What is virtual fencing for livestock? Monitor your animals digitally with virtual fencing to gain flexibility and offer new forage.
It’s 3 a.m. and a storm has whipped up out of nowhere. The wind is howling, the trees are thrashing, and my mind immediately goes to my small herd of two dozen brush-management goats in our valley. What if a tree has squished a fence and the goats are already in the next county? Should I throw on my raincoat and head out into the maelstrom to check for chaos? But then, I remember: My goats are all wearing Nofence collars and are virtually fenced. All it takes to calm my mind is a quick check of the Nofence app on my phone. The goats are hunkered down where they should be and in the correct county. All is well; I go back to sleep.
We’re about to start our third year of managing goats with Nofence collars. We’re trying to reduce invasive species and establish silvopasture on roughly 50 acres of our wooded valley. Aside from just plain working as it’s supposed to (keeping the goats where I put them!), a huge benefit of virtual fencing has been adding peace of mind and resilience to our farm. Adopting the technology on our farm hasn’t been pain-free, but, overall, the pros have vastly outweighed the cons.
The Nitty-Gritty
Nofence (and similar products) is a tracking and containment system that consists of collars that use a combination of cell service, GPS, and Bluetooth to communicate with a smartphone app. You’ll need mobile-phone service in the area that’ll be used by livestock.
The Nofence sheep and goat collars weigh a little over a pound each and consist of a collar unit with a solar panel on the side, an adjustable neck strap (metal chain and plastic breakaway strap), and a rechargeable battery. The system may not work for younger kids or lambs, because the chain on the adjustable collar must be touching the neck for the shock to work, and the animals must be able to tolerate the weight of the device. Collars for cattle are also available.
The smartphone app is where you establish your paddocks (maximum size of 3.9 by 3.9 miles), check the location of each animal, view a heat map (which shows how heavily different parts of your paddock have been grazed), and monitor the battery level of the collars. You can draw as many pastures as you’d like. If you split your herd into separate groups, you’ll need to consider their friend and family groups so they don’t risk adverse effects trying to get to their preferred herd mates.
When one of our goats crosses the virtual paddock boundary we’ve drawn on the app, the collar starts to emit an audio warning that the goats experienced and learned during the crucial 1-to-2-week training process. The warning means “Turn around!” If they keep going, eventually the collar will give them a 3,000-volt shock – strong enough to be unpleasant but not enough to harm them. If they continue to leave the area of the mapped paddock – for example, if they’re spooked or something is chasing them – the audio cue plus shock process happens twice more. After that, the collar considers the animal “escaped” and the audio cues and shocks stop. To encourage the animal to rejoin the herd, there are no “penalties” on the way back into the virtual paddock.
Training Your Livestock
Nofence provides a training protocol involving a slow transition from a physical fence to the virtual system. Take this part seriously and don’t rush it! If you’re not willing to train your animals thoroughly, you’re setting them up for a world of hurt, literally and figuratively.
Once our goats were fully trained, the vast majority received a low number of shocks per month. Of course, these are goats, so there are outliers that seem to have more of a tolerance for a zap or two as they push the boundaries of the paddock. In our experience, the system plus the goats’ instinct to stick with the herd keeps even these rebels where they need to be. The app provides live updates about each animal, including location, number of shocks and audio cues, escapes, and activity levels.
Battery Life
The battery life of the collars depends on if the goats are receiving high rates of audio cues and shocks, if they’re browsing in deep shade, or if they decide to bed down for the night right next to the paddock boundary, all of which decrease battery life.
Generally speaking, we plan to swap out the batteries from each collar every 5 to 8 weeks. With friendly goats, this is a breeze and can be accomplished solo. Walk up, give the goat a pat, and quickly replace the battery while it stands still. For us, with more skittish goats, replacing a battery or adjusting a collar requires luring the goats into a livestock trailer with a bucket of sunflower seeds or a tasty box elder branch (their favorite!) and then having a helper firmly grab them by the horns while we swap the battery.
If you can afford it, having a spare battery for each collar is helpful for planning labor, since you can round everyone up and do a big battery swap instead of needing help for several battery swaps per week. My husband and I can get goats into the livestock trailer, swap batteries, adjust collars, and do any other kind of checking and doctoring in less than two hours. We like to pay ourselves and our help at least $15 to $20 per hour, so two hours once every month or two isn’t bad compared with the four-plus hours it used to take us every week to move the portable electric netting fence we’d been using through thick brush. The ease of moving netting depends on the unique lay of your land.
Collar Dollars
Speaking of money, let’s talk numbers. For a herd of five goats, which is the minimum order of collars, the upfront Year 1 cost of the collars (at $199 each) is $995. Accessories, including a charger, five extra batteries, a beacon, and a battery-removal tool, adds another $311. Then, there’s the Year 1 subscription fee of $56 per collar for a total of $280, bringing the Year 1 grand total to $1,586.
The cost in Year 2 and beyond is based on usage. For 49 or fewer collars, you’ll pay $6.50 per collar per month of use. For a herd of five goats and a 6-month season on pasture, that’s $195. All told, if your goats have a 6-month browsing season, your cost for five goats over five years would end up being $2,366, or $94.64 per goat per year. You can use the collars year-round for stockpiled forage or bale grazing in the colder months, or you can remove the collars and follow the end-of-season maintenance protocol before storing them.
These numbers don’t account for replacement parts. If you have bucks, you may need to budget for replacement straps. In our second year with a larger herd of 24 bucks weighing up to 190 pounds, they broke the straps left and right. It’s still unclear if it was the bucks themselves or a manufacturing defect, so the company assisted me with some but not all of the replacements. At $20 per strap plus shipping, it was painful.
Despite the expense, we still think Nofence beats messing with electric netting in the brush by a country mile.
When Virtual Fencing Shines
Nofence works particularly well for the following conditions.
- Farms with brushy, steep terrain that would be nearly impossible to affordably fence in. (It’s sort of doable with electric netting, but it isn’t easy.)
- Farms in areas with high labor costs. Moving electric netting can be slow and arduous – when you’re paying for help, those hours add up!
- Areas with decent cell coverage for uploading new paddocks and getting alerts.
- Pastures or woods with buildings, bodies of water, or sensitive areas. Nofence includes the ability to easily create exclusion zones that keep livestock out.
- People who want additional monitoring capability. Maybe you’re like me and are a bit on the anxious side or have an unpredictable schedule. Nofence is never a substitute for spending time with your livestock, but the alerts and ability to monitor your livestock more frequently from your phone can greatly enhance your capacity for responsible animal husbandry.
- Severe weather. Enough said.
- Injured farmers. When I broke my finger in 2023, the ability to move the goats using my smartphone kept the goats on track for our invasive species removal goals.
It Isn’t for Everyone
There are plenty of farms where Nofence won’t be a good fit.
- Farms with low or no cell service. Since mid-2024, we’ve enjoyed better coverage. In 2023, however, we were right on the edge of having too little service, and our experience with the collars was overall positive but far from trouble-free. This isn’t the fencing for you if you have large dead zones on your property!
- Farms with free help or existing fencing that works well. If you’re one of those lucky ducks, the cost of Nofence may be tough to justify.
- Areas with high predator pressure. Nofence offers no predator protection, so you may need to rely on livestock guardian dogs or forgo this tech entirely.
- Farms with large herds. There’s a 140-animal limit to the tech, so if you have more, you’re out of luck.
- Land that needs high-density grazing. You may run into issues because of the GPS boundary margin of error of up to 20 feet. Our goats will challenge the boundaries and drain their batteries with small paddocks. Frequent pasture rotations may mean unacceptably shortened battery life.
- Paddocks that run up against a tasty treat, such as a cornfield. The GPS margin of error means you may need to skip that area or use a physical fence.
All in all, virtual fencing has been a game changer for us despite sporadic challenges. I hope this rundown of our experience with Nofence can help you assess whether it might be a good fit for you!
Dayna Burtness runs Nettle Valley Farm in Spring Grove, Minnesota. With the help of her husband, Nick, she raises meat and brush goats, grows Certified Organic seeds, and runs Little Dipper Sauna Co., a mobile sauna business.
Originally published in the June/July 2025 issue of MOTHER EARTH NEWS and regularly vetted for accuracy.
