Ranching on the Edge

On the rugged rangelands of British Columbia’s Similkameen Valley, ranchers once spent hours traversing dangerous terrain to check on a single animal. Now, Dr John Church sends a drone into the sky and can do the job in minutes. Technology, it turns out, is making the mountains safer for livestock and the people who tend them.

Smart Ranching

Dr John Church is an award-winning Professor of Natural Resource Science at Thompson Rivers University (TRU) and the Regional Innovation Chair in Cattle Industry Sustainability. He earned his PhD studying how production practices impact the behaviour and management of cattle, elk, and bison on farms. Today, he leads a research team at TRU focused on developing innovative practices and technologies to advance the sustainability and productivity of the cattle industry and rangelands.

Descended from five generations of cattle ranchers, Church was steeped in the traditions and values of ranching from a young age. His grandfather managed the community pasture, and his father was helping move cattle at six years old, later becoming a cattle veterinarian.

"I spent my early formative years driving around in an iodine-smelling station wagon in southern Alberta, going to different farms and ranches to my father's clients. That's where I really got a love of cows and a love of ranching.”

His discovery of the work of prominent American ethologist, Temple Grandin, in his early 20s influenced his career choice to work in cattle behaviour and welfare. An early influence that has now come full circle, with Temple inviting Church to write a chapter in her book on Bison.

An honour, he says, but a challenge, “I’m used to writing scientific papers, but to write a whole chapter for her book, I found that quite hard!”.

A tech enthusiast at heart—he was an early adopter of an electric motorcycle—Church's understanding of modern technology has fuelled his research in cattle ranching. By leveraging the latest tools, Church seeks to combat some of the challenges of modern ranching: treacherous landscapes, labour intensity, predator threats, pasture management, and wildfire devastations in British Columbia.

Rugged Terrain

For generations, ranchers have contended with the formidable terrain of British Columbia’s high-altitude rangelands.

Ranchers began driving cattle into the interior natural grasslands in the Similkameen Valley in the mid-1800s—navigating steep, mountainous terrain dotted with dense forests and treacherous drop-offs to graze their cattle.

Navigating dangerous paths on horseback or ATVs can turn a simple task, like inspecting paddocks or locating a lost animal, into a four-hour journey; with no guarantee of success. The isolation of these grazing lands places immense physical and logistical demands on ranchers, with every trip presenting potential risks.

Dr John Church has navigated these rugged landscapes with caution, recalling moments when he genuinely feared he might end up at the bottom of a cliff.

“You're on the side by side and you're white knuckling it. I was thinking to myself if this baby tips over, we're going to go all the way down to the bottom. It took us three hours to travel to where the cows are up in the Alpine.”

Racing Winter

In addition to the dangers of the terrain, time is a critical factor in managing these operations. With only a small percentage of the province privately owned, approximately 90% of beef cattle producers use ‘crown range’, accessing government-owned land by permit.

These high-altitude grazing areas are heavily relied on, but the window for utilizing them is narrow —just four months each year, depending on location, to utilize their permits before the onset of snow.

Cattle are turned loose to go up the mountains in May, often in cow-calf pairs, expected to return home by October before Winter sets in.

“When I first came to British Columbia and I saw the ranchers would open their gates and let the animals go up the mountain, I thought to myself ‘How the hell are you ever going to bring them back?’.”

The answer is cowboys.

Each fall, they spend up to four weeks riding out to retrieve the animals, often without accounting for all of them. This year had been the toughest yet according to one rancher that spoke with Church. After seven trips to try and bring back nearly 1,000 animals from the ranges, some were still missing.

Dr Church says virtual fencing collars change the game by enabling ranchers to create corridors that gradually collapse, ushering the cattle down the mountain back to home.

“After 49 years of running the animals onto that range, the 180 animals with the eShepherd neckbands all came down on the first try. That’s never happened before.”

The potential for safety is huge, enabling cowboys to spend less time traversing dangerous slopes and more on safer tasks across the ranch.

Soaring Sidekick

Drones are also facilitating greater safety and efficiency on large ranches. By sending a camera-mounted drone to survey areas that would take hours to reach on horseback, ranchers can gain peace of mind in mere minutes.

According to the most recent census carried out by Statistics Canada in 2020, an impressive 25% of large cattle farms in B.C. (spanning 2,240 acres or more) utilize drones.

Contending with an epic 6,000 acres at Barrington Ranch, Dr. John Church’s research leveraging drones is essential to save hundreds of hours of manual labour each year.

One of his drones, touting an impressive 400x optical zoom camera, can read ear tags from 200 meters away—a capability that, he notes with a smile, far surpasses the 20x zoom famously touted by his childhood action hero from the seventies, the Six Million Dollar Man.

Equipped with advanced sensors like LIDAR and multispectral imaging, Church can collect precise data on pasture conditions and biomass. These insights, previously time-consuming and potentially dangerous to obtain, allowed for more informed decision-making in grazing management.

"Temple Grandin says, ‘We manage what we measure.’ Drones are one of our most efficient ways to observe, measure, and manage.” says Church.

 

Predator Watch

Drones have potential to play a crucial role in documenting the 5-15% of animals lost to predator attacks each year during summer grazing. In regions of British Columbia where apex predators threaten livestock, ranchers can receive government compensation for their losses if they can provide photographic evidence of the animal's death.

However, reaching the attacked animal in time to collect this evidence is often a race against wild scavengers, which can erase all traces of a carcass within days. According to Dr Church's experience, even with an experienced team of cowboys sometimes searching for 14 hours a day for a month, some animals are never recovered.

With drones, Dr Church can swiftly locate and document attacks, securing the evidence to recoup any financial losses.

Drones can also be used to deter wolves, grizzly bears, and cougars that pose a threat to cattle. Church discovered that the prop wash from a low-flying drone effectively scares off these wild animals. By tracking cattle movements with GPS neckbands, he can swiftly deploy the drone to protect a herd under threat.

“If we use the drones in tandem with GPS neckbands it doesn’t matter if we’re 800 metres away, or 8 kilometres, I can fly there and chase them off.”

Facing the Flame

GPS-enabled neckbands are also proving invaluable for cattle safety, especially during and after wildfires. These devices help ranchers track and monitor their livestock, ensuring they can quickly locate and protect them in emergencies and continue grazing away from damaged areas.

As British Columbia experiences temperature rises, breaking multiple heat records in 2024, with it comes more frequent wildfires to dry pastures. These fires can devastate both the environment and livelihoods. Each wildfire season brings the risk of losing not only valuable grazing land but also critical infrastructure which is expensive to replace.

The cost of replacing fencing lost to these fires is “no longer an option” according to Church. Rebuilding traditional fencing after a major fire can cost upwards of $400,000 CAD as experienced by Barrington Ranch in the Crater Creek Wildfire of 2023.

Matt Quaedvlieg, the manager of Barrington Ranch where Church conducts his research, explains that the cost of replacing the fence, at $25 per foot, is prohibitive for a ranch of this size. Additionally, finding a fence crew willing to work on the steep rangelands is nearly impossible.

“We’re having to replace these fences, not just the ones that age out after 30-40 years, but the ones destroyed in the fire.” says Church.

As an alternative to replacing the fencing, Thomas Alexander, a graduate student at TRU, had the idea to implement virtual fencing at Barrington Ranch, under the guidance of Church.

The method has been successful across the board. The ranch has avoided the costs of replacing old or burned fences and enabled cattle to graze on the range much sooner than the three years it would typically take to construct new fencing.

This grazing maintains safer pasture levels on the rangelands, reduces fuel loads that could exacerbate fire spread, and avoids soil nutrient loss that results from the extremely high temperatures.

The virtual fencing was also useful to guide cattle away from damaged areas and locate distressed animals that had strayed.

Transformative AgriTech

Virtual fencing uses GPS technology to create invisible boundaries for livestock, eliminating the need for traditional physical paddock fences. This innovation allows ranchers to manage cattle movement with unprecedented precision and convenience, a critical advantage in the complex terrain of B.C.

“It’s the most transformative AgriTech I will see in my lifetime." Church exclaims.

With virtual fencing, ranchers can now monitor and control their herds remotely through GPS-enabled collars, creating a seamless, efficient system for managing large, rugged landscapes. 

Ranchers can easily adjust grazing zones through an app, guiding cattle to fresh pastures without ever setting foot on the land. This maximises the use of available forage and prevents overgrazing and reduces fuel load.

Another application is in creating virtual corridors that lead cattle to water or specific hay bales.

“In Canada, we get quite deep snow and it's a big effort to take the round bales out to feed the cows all the time. But we can place the round bales strategically across the pasture and restrict the herd to go to only one bale at a time. It saves a lot of labour.” says Church.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Precision Ranching

By exploring virtual fencing, GPS data and drone vehicles, Dr John Church is not only enhancing the ability to navigate the challenges of high-altitude ranching but also prioritizing the safety and well-being of animals, the environment and the community.

These innovative tools allow him to respond more swiftly and effectively to threats like predators and wildfires, which can be a constant source of concern for B.C. ranchers. These efforts highlight a hopeful and adaptive future for ranching, showing that it is possible to thrive even in the face of changing environmental conditions.

“I'm very excited about the future because not only is this technology key to agriculture, ranching and production of food, but I think it's a critical technology in the prevention of wildfire loses and one of the best ways for us to combat climate change. We have the opportunity to work with nature instead of against it.”