Once you get them together, sure, but it appears from TFA that this is about gathering them from mountain meadows or other far flung environs. A herd could be spread over thousands of acres, canyons, mountains, all sorts of places to be out of site. These are operations that don’t use fences. The article mentions this is a NZ company, but the American West would have a similar issue where ranchers can run cattle on land leased from BLM. I would imagine Australia would have a similar problem to solve.

It's called a herd for a reason. Usually if you've found one cow you've found them all. In the wild any cow with genes for aloofness quickly got culled by predators.

The exceptions are the lame & sick ones, but no fancy gadget is going to bring them in; you've got to take a truck to them.

We put our cows out to pasture in the mountains in the spring/summer.

Without the fancy tech it takes about a day to gather them all up.

But you have to realize, this is a job we do once a year. Gathering the cows from the winter pasture is easy because it's a lot smaller.

This is why I said the location information could be useful. But, we used horses and anywhere the cows can go a horse can go.

> These are operations that don’t use fences.

Nope, ranchers own (or lease) the land they put their cows out to pasture on. It's all fenced.

> but the American West would have a similar issue where ranchers can run cattle on land leased from BLM.

I'm in the american west. And BLM land that is used for grazing is fenced. In fact, that's part of what you are paying for when you buy a lease from the BLM is to maintain the fence.

> A herd could be spread over thousands of acres, canyons, mountains, all sorts of places to be out of site [sic].

Are you.. mansplaining how herds work to a cow farmer, because you've read an article on HN?