The future of livestock fencing

Agriculture is the oldest industry on the planet. For thousands of years we have been cultivating land and keeping livestock to feed ourselves.

Erik Harstad
Jul 21, 2017 · 4 min read

Fencing History

Through all this time there has been a key challenge for farmers: To keep the livestock inside the preferred pastures where you wan’t them to stray. Not outside on your neighbors property. The solution early on was using herdsmen, but that required much labour, which later evolved into building fences from rocks or wood.

In modern time fencing is still the preferred method of keeping livestock in place. Since the electric fence emerged in the 40-ies, this was a huge step ahead. It was light and easy to set up — And it was very effective.

Pavlov’s dogs

The reason behind the effectiveness of the electric fence is the psychological learning principle called conditional learning, discovered by Ivan Pavlov.

“In the early twentieth century, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov did Nobel prize-winning work on digestion[2]. While studying the role of saliva in dogs’ digestive processes, he stumbled upon a phenomenon he labeled “psychic reflexes.” While an accidental discovery, he had the foresight to see the importance of it. Pavlov’s dogs, restrained in an experimental chamber, were presented with meat powder and they had their saliva collected via a surgically implanted tube in their saliva glands. Over time, he noticed that his dogs who begin salivation before the meat powder was even presented, whether it was by the presence of the handler or merely by a clicking noise produced by the device that distributed the meat powder.

Fascinated by this finding, Pavlov paired the meat powder with various stimuli such as the ringing of a bell. After the meat powder and bell (auditory stimulus) were presented together several times, the bell was used alone. Pavlov’s dogs, as predicted, responded by salivating to the sound of the bell (without the food). The bell began as a neutral stimulus (i.e. the bell itself did not produce the dogs’ salivation). However, by pairing the bell with the stimulus that did produce the salivation response, the bell was able to acquire the ability to trigger the salivation response. Pavlov therefore demonstrated how stimulus-response bonds (which some consider as the basic building blocks of learning) are formed. He dedicated much of the rest of his career further exploring this finding.” (https://www.learning-theories.com/classical-conditioning-pavlov.html”)

So when animals experience the electric shock from the electric fence wire the first time, they soon associate the discomfort with the sight of the wire. After a few times the have learned to avoid the wire when they see it. So this method of fencing uses the the visual sense istead of the hearing sense as was Pavlov’s original discovery.

Animal welfare

Despite of the effectiveness of the electric fence, there are of course still challenges with use of labour for setting it up and doing regular maintenance. But the worst thing is the fact that many animals die as the get wrapped and stuck while dying a slow an painful death from electric current. With the modern electric mesh fences this often happens fairly often both with livestock as well as wildlife. It also happens while the farmer is unaware of the situation, and cannot make any action — Is this acceptable animal welfare?

Sheep and wildlife are dying a slow and painful death in modern electric meshed fences.

The future of fencing.

Virtual fencing as been a concept discussed in academia for decades, but the technology to realize the concept has not been mature until recently.

Nofence has since 2007 been developing a gamechanging solution for virtual fencing for livestock. This is a solar powered GPS-collar and a smartphone app where the farmer can design pastures, recieving notifications and supervise the animals behavior amongs other things. As with electric fences, also Nofence uses Pavlov’s conditional learning principle with the audible signals as warning of a coming aversive —So the animals hear the fence istead of seeing it. When they approach the border, the collar starts playing a sound cue (scale) and they turn and go back to the pasture to avoid the mild electrical shock that is only 3% of the energy in electric fences. The advantages for the farmer are numerous:

  • First he can easily build and modify the virtual fence lines for all the pastures in the app.
  • Never have to do maintenance of physical fences — which today takes much time.
  • He can start utilizing pastures in uncultivated land that was impossible to fence.
  • Make no-go area inside the pasture forexample cabins, apple trees or dangerous areas.
  • Get immediate notifications if an animal is stuck somewhere as the sensors in the collar generate data that the software quickly interpret.
  • Learn about grazing habits and behaviors, and adjust fence lines according to the animals needs.
  • Rotational grazing — Easily move the flock to a new fresh pasture
  • Digital documentation of the animals grazing history — Every byte of the historic tracing is stored on a big data server.
  • Easily locate the animals.

Welcome to the future of fencing

Erik Harstad
CEO

You can follow us on www.facebook.com/nofence

Pre-orders can be placed through our website: www.nofence.no

Nofence

The future of livestock fences

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Erik Harstad

Written by

CEO, Nofence AS

Nofence

Nofence

The future of livestock fences

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