Nofence offers the world’s first virtual fence for grazing animals

Although there are vast areas of grazing land, these are often underutilised due to labour intensive and costly management methods, which often involve physical fences or other barriers.

Additionally, too many grazing animals are fed while separated from their natural environment. This prevents them from satisfying their natural behavioural needs, thereby affecting animal welfare.

Nofence grazing technology is a brand new, GPS-based virtual fencing system that removes unnecessary barriers to resource utilisation.

The Nofence system consist of collars with transmitters that connect each animal to an app. With the help of the app, farmers define the boundaries for their pastures using a smartphone or tablet, and can change these boundaries with the touch of a finger.

To keep animals in their designated pasture, the system uses audio warning signals, as well as a light electrical impulse. Individual animals can also be tracked via GPS using the app, making them easy to locate and monitor.

This makes it simple to manage livestock in a way that optimises resource use while fulfilling animals’ natural behavioural needs.

The Nofence virtual fence could dramatically improve utilisation of pasture resources. It also enhances animal welfare by giving livestock access to varied pastures and keeping them out of potentially dangerous areas.

Tracking individual animals means farmers can monitor the well-being of each animal. The monitoring even provides useful grazing data for meat and milk production.

Moreover, better management of ruminant animals increases soil life and soil health. Integrating properly managed livestock into cropping systems can reduce the use of synthetic fertilisers, fungicides, pesticides and herbicides.

The global market for Nofence’s technology is 2 500 000 000 animals – cattle, sheep and goats. Currently, the company’s serviceable market is 0.5 per cent of the total global market, but this share will increase in the coming year.

Nofence was founded in 2011 by entrepreneur and goat farmer Oscar Hovde Berntsen.

In 2019 the company had 850 customers across Norway with a total of 17.8 million hours of use by goats, sheep and cattle.

In 2020 it aims to triple the number of animals using Nofence and make the first step into new markets, moving from being a start-up to become an international scale-up company.