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.

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defrost 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm also rural.

Livestock theft, agricultural gear theft, is a real thing in AU/NZ as I suspect it is where you work.

One advantage (but is it economic?) to GPS collars on animals is tracking and warnings should they all suddenly accelerate to road transport speeds.

There's potential for heartbeat monitoring to warn of fallen / removed collars or predator takedowns.

> this is a job we do once a year.

And these collars are principally targeted to dairy operations that move herds about on a daily basis.

> I'm in the american west. And BLM land that is used for grazing is fenced.

I'm from the Kimberley .. what's a fence?

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5EQ1NZN6A

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cogman10 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Livestock theft, agricultural gear theft, is a real thing in AU/NZ as I suspect it is where you work.

I mean, I don't want to jinx it, but it's not really been an issue for us. The main theft we've had to deal with is feed theft and that was solved by switching from 50lbs bales to 1 ton bales.

> And these collars are principally targeted to dairy operations that move herds about on a daily basis.

Yeah, makes sense why it'd doesn't make sense to us. We didn't raise dairy cattle.

We did have a couple of dairy cows, but that was more for my family and a few members of the community. Not for any sort of actual real production. I could see how it'd be a time saver in that case as you do have to twice daily gather the cows to get milked.

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defrost 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Heh - nobody want to jinx anything.

On an IT aside, the challenge facing yard, barn, and road security cameras in Australia is parrots .. flocks of several thousand intelligent airborne can openers that follow grain rail lines and rivers and love nothing more than tearing wiring apart.

You have to build to extreme anti vandal standards.

Changing bale sizes works well to deter casual thieves .. serious shitheads turn up with their own trucks and lifting gear.

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cogman10 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> flocks of several thousand intelligent airborne can openers that follow grain rail lines and rivers and love nothing more than tearing wiring apart.

Lol, oh that stinks. Yeah not a problem in the PNW. We have some woodpeckers that are annoying if you own wood paneled things (like barns and homes) but otherwise there's not a lot of fighting against nature beyond infections.

> serious shitheads turn up with their own trucks and lifting gear.

It may just be the location and community where I'm from that makes that somewhat unlikely. There's enough people along the roads that someone would see you trying to make off with a giant bale and where I'm from everyone waves at everyone when you drive by :).

It's a combination of being rural enough that everyone knows everyone else yet not so rural that you see the extreme sort of isolation that I believe is possible in Australia.

	▲	defrost 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There's massive amounts of community support in rural Australia .. and occasional opportunistic teabags (thieves), we all wave and coordinate on fire fighting and harvests, keep an eye out for carpet baggers, and rescue outsiders that keep getting lost / stranded. > someone would see you trying to make off with a giant bale If you ever get into high luxury car theft, in London one crew pattern was to all wear high vis jackets, someone has a clip board, and the team lifts a high end car straight into a Faraday cage lined truck in plain and open sight. If the alarm goes off and people look, someone on the crew just visibly shrugs and mimes putting their hands over their ears and gets back to knicking a car. Point being, successful thieves often look like they're supposed to be doing what they're doing and they don't register .. unless someone specifically knows that hay bale and the owner of that land .. but that's an aside. > the extreme sort of isolation that I believe is possible in Australia. The vast majority of people in Australia live near the coast and to each other, it's quite bunched up. My state is 3x the size of Texas, has a bit over 2 million in population now, but they mostly all live in and around Perth, the Capital city (and famously described by one US astronaut as the most isolated city on the planet) - I'm from quite some distance from that City in a region with considerably less people. Still, I got to travel the planet doing geophysics and related things.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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