Solar collars create virtual fence giving cows safe grazing

When you work on the land with the seasons, one of the most rewarding and challenging aspects is working with cows and sheep. Somehow the meadows and fields don’t look quite right until the animals are there, replicating the work of the ancient wild grazing herds.

Grazing nature reserves is one of the best ways to maintain features such as grasslands, fen, mires and saltmarsh. Thousands of years ago, Britain had many native grazers including wild horses, deer and the imposing aurochs - the forerunner of modern cattle. Their feeding activity prevented the open spaces from being taken over by woodland and allowed native wildflowers to thrive, which was of great benefit to insects which, in turn, provided food for bats, birds and other small mammals.

The pattern of this grazing, and the trampling of ground, created the variable sward that ground-nesting birds needed to breed successfully - making these grazers a crucial part of the landscape. When the aurochs went extinct and wild horses and deer were removed, however, this function was lost. Much of their work can be replicated through manual management of course, but grazing is more natural, less intensive and less expensive. So at Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, we use various animals on different nature reserves to achieve natural habitat.

When I started working at the Trust, we had no cows and some fairly wild sheep, and we photocopied maps and drew on them with pencils! The sheep used to scatter on sight half the time; now (on a good day) I can lead 200 of them into a pen at our Wheldrake Ings nature reserve with a bucket of sheep nuts. That kind of trust and order can only happen through years of training and careful breeding by the grazing team.

We have learnt so much in the time I have been at Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, and always strive to be innovative and try new things. This year we are trialling some incredibly exciting new technology – the world’s first virtual fence for livestock! Solar-powered livestock collars, produced by a company called NoFence, have enabled us to bring our own Highland cows onto Wheldrake Ings for the first time and record how they graze and use our meadows.

These high-tech collars mean we can see where the cows are on our phones and change field boundaries at the click of a button in the office or at home, without having to set up or move miles of electric fencing. The volunteer checkers can even scan a QR code on the gate to know where to look for the cows! This complimentary technology can help us to graze areas that were impractical to fence and graze before, creating better habitat for species including snipe, meadow plants and insects.

Cows grazing on Yorkshire Wildlife Trust land

We were all so pleasantly surprised to see how quickly the cows responded to the new technology. The collars work by emitting a musical alarm when the cow is beginning to approach the edge of the boundary, where a fence would traditionally be. Within just a few weeks, we would be able to see with our own eyes the cows stopping and turning around at the sound of the music – they responded so quickly.

The trial runs of this exciting new technology at Wheldrake Ings and Spurn National Nature Reserve have been so successful, we are looking to expand the use of the collars next year. Now that we have so many of our own cows used to the technology, we are looking towards being able to graze all the way down to the end of the Point at Spurn, an area we couldn’t naturally graze previously. Plus, the more areas we can now use for grazing, the more grazing job opportunities we can create too.

Last year, Yorkshire Wildlife Trust declared a climate and wildlife emergency and are advocating for 30 per cent of land and sea to be protected and connected for nature’s recovery by 2030.

Exciting technological breakthroughs in conservation like the NoFence collars will be a great help in us achieving that goal and creating more space for nature to survive and thrive.