(The following is from my monthly newsletter. This series began in March 2022 and has continued for nearly a year, with its final installment in February 2023. Below is the “better” edited version I initially emailed my followers.)
This post is the final installment of the Regenerative Grazing series I started in March 2022. This month, I would like to discuss technology. Technology is surprisingly vast in the context of regenerative grazing, even though it covers a fairly limited area.
Technology: At Our Fingertips and Our Disposal
Technology is extremely varied in its sophistication. It’s a fancy euphemism for tools. It can be as basic and ancient as a hammer or as complicated and novel as a quadcopter drone.
Technology is cool and has helped us make our lives easier and more convenient. With the advent of the Internet and complicated computer programming, we can now easily communicate with people worldwide and travel hundreds of miles in a day, something we thought was impossible over a hundred years ago.
It’s also helped us produce more food for a more urbanized population and produce food in a more efficient, mechanized, and industrial manner. Technology allows us to feel like we can toss aside the old, outdated, inefficient tools for better, more advanced tools.
Technology is just about having fancier and more complicated tools.
In the context of regenerative grazing, technology has allowed us to plan and manage pastures better than we could in the past. Satellite imagery helps us better plan where to lay down fence lines and water pipelines. It also gives us a “bird’ s-eye view” of how it looks when animals are going to be moved from one paddock to another.
It also gives us many options for livestock watering systems, from temporary gravity-fed systems to solar-powered systems to permanent well-based systems. The same can be said for fencing, ranging from hi-tensile to permanent barbed wire to many options for temporary electric fencing.
Technology, coupled with human creativity, makes our options for carrying out regenerative grazing endless.
(We have to remember, too, that technology is a result of human creativity in creating and inventing different tools to, as mentioned previously, make our life easier. Did I not mention this before?)
Technology for Regenerative Grazing
Starting with pasture planning, or making grazing plans, my own favourite piece of technology, so far, is Google Earth Pro. It’s free, it’s generally easy to use (once you’ve figured out how to make the most of it, with some trial and error), and pretty awesome when it comes to making grazing plans.
(Compared with PastureMap or MaiaGrazing, Google Earth Pro only allows you to draw lines and polygons to lay out fence lines and water pipelines. It doesn’t help you with any pasture planning or weather/forage forecasting based on the number of animals or paddock size, and more. PastureMap and MaiaGrazing require a monthly or yearly subscription to get full access to all of their perks. Despite the price tag associated, some of you might find this an advantage over Google Earth because they help you lay out which pastures are where, when the animals are going in and coming out, the history of their use, and so on. Also, both are available as apps for your smartphone and tablet. Google Earth Pro doesn’t do that or is available in such formats; I believe Google Earth Pro is for laptop or desktop computers only and can’t be used on other devices. However, please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.)
I’ve used GEP to develop pasture plans because it allows me to make multiple plans, placing each in different folders and automatically saving them to my GEP files. Not only do I make one plan, but I can also see if I can make four or five plans if I’m not happy with the first. Or second. Or third. Or… you get the picture.
The satellite imagery is fairly current, though a downside is if your farm is right underneath a cloud and you can’t see anything! Also, some areas might run the risk of not having clear imagery, especially when zooming in to where you can see things from 100 feet from ground level. It doesn’t help when you can only see clearly from 10,000 feet of elevation!
The neat thing about using polygons for making individual pastures is that it gives you a fairly accurate estimate of how big those pastures are. GEP also allows you to choose different colours to see which lines are your permanent fences, which are your temporary or semi-permanent paddock fences, where your water lines are, and more. (For use of polygons, make sure to select the “fill” colour to be blank or no-fill, not some other colour!) Placemarks help identifies where dugouts or farm yards are or will be.
Other tech: Drones and GPS collars
Drones (or Remote Piloted Aircrafts [RPAs]) have become a fantastic tool for more and more farmers and ranchers these days! Drones are great (I’ve yet to get one, but I hope to in the future) for checking cows, checking water systems, trying to find a few escapees, and seeing how the pasture looks from that bird’s eye view (via a whole lot more current view than what satellite imagery can do), and more.
A drone can be put on autopilot to map differences in vegetative structure using NDVI mapping or ArcGIS mapping technology. Photos and videos can be easily taken from almost any elevation (except into space, sorry, lol), from 2 feet off the ground to over 100 feet.
There are rules and regulations to piloting RPAs, which, in my opinion, is a good thing, as not just anyone can purchase a drone and automatically know how to properly–and safely–operate it. It can be costly to replace or get new parts for a drone if the first thing you did on its maiden flight was put it into a tree! Or, probably more amusingly, land it in a pond…
Another up-and-coming piece of technology I’ve just been beginning to learn about is GPS collars–or otherwise known as virtual fencing collars–which have been invented as a means to control where animals graze without having to build or move fences. They’re still very expensive because they’re a new invention undergoing research trials worldwide–including through the University of Alberta on the Roy Berg Research Ranch near Kinsella, Alberta, Canada.
They’re fascinating in that they are easily powered and monitored by an app on your phone. Each animal is identified by numbers or letters—you can do names too, I believe—and monitored as to where it is within 10 minutes of activity. Satellite signals allow that communication from the collar to your phone. You would get alerts if an animal has tested the virtual fence or if it escaped its virtual paddocks during a thunderstorm.
The virtual fence has great promise, especially in areas where the topography makes it difficult to monitor and move animals using fences. It would also be advantageous if fences were to cause issues for wildlife, and a virtual fence would eliminate issues of wildlife getting trapped and dying by such means.
Animals need to be trained to respect the collars. However, it doesn’t take much; they learn where the virtual fence is by a particular beeping noise emitted from the collar when they get within several feet of the virtual fence line. The beeping increases speed when they get closer, and a shock goes through if they’re too close or over that invisible line. The shock animals feel is not much different from those dog shock collars.
I’m guessing the technology will be cheaper five years from now. I can see it changing the landscape as far as regenerative grazing is concerned, literally and figuratively speaking.
Technology Cannot Fix What Biology Can, Though!
While technology is mind-bogglingly amazing, we can’t get caught up in making it the saviour of the larger environmental problems.
Tools are just tools; they’re in our massive toolbox for our use. But no tool can replace biology.
Biology is a form of “technology” in and of itself. It’s far more complex, delicate, and intricate than we can possibly imagine, and it does things no type of technology we’ve been able to invent today can possibly do. Biology goes hand-in-hand with ecology and demands the utmost respect.
Because we’ve lost focus on that, we’ve only seen technology as the best fix for our environmental solutions. Our love for using tools has blinded us to the amazing capacity of biology and nature. I’m asking each and every one of you to remove that blindfold or, if you’ve done so already, to find ways to help others remove it.
Don’t get me wrong—we need technology to help us regenerate the landscape. But we need to use technology in a way that also allows biology to flourish and do what it’s meant to do.
This is what holistic management is all about: understanding your social, financial, and environmental contexts and finding ways to unite human creativity, money, labour, time, and technology to make your operation as regenerative as possible.
Those are my closing remarks for this regenerative grazing series. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them as much as I’ve enjoyed creating them.