Virtually ready for calving season

 The virtual collars are all on the cows as of the first week of February.  A few hiccups, but mostly just plain old miscommunication between my dad and me.  I put the fences up excluding some areas, he puts the hay in that excluded area. This results in very confused cows. But beyond that so far so good. But let me back up and lay out the order of getting virtual fences to Tompkins Corner Ranch.

In December we received a massive pallet of collars, towers, and counter weights.  I was instructed to immediately open up the collars and get them laid out in the sun to charge up.  I grabbed a few pallets and laid them on the south side of our barn to a great afternoon of sunshine.  

After the collars all showed a light blinking, I then needed to then get two 8-10 foot posts and setup towers at the locations that were marked out by Halter.  

Then I put a fence around the towers, because those are definitely getting rubbed against if I don't.  

Once the towers were up we were ready to schedule our first collaring day.  This was early January, my dad and I asked a few people and my pastor brought a few of his boys and they worked with dad to bring the cows into the chute. It was time to do the first batch and they were the young cows, and a few older ones.  It was a pretty exhausting day.  A rep from Halter came and helped to make sure it went well. I didn't quite have the technique down at first and got my hands pulled back into the headgate, but nothing serious. 

We found out that using a bucket of grain was the trick.  Denise was a huge help, both with scanning collars and assigning tag numbers as well as getting their necks extended so I could get the collar around the head, feed the strap through, buckle the clip and tuck the strap. Here's a video of one of them completed.  Some cows didn't mind too much, and others looked like a possible entry for the next rodeo.  

We had two more days in early February of getting the rest of the cows collared with two more teams of a few young guys and at least one more old one.  A good friend from Stromsburg who had been pretty excited to see this technology in action and the final day one of the elders from our church came and helped with a couple of his grandsons.  Really thankful for the help. 

Upon reaching the boundary cows will receive a series of beeping that increases in rate and then a "pulse" as the Halter reps say it, or a shock, basically the same as what a poly wire fence would give off.  They learn the system virtually right away (pun intended). This video clip shows them walking up to it, you can hear beeping if you have the volume up.  Then a shock is given.  Baron decided the cows jumping back was a good time to add his contribution.

As of today here is where they are.  The green group is the main herd and the purple is the young cows.  

In the next couple weeks we will start calving and I have a few ideas of how we can utilize the collars to help.  Mostly with noting cows off by themselves sooner and then with getting them separated from the rest of the herd a few days later. Then once the grass comes in we can start rotational grazing!  Thanks for taking the time to read.  I'm still learning and probably will be all this year.  But let me know if you have questions or curious enough to come visit!  God bless.