Cows get GPS collars to stop them falling in river | Hacker News Reader

Cows get GPS collars to stop them falling in river

bbc.co.uk

75 pointszeristor77 comments

If I recall correctly, Cambridge City are using off the shelf grazing tech to help with a one off problem.

These digicowbells have a more common application of managing grazing herds in order to rotate them evenly through pastures without having to go out and redeploy fencing every week. If you want Daisy et al to let the north half of the field regrow you just draw a line around it in the app and it’ll get left ungrazed. Popular in large commonland projects too where you want to dynamically leave parts of the land fallow.

It’s also just handy to give your cattle a mobile device. You can monitor their health and breeding status. In the spirit of the dad joke about asking if iPhones “can also make phone calls!?”, it wouldn’t be crazy if these things shipped one day with some kind of two way communications. If Gertrude gets stuck ten miles up the valley it could be handy, perhaps, to see what the problem is before you fire up the brummy quattro (Land Rover.)

This is a great idea. A drone would also work, but would need favourable weather.

Ah - I live just a half mile from these fields. It’s one of the historical quirks of the city; lots of common land open to the public, grazed by cows.

Although there’s fencing on other boundaries of the grazing land it simply isn’t practical to fence off the river - and as someone who also rows on the river I usually see a cow in the water at least once a year, so it’ll be interesting to see if they work!

One of the great things about Cambridge, besides its bookstores and libraries, are all the green spaces.

Every time I visit (for synth-diy, mostly) .. I take a few hours and stroll along the cam, and through the city, and just .. enjoy the space.

Even though it is a busy and industrious little town, one can find a tree to park under and read for a few hours and thoroughly enjoy the environment. And yes, occasionally get interrupted by a curious bovine or two.

Also, you haven't lived until you've fallen off a punt or so, or at least enjoyed the view of others doing it while sipping on some suds at Granta on Mill Pond.

Bonus points for bonking ones noggin on the Mathematical Bridge while you're at it.

I really get a feeling that the city was set up for idle thought by the studious and curious. No surprise that it loves its cows too.

There is Australian research into virtual fencing https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/it/Virtual... that has been commercialised. There’s a lot of expense in fencing and being able to herd cattle remotely is one of the benefits, you can also define areas to avoid, like rivers and dams without putting a fence in place.

When I saw that, I assumed it was www.halterhq.com, which is out of NZ, but I came across them (I think) at Tech23. I'm former CSIRO, and I knew there was virtual fencing tech that came out of CSIRO, I had always assumed it was Halter.

Our neighbour's cow walked down a slope to drink from a river in the field near us. Unfortunately the slope was a bit muddy and it couldn't get back up again.

After we all tried to give it a bit of a push, we had to admit defeat and call in the Kent Fire Service Animal Rescue Unit: https://www.kent.fire-uk.org/news/meet-crew-specially-traine...

> After we all tried to give it a bit of a push

Not a countryside guy: sounds kinda dangerous? If the cow panics (or gets annoyed/angry), getting kicked by a hoof would seem like a direct trip to the hospital? Or if it slips and falls on someone (is that possible?)

It was pretty tentative, and from memory we used a strap across its backside, rather than stand directly behind and push by hand.

I did also have to deadlift a wet sheep out of a stream once and carry one from one field to another. That was a lot easier.

I've been kicked by cows a fair number of times. I'm sure it could be serious under the right circumstances, but usually it just hurts a lot. Interesting fact, unlike horses cows can kick sideways.

People do not normally imagine Cows administering ninja kicks but they kinda do.

The cow knows from situation and body language that everyone is trying to help. Panic is not likely.

As with most things, it's not as dangerous as the internet would have you think. Don't sneak up it and hit it and you'll be fine.

Also, horses are way more high-strung than cows.

A cow can kick you and you can get injured, but it isn't anything close to like a horse kick that can easily instant KO or kill you if they hit somewhere vital and cows aren't nearly as aggressive. Cows are fairly gentle and docile despite their potential size. If someone does die from a cow, which is itself pretty rare, 9/10 times its from someone falling down and getting trampled from the cow being in a panic.

It also partly depends on the size of the cow. Some regular jersey cow might weight 800 pounds but are still pretty broad so if they fall on you you aren't likely to be killed but of course you could be injured. However some holsteins are pushing 2,000+ pounds and could crush your bones if it fell on you. But cows aren't likely to tip over sideways in general, they have much better lateral movement of their legs than horses to stay steady. And if they start to slip or feel unsteady and can't keep themselves upright, they mostly just try to sit or drop down on their belly. It is why cow tipping doesn't work either which is kind of just a hollywood myth. If you did somehow manage to push a cow sideways enough for them to start tipping, which is already going to be incredibly difficult, they will eventually let their legs buckle beneath them and drop down to their stomach, and not fall over at full height with extended legs.

Oh, I have a Kentish cow story, too, except this cow had been hit by a train and was quite dead.

Just past six AM, winter, somewhere near Godmersham, we’re sat there, the conductor is saying it could be a while before anyone can come to clear the line… so, this being the days of slam-doors, out bundled a dozen besuited commuters, yours truly included, to manhandle a bloody heavy and rather messy deceased bovine out of the way, and off we went. We were only 20 minutes late into Cannon Street, which is essentially on time for that line.

I’m pretty sure it was the only time anyone on that train actually talked to one another.

Haha. Awesome. I wish that was in the days of mobiles so someone grabbed a picture.

Found via:

https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/05/local-news.html

Sometimes the provenance is just as interesting

Tablogoid!

Thanks for that. Metadata can sometimes be more useful than the data itself.

Meanwhile in German politics: "We don't need 5G on every cow facility" [1].

Turns out, modern agriculture needs good mobile connectivity wherever cows are being held...

Politics aside, what I don't get is why they don't go and raise temporary electric fences with gates - that's how cows are held in alpine regions. And a side note, if you go on a hike in alpine regions in Germany, please close the gates after you pass through so that the cows don't escape.

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/anja-karliczek-br...

I guess we would just set up a cow fence.

These GPS trackers help find cattle, possibly making rescue efforts faster and thus cheaper, but they do not prevent them falling into that river in the first place. A fence does.

I know, this is the classical "NASA builds a 1 million dollar Space pen, Russians use pencil" story - but sometimes, high tech is not necessary to solve problems that have been solved for centuries.

Doesn't mean we don't need better infrastructure. Just that we should avoid overcomplicating things.

If you read the article, you'll find that in fact the collars do prevent them from moving toward the river using sound, vibration, and shocks.

> they do not prevent them falling into that river in the first place

The article explains pretty well how the devices prevent cows from falling into the river:

> Solar-powered GPS devices emit a high-pitched sound as the animal moves through a boundary zone towards the water, with a mild electric pulse delivered if it fails to turn around.

So the cow learns there is a 'good zone' or a 'bad zone' to be in. And how does the cow - which now may be panicking - know it does not exit the 'bad zone' by, let's say, jumping into the river?

Applying human intelligence to bovines may be misguided.

They're not particularly dumb animals (similar to the average dog), generally they do get the idea pretty quickly. (There is a gradient of warning as they approach the edge of the zone, so it's not just suddenly a big shock)

I'd compare their intelligence to cats, in that a dog uses its intelligence to please its owner, and a cat uses its intelligence to do whatever it pleases. :-)

Someone below linked to a company providing this technology and it seems we do now have remote control cows (no panicking that I can see):

https://www.instagram.com/halterhq/reel/C_hq8_iSnCH/

I ... honestly don't know if I should be impressed or horrified. Essentially, they have become cyborgs. Mootrons?

I stand corrected either way.

[shrug]

Invisible Fence (https://www.invisiblefence.com/) has been a thing at least since the early 2000's when we had one for our dog.

It's inarguably smart, but... freaking dystopian.

Differential GPS is already a cornerstone of precision farming, because on a very lond field harvesting a 2cm border stripe (or not) implies substantially more yield (or not).

Whether each cow needs 5G we can debate - but usually once a service exists, it generates novel ideas that use the service. It's called "innovation", and I invite politicians unfamiliar with the subject (German or otherwise) to attend my lecture with the same title.

I remember reading that a cow health monitoring in the Netherlands would generate about 20 GB of data daily (location, temperature, how many hours walking vs lying). So 5G makes sense in some agricultural setups.

20gb of data per day on cow telemetry sounds crazy. even 2 id be like what are you doing...

Pretty awesome tech, virtual fencing with noise and vibration, assume this is using https://www.halterhq.com. It can even be used to get them to walk to the shed for milking, or virtual break fencing

From the pictures is looks like they're using https://www.nofence.no/en/

This technology is really interesting and practical! The idea of using GPS collars to prevent cows from walking into dangerous areas is so smart. This is a perfect combination of technology and traditional agriculture. It not only reduces the risk of death of cows, but also saves rescue costs and is even good for the environment.

This also makes me think of a question: Can similar technology be applied to other fields, such as wildlife conservation? Many endangered species are now threatened with extinction, and technology like this may play a very important role in protecting them. If it can help prevent animals from entering dangerous areas or better monitor their activities, it may bring great breakthroughs to conservation work.

Can similar technology be applied to other fields?

Children maybe every human

this is the third slop machine I see today, inconspicuously hiding among genuine comments. mods please do something about this <3

Classic kids book: https://bestkidsbooks.com/selection/the-cow-who-fell-in-the-...

Different solution: just release some turtles on the river bed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_cS4Nf47jM

What is this article. GPS has been used for cow tracking since the 80s at least. Some of the companies have gone on to do ankle monitoring of people.

Turns out GPS isn't that accurate :)

It was less accurate in the 80s/90s, if you were a civilian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_analysis_for_the_Global_...

The only potential problem I can see is that the out-of-hours pinder service is not paid per callout, but paid to be ready to be called out. So if the new corals just reduce the number of callouts but not completely eliminate them you will still need to pay for both the service and the corals too.

The local council was using these things to let cows graze Wanstead park for a while, they were really cute.

Thats for posting about "cow GPS" just as I was looking for further examples for "geofencing" for a book I am writing, apart from FourSquare. ;-)

Dunno, once upon a time the low tech solution was... a fence.

There's another "low tech" solution. Just pump the water to a safe place. You can even create an area with sprinklers activated by movement.

Fences require maintenance too, especially near rivers. Plus these aren't traditionally farmed cattle, so there's that.

yes, true, my niehbors have a biodynamic farm with cattle, but the farm dogs has decided to start monitering the activity on all the adjacent farms.....quite odd hound dog....and so has been fittedwith a gps collar, which is proving to be just further distraction....as the dog is supper cagey, and silent....except when going into full hound dog baying mode....checks the road both ways...and slinks off if there is traffic....only darts accross when it's all clear. There was a full robot dairy farm up the road, but they sold there quota....likely retiring to somewhere exotic.

The historical reason is that canals were originally built to facilitate horse-drawn boats, and as such there are no fences. The modern reason is that people use the canals all day, for hopping on/off houseboats and rowing training - putting up fences just for a few cows would make many people upset.

FYI, I live right next to this area and it's almost as central as you can get in Cambridge, so it's super busy - people and cyclists coming through this field all the time, including myself. There are plenty of fences around the roads and land borders of the commons, but it's just the canals that have these special uses that require a lack of fences.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/PifHtYpg1u2SfojF9

> The historical reason is that canals were originally built to facilitate horse-drawn boats, and as such there are no fences. The modern reason is that people use the canals all day, for hopping on/off houseboats and rowing training - putting up fences just for a few cows would make many people upset.

Seems like maybe the fence could be put up some reasonable distance away from the water to leave enough usable space along the shore for people. I see that done here where I'm at sometimes.

Of course you could put up a fence. This isn’t a situation where the collars solve a previously unsolvable problem. But fences cost money, both the build and to maintain. Fences restrict movement for people (and wildlife), which is undesirable. You have to build gates for people to use, and if it is a busy area you need a lot of gates. People fail to close gates and cows get through them. If you need to move vehicles or equipment between the canal and the field, then you need some large gates as well.

The collars allow for restricting the movement of cows, while leaving the entire area open and unencumbered for everything else.

Fences would be ugly and cost a lot more than some collars for a herd of cows.

I should clarify that I'm thinking like an old-school dairy farmer here, because I did grow up on a dairy farm. Cows were confined to the day's grazing area by putting up lightweight electric fencing. Just sticks of wood hammered into the ground with an electric insulator on them, and wire strung between them from a reel. That's how we did it; more modern version uses metal or fiberglass poles and a soft string that has wires woven into it.

The shock from the fence was mild, but the cows knew about it and respected the fence. And when the area was grazed out, you moved the fence and gave them a new area. Any "right to roamers" that wanted to cross the field could easily duck under the fence. No problem. Mind you, this was in rural south Germany, not urban Britain. We did get right-to-roamers, sort of, because there was a somewhat popular swimming access to a small lake on our pasture.

So, the way you've written this comes across as if you think that's a canal running across midsummer common. For the benefit of those unfamiliar, it's not a canal, it's the River Cam. It may well be that the reason for no fences is boat transport, though.

There definitely was serious boat transport in the area- midsummer common hosted a fair; historically fairs were actually vital to the economy as a lot of goods were exchanged there, and even more contracts for goods. Nearby Stourbridge fair was the largest in Europe: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stourbridge_fair and the inspiration for Bunyan's "Vanity fair" in "Pilgrim's Progress"

Yes you're correct - I more meant that paths either side of the river and other infrastructure was originally put in place for this reason, not that the body of water itself was man-made.

We've heard of Chesterton's fence. This is a rare example of Chesterton's non-fence.

It only appears rare for two reasons: the proposal consists of a literal fence, and we’ve no idea how many such failed or denied proposals have come before it.

Surely it must be well-known that it is exceedingly rare, but valuable, for an organization to document why they didn’t do certain things.

No, this is rare because of how how few places are called Chesterton.

Chesterton's geofence.

Cows can jump a lot higher than people expect. They can also throw their weight at a fence and break through.

Except that they don't. Again, old school dairy farm experience here. The cows were confined to the barn all winter. When we first let them out in the spring, they went for a stampede around the field. This was a bit risky, because if a fence wasn't clearly visible enough they might trample it and hurt themselves on the barbed wire. In practice, the stampede only lasted for a few minutes, then they settled down and grazed. And that was that; for the rest of the season even the barely visible temporary electric fences (just wooden poles and a wire) would contain them fine. They would graze under the fence, they knew exactly how far they could go without the wire contacting them and giving them a shock. And they certainly didn't jump over anything.

Old tech, but this video impressed me - https://www.tiktok.com/@halterhq/video/7504837843571838215

It's more than a virtual fence, it can move them and has health checks / in heat.

I don't know if you can split the herd once together but you can manage more mobs, bring them in groups (Like small and large) for milking or feeding.

You could be able to tell if they mated as well or ever direct the bull towards heifers that haven't.

...are fences too costly, or something?

Pretty sure they might be cheaper that £10k a year.

Maybe after ten years.

Yes, fencing is very costly especially because cows are strong. I grew up on the countryside and learned a couple of things. Fencing not only needs to be built but also maintained. You can also use electric fences but that's basically the same, and you need to run power.

Cows are stubborn and especially in summer, when they found out that the water cools them down, they get into the water. But often they can't get out, at least how N/W-European pastures are. So you get a tractor and pull them out, but then they learn that :-)

What actually is necessary, is that there's enough shade. But trees need to maintained so a lot of farmers cut them down.

Note that my knowledge is limited and perhaps already out of date.

Modern solution, a half-open barn with a roof of solar panels. I don't understand why pastures don't have a roofed area.

...solar panels that power the electric fence or 5g broadcaster for the GPS collars, lol.

It's a hassle, it's in the way of mowing.

Trees cools down what’s beside not only by their shade but also with evaporation. The cooldown effect of a forest is way stronger that and solar panel shaded area.

Would cheese off a few people in the area, since along that stretch of river there's a popular riverside picnic spot and a mooring area for houseboats.

(Also, it's a common, which in England means massive piles of red tape to build anything on it)

The cows graze in parks shared with people. You don't want to fence around the people, just the cows. This is an example of a field that the cows visit regularly:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/iYbCeJu8fvrmuAXz9

I suppose they didn't feel a stile, gate, or cattle grid would be aesthetic enough.

There are already barriers like that at the edges of the common:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/1anrXAPRE3Dp3ZFo9

https://maps.app.goo.gl/YTfAYamG55SftWay6

https://maps.app.goo.gl/AWKxr76HUzgvSqBG7

People have free access to the river and the field, any physical barrier would limit that.

The cows are on public, multi-use land.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_land

Fences are useful, but if a cow truly wants through a fence, they can and will just push through it and snap it. Electric fences and barbed wire can make them a better deterrent, but even then if the grass on the other side looks tasty enough they will push all of their potentially 2,000+ pounds against that fence until it tips over or snaps.

Nobody knows how to build a fence in Cambridge?

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