How Virtual Fencing Helped Eastern Oregon Ranchers Recover from the 2024 Wildfires
The 2024 wildfire season in eastern Oregon was one of the most destructive in memory for the ranching community. Fires that swept across Grant, Harney, and Malheur counties burned through hundreds of thousands of acres of rangeland, destroying not just grass and sagebrush but miles upon miles of barbed wire fencing that ranchers depend on to manage their cattle. Replacing that fencing, which can cost $10,000 to $15,000 per mile, was far beyond what most operations could afford in the wake of a fire that had already decimated their forage base.
Sustainable Northwest’s regenerative ranching team responded quickly, deploying virtual fencing technology to help affected ranchers regain control of their herds without waiting for physical fences to be rebuilt. Virtual fencing uses GPS-enabled collars on cattle that deliver audio cues and mild electrical stimuli to keep animals within designated boundaries. The boundaries can be set and adjusted remotely using a smartphone app, allowing ranchers to manage grazing patterns with a precision that traditional fencing cannot match.
For ranchers like Sarah and Tom Wheeler, who lost over 40 miles of fence on their 12,000-acre operation near Burns, virtual fencing was a lifeline. Within weeks of the fire, Sustainable Northwest provided collars for their herd of 300 cattle and helped the Wheelers set up virtual paddocks that kept their animals off burned areas while concentrating grazing on pastures that still had forage. The technology also allowed them to protect recovering riparian areas and keep cattle away from roads and neighboring properties.
“Without virtual fencing, we would have had to sell half the herd,” Tom Wheeler says. “There was no way we could have rebuilt that much fence before the next grazing season. The collars gave us time to recover without liquidating our operation.”
Sustainable Northwest deployed virtual fencing to more than a dozen ranches across eastern Oregon in the months following the 2024 fires. The experience has reinforced the organization’s conviction that virtual fencing is not just a tool for regenerative grazing but an essential part of the disaster recovery toolkit for rangeland communities. As wildfire seasons continue to intensify, having flexible, rapidly deployable fencing technology will be critical for keeping ranching operations viable in fire-prone landscapes.