HIGH DESERT PASTURE NEAR LOMA — On a cloudless morning in early May, Lloyd Calvert fiddles with an application on his cellphone as a cow ambles toward a water tank in a 15,000-acre pasture on the Western Slope.
Some cows wear bells around their necks, but the ones in Calvert’s herd are outfitted with GPS-enabled collars with little solar panels affixed to the tops.
With the help of a satellite, Calvert’s phone can talk to the collars, allowing him to steer his cattle where he wants them to go, whether he’s standing where he is — on the 300-square-mile High Lonesome Ranch he helps manage for Texas attorney and conservationist Paul Vahldiek Jr. — or from a Tyler Childers concert, say, at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas where the country crooner played last July.
It’s the latest iteration of virtual fencing, which has advanced light years beyond an earlier version introduced to Colorado in 2021. The company delivering the new tech is Halter, which originated in New Zealand in 2016 and came to the U.S. in 2024.
The old technology did a lot of what the new tech does, but with an unsightly and cost-prohibitive feature: The old collars sent data to ranchers’ computers via a network of control towers that some said blighted the landscape and cost a bundle to install.
It also had limited range, which was OK for small to medium-size cattle operations. But for ranchers like Calvert, with big herds and massive pastures, the new tech is fundamentally changing grazing by removing the need for towers, preserving priceless views, making virtual fencing more accessible to a wider range of producers and this crucial element in Colorado: giving ranchers a livestream to spot potential wolf attacks before they happen.
Satellite imagery shows cattle behavior. Calvert says he can tell when a predator is harassing his herd.
And that may be one of the most important advancements of the latest version of virtual fencing. If wolves kill cattle, wolves can be killed.
Colorado’s wolf reintroduction has hit a precarious point, with Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s wolf conservation program manager stepping down without giving assurances that reintroduction can succeed. Just 32 known wolves roam the landscape more than three years into the program. And the federal government has blocked CPW from reintroducing additional wolves.
New pups have been born into ranching areas yet CPW’s ability to alert ranchers to wolves continues to lag. “We’re reliant on technology to tell us where wolves are at,” one CPW employee told the Parks and Wildlife Commission at its latest meeting, but “by the time we see the data, it’s old data, so we don’t really know where the wolves are at.”
Troubled early technology
Colorado State University has been experimenting with virtual fencing since 2023, when researcher Anna Shadbolt started running pilot projects on ranchland in Colorado.
Back then, it was still dubbed an “emerging technology.” The pictures accompanying Shadbolt’s study showed cows lugging clunky grey transmitter boxes around on their necks on heavy chains.
The basic premise was the same as it is now: Through a computer program, a rancher could draw discreet “fenced-in” areas that cows “sensed” through a noise or gentle shock when they got too close, so they stayed inside the fenced areas, allowing areas they’d already grazed to grow back.
Invisible fencing eliminates the cost and impracticality of stringing barbed wire across the landscape, which elk can destroy or get caught in and die. Management of grazing patterns has the added bonus of reducing wildfire risks by creating fuel breaks in fire-prone areas. And, as some ranchers are finding out, it can help keep their land healthy in Colorado’s persistent and intensifying drought.
But the old tech had issues, a study by the American Society of Animal Science highlighting six ranchers with 1,500 to 3,000 collared cows in the Eagle County Conservation District showed in 2025. The project, which spanned private, Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands, provided collars and base stations to ranchers, covering an area of approximately 640 square miles.
Researchers assessed the efficacy of virtual fences on rugged and remote terrain through interviews with each rancher over a three-year period. Several challenges emerged, including collars falling off, user interface issues, spotty connectivity and coverage and time lags similar to CPW’s setup to track wolves.
The study also showed the obvious: “For both efficacy and conservation benefit, the manager matters more than access to the tool itself.” But Calvert and another rancher, Amy Johnson, are demonstrating how the recent advancements in virtual fencing are helping managers do more for conservation of the land their cattle graze.
And the tech – especially for Calvert – is relatively inexpensive. A subscription to Halter’s satellite fencing, introduced in April, is $96 per cow per year. Collaring all of the cows in his herd of 250 will run $24,000. “But compared to the cost of a ranch hand to reach our goals, that’s drastically cheaper,” he said.
Small-scale pasture tech
Johnson runs a cattle operation near the Cheyenne County town of Kit Carson and says she has used Halter tech since August.
Hers is a relatively small operation — just 640 acres — and she uses the old-school method: Four towers make communication between her Halter app and her cows’ collars possible.
What has “hit her most” about what Halter can do for her and her husband, she said, is help with drought resistance.
With a finger to a touch screen on the mobile app, they “can draw triangles. We can draw rectangles. We can draw doughnut-shaped pastures where we have a critical area that we don’t want to hit, because if we graze and the grass doesn’t grow and then in our pasture rotation we graze that area again, the land gets more and more damaged and you can get down to bare dirt if you’re not careful,” she said.
They also have prairie chicken habitat they’re obligated to protect, following the Colorado State Land Board’s 2026 Lesser Prairie-Chicken Stewardship Action Plan.
They’ve fenced out an area where they removed the invasive tamarisk plant “and that area is now very delicate, but our herd can graze it if we feel the tamarisk are coming back,” she said.
And even though her virtual fencing is more expensive than Calvert’s — a single tower costs $4,500 and a yearly subscription to her Halter app is $79 per cow — Johnson says it’s worth it not only for the long-term health of the ranch but because “it’s something that might make cow and ranch haters a little happier.”
The app that can watch wolf action in real time
Calvert believes Halter’s satellite tech is helping him take the regenerative ranching Vahldiek Jr. focuses on — landscape-level stewardship including watershed restoration, improving wildlife habitat, and managing, rather than fighting, natural resource development — to a new level.
He says as much as he stands in the sagebrush gazing out over the 15,000-acre pasture he’s currently running cattle on.
You can see cows way off in the distance — looks like they’re moving in on Loma.
But with a swipe of his finger, Calvert can move the fence blocking their way and encourage them to come back toward him.
“They’re also limited from going down this hill, which is their next pasture,” he says, pointing west. “So Halter kind of gave us this keystone piece” of being able to control them at a moment’s notice, even from where he lives, 70 miles distant.
And if a wolf gets into his livestock?
Right now, only CPW can access collared wolves’ data. And as Travis Black, the agency’s northwest regional manager, told commissioners at their last meeting, “there’s maybe inconsistency in the way we are informing (ranchers) of their locations.”
The Halter app is helping Calvert mitigate that gap, because it allows him to monitor his herd’s behavior in real time, including telling him if cows are panicking because a predator is in their presence.
If a cow is killed he can respond immediately, to gather evidence, which is the most important factor in ranchers being reimbursed if the killer turns out to be a wolf.
“While wildlife tracking technology has made great strides since previous wolf restoration efforts in other states, it is not quite caught up to the tracking technology used for domestic animals or livestock,” said CPW spokesperson Luke Perkins.