How Fenceless Ranching is Transforming Land and Water in the West

Where it enters Chrissy McFarren’s high-elevation ranch 20 miles from Coaldale, Colorado, Badger Creek, in most seasons, is a two-foot wide dribble. From there, it winds—sometimes cuts—through willows, wetlands, and grasslands before picking up steam on its downhill journey through the southern Front Range foothills, ultimately emptying into the Arkansas River, just 14 miles southeast of Salida. Reinforced by Badger Creek, the Ark tumbles another 70 river miles to the Pueblo Reservoir. It pauses there before continuing on across America’s plains, eventually merging with the mighty Mississippi in eastern Arkansas.

McFarren is intimately familiar with the trajectory of Badger Creek, especially across the 7,000 sprawling acres—some public, leased lands—she and her husband, Dave, have stewarded for nearly a decade. The diminutive little waterway (the inspiration for her ranch’s name) is one of the first places she looks when she’s trying to find her roughly 100 head of cattle—and it’s often one of the last places she wants them to be.

“Too many cows on the creek bed can cause erosion,” McFarren says. “It’s a very sensitive area. It’s fragile. It needs rest.”

While cows have a natural urge to congregate around water sources like Badger Creek, (and occasional grazing in these areas is helpful), too much cattle traffic can damage wetland areas by trampling grasses, overgrazing riparian zones, and eroding banks with their hooves. The consequence? Soils become compacted, and wetland areas lose their ability to store and spread water; creek beds become trenches, which only grow deeper when spring storms bring rushing water that causes erosion. Instead of Badger Creek slowly winding through willows, helping to spread the water out to create wetlands where bees, bugs, birds, and other critters congregate, in the spring, it often rushes across the acres, scoring deep gouges in the landscape and taking pieces of creek bed along with it.

In fact, according to the Central Colorado Conservancy, about 64 percent of the Badger Creek Watershed’s wetlands have been lost in a process called channel incision, the technical term for this kind of narrow erosion. Unfortunately for those downstream, this means soil that should have stayed in place ends up as sediment that can cause all kinds of issues: It transports toxins, harms fisheries, and leads to diminished capacity in reservoirs. The Pueblo Reservoir, for example, has lost 20 percent of its storage capacity due to sediment piling up in the Arkansas, which puts a crunch on agricultural producers and local residents who depend on the supply.

“We needed to slow the deluge down, keep sediment in place, and make the water slow and spread, ” McFarren says.

One way to counteract this problem is by allowing the riparian areas rest and grow vegetation that stores water and holds soil in place. Over the past several years, McFarren has been working with her neighbors through the Badger Creek Watershed Partnership—a collaboration launched by the Central Colorado Conservancy that includes federal, state, and local land managers—to do just that.

“But grazing has to work with this whole plan,” she says. “If we’re letting cattle sit on those on the creek beds and destroy all the work, that doesn’t make much sense.” After all, a delicate willow or a few inches of fragile creekbed soil are no match for a 1,000-pound animal tromping along the creek.

The Search for Solutions

Fences and gates installed throughout McFarren’s ranch helped some, but they couldn’t keep cattle away from every riparian area. So, in early 2023, McFarren and her neighbors in the Watershed Partnership turned their focus to how to keep the ranch’s herd away from Badger Creek’s most sensitive areas. They found what they thought might be an answer in Vence (virtual fence) collars from Merck Animal Health.

The Vence collar technology is not unlike the electric fences some pet owners use to keep their dogs from running away. Livestock managers put the electric collars—which transmit a signal through satellite base stations—on their animals, helping ranchers track their herd across thousands of acres while also creating exclusionary zones. As cattle approach an exclusionary zone, they’ll hear a beep; if they go closer, they’ll receive a buzz or small zap. While cows—like dogs—must be trained to understand how the system works, they have proven to be relatively quick learners (unlike some dogs).

McFarren figured she could use the collars to create exclusionary zones around the most sensitive creek areas, diverting her cattle to other water sources instead. Using funding from the LOR Foundation’s 2023 Field Work initiative—which provided up to $10,000 each to more than 60 ranchers throughout the Mountain West to implement innovative water practices on their lands—McFarren purchased more than 90 Vence collars for her steers and bulls. She collaborated with neighboring ranches and helped others equip their herds with collars, too. She placed a virtual boundary around fragile ecosystems. With the cows collared and sensitive areas virtually cordoned off, all they could do was wait to see if it would work.

It did. Instead of trampling through fragile riparian zones to slake their thirst, the cows head instead for two troughs installed elsewhere on the property. “It doesn’t mean they don’t still want to go down to the creek,” McFarren says. “But [the collars] force them up to these other points.”

Looking Ahead

For Colorado’s McFarren at least, there’s no going back. Today, she’s able to track her cows from a laptop in her dining room, saving all kinds of time and sparing her horses extra labor. “We still move cows on horseback,” she says. “It’s a lot for our horses if we’re out scanning thousands of acres trying to find the herd.” Because they can remotely track their cows, they don’t have to roam the property just hoping they’ll come across them—a practice that wastes human hours and wears down horses.

But saving time isn’t the most important result for McFarren: saving the fragile ecosystem she and her downstream neighbors rely on is. After using the technology for two seasons, the benefits have become clear. McFarren and visitors to Badger Creek Ranch report that the wetland area is healthier than it’s ever been. It’s not just anecdotal: According to studies from a local chapter of the Audubon Society, the birdlife on McFarren’s property increased significantly year-over-year. In 2023, Audubon measured 13 total bird species on Badger Creek Ranch; in 2024, the number had increased to 19, with swallows, sparrows, and hawks among the newcomers.

The grass life also is significantly richer, McFarren says, and by spring 2024, water was spreading further out into land. Now when McFarren saddles up to survey her land, she sees small willows swaying in the breeze on land that was once bare. She sees new sedges thriving and spreading near a creekbed previously devastated by spring floodwaters. Some days, she sees cliff swallows and vesper sparrows flitting above the grasses. A red tail hawk soaring higher. Peering further, she sees golden pastures and green hillsides—and hope for the future of her and her neighbor’s lands.