Bovine Geocaching

The Economist web site has an interesting story about high tech cow herding. Maintaining fences to keep cows constrained to your property is an extremely expensive, time consuming and labor intensive activity. According to the economist, fences can cost $20,000 per kilometer just for the materials. Given that ranching is a very low margin business, this is a huge expense.

So researchers have been looking at alternate ways to keep the cows where they need to be. One of the thngs they've been working on is using the same basic technology that has been used to keep dogs in fenceless yards.

The way it works is that the cows are fitted with some high tech head gear called an Ear-a-round. The Economist article describes it like this:

The Ear-a-round consists of a small, light box that sits on top of a cow’s head, and a pair of earpieces made of fabric and plastic. The box contains a computer chip, a GPS tracking device and a transceiver that enables it to be programmed remotely. The earpieces serve both to keep the box upright and to supply command signals—either sonic or electric—to the animal wearing the device. For maximum working lifetime, the whole thing is powered by lithium-ion batteries that are topped up by solar cells.

The cows are then monitored by satellite GPS tracking. I imagine you could then create a Google Maps application to show where your cows are at any given time! You then use the tracking system to identify the area where the cows need to be. When they start to go astray, they either feel a shock or hear a bad sound in one of their ears. The cow then turns in the right direction to get away from the negative feedback.

The device is smart enough to learn which feedback works with each cow and how much is needed. As the animal gets used to the device, the signals become less and less harsh. And now they are even starting to experiment with positive signals. And, I kid you not, they are experimenting with piping in cowboy songs that are hundreds of years old into the ears of the cattle to see how effective they are at guiding the cows to the right area.

This amuses me to no end.

They are also experimenting with fitting just a limited number of cows with this gear instead of every sigle one. The idea being that if you get a critical mass of cows followng the signals, the rest of the cows will follow the herd on their own.

There are some other benefits to fenceless cow herding, It has less impact on the environment. Environmentalists have long complained that fences impede the natural migration of roaming wildlife. So this system would address that concern as well.