time last year and has been thinking about new ways to use the system in the future. For example, if there are areas that have been hit by drought, he can easily exclude those spots with a virtual barrier, giving grasses time to recover. “If there hasn’t been precipitation, we’ll let it lie dormant, and maybe by late season there’s been some rain and then we can send the cows back,” said Wooten, who was named 2025 Livestock Leader by CSU’s Department of Animal Sciences.

Conversely, Wooten said, if he has an area of high-quality grasses, he can attempt to optimize his herd by being precise about when he allows the cattle to graze that area. Overall, he said, having increased flexibility for how, where and when he grazes his herd is significant.

“Managing electric fencing can be a two-times-a-day job — you’re checking it constantly,” Wooten said. “Without this, the idea of breaking up pastures and giving certain areas rest periods is futile.”

Wooten is also interested in how the data from the collars might help him better manage his herds. For example, Wooten has a friend who grazes livestock on hilly country in California. That rancher is using data from the collars to track which cattle will walk to the top of steep hills and graze — and is looking into whether he might then be able to genetically select for more of those types of animals in the future. Another scenario, Wooten said, might be to use the collars to identify cattle that are moving very little. “Lack of movement indicates an animal isn’t feeling well,” Wooten said.

Another potential use, Wooten said, involves protecting ranchers from being held liable for negative impacts to environmentally sensitive areas on leased land not caused by their cattle. Sometimes, he said, elk herds can destroy critical habit. With collar data, he said, a producer would be able to prove their cattle were never in the impacted area and thus not responsible for any damage. Wooten is also working through challenges he had with the technology during his first year. Several collars fell off, some seemed to malfunction after being exposed to too much moisture, and in others the battery died quicker than he was expecting. Still, he’s optimistic. “I think this is going to be highly adopted in the western two-thirds of the country,” Wooten said.

Working with AgNext, Wooten hopes to set up a simple, multiyear experiment managing one herd with virtual fencing and another nearby without it; this way, he and researchers can examine impacts on the land and animals over a period of years. “In our semi-arid environment, it takes a long time to see ecological change,” he said.

For her part, Shadbolt is excited that producers are becoming more aware of the technology and about CSU playing a role in trying to help make the tech work for ranchers in Colorado and beyond.

“We want to have solutions for real people in the real world,” Shadbolt said. “I see that as our mission and part of being a land-grant school — testing things like this and trying to minimize the risk for producers who might want to adopt the technology.