Virtually perfect for farmers – wireless fences
I GOT a bit excited the other evening after we’d spent a good part of yet another day repairing fences and moving the ones which are used to strip graze the sheep on the stubble turnips.
For I stumbled upon an article about what they were calling “virtual fences” – and it was music to my ears to hear some boffin was making progress with his research into keeping stock where they should be – without posts and wires.
You see, not only are the posts and wires expensive in themselves but the cost of time and labour to do the job makes it even worse.
So, as we’ve had cordless phones, cordless kettles, and wireless internet for many years, I found myself wondering why we couldn’t just we go the whole hog and have a wireless fence.
The notion isn’t really all that new – there are pet collars designed to stop animals straying out of their gardens.
They have probably had mixed success, but most of them have been based on a collar which makes a warning noise when the animal approaches the boundary it isn’t supposed to cross.
Sometimes these are backed up with a small electric shock when an animal actually crosses the barrier – and although this might sound a bit cruel it’s no worse than the electric fencing systems currently in operation which do exactly the same thing when an animal touches an orange plastic wire with a few threads of steel wound through it.
And although our existing electric fences can give a fair old belt when touched, they certainly do no lasting harm.
While a bunch of animals tend to learn to stay clear of them within an hour or so – during which time only a handful will actually get a shock – I’d guess I’d not be the only farmer to have been stung by such fences literally hundreds, of times myself.
In the past one of the biggest problems with the collar systems was the fact that they still had to have a wire or some similar system installed, often underground, for marking the boundaries.
However this latest development is designed to use satellite positioning GPS to map out virtual boundaries meaning fences could effectively be moved at the press of a few computer buttons!
So, from stone walls to wooden stockades, from mild steel to high-tensile fences, from barbed wire to electric fencing it’s good to think that we might be set to move the boundaries once again.