Using technology to help cattle and carnivores coexist
A view looking south into Yellowstone National Park near the mouth of Paradise Valley. NPS PHOTO
Gilded trees, azure waters and snow-capped rugged horizons are a corrective for a tired soul. In 1866, a weary crew of cowboys might have thought just that as they put up their horses at the end of their long ride from Texas to Montana. What would become a legendary cattle drive that inspired Larry McMurtry’s classic western novel Lonesome Dove, this venture was led by Nelson Story and culminated in Southwest Montana’s Paradise Valley where Story wintered a portion of his herd.
Paradise Valley, an ancient glacial river drainage carved between the high-elevation wilderness expanses of the Gallatin and Absaroka mountain ranges, extends north more than 50 miles from the small town of Gardiner and the North entrance of Yellowstone National Park to the town of Livingston. The meandering Yellowstone River spills out across the valley, where today, some 2,100 people reside.
The area is rich in history and has long been a travel corridor for Indigenous peoples, trappers and early explorers. It was the original route to our nation’s first national park, and became home for many a cowpoke. Early settlers carved out an existence along the Yellowstone River and its tributaries, establishing homes and livelihoods in an area rich with elk, mule deer, bighorn sheep, wolves, mountain lions and grizzly bears.
“I find compassion for what it took to survive and what it looked like then. Imagine how strong those families had to be,” says Malou Anderson-Ramirez. Anderson-Ramirez grew up on a ranch above the head of Paradise Valley in a tucked away meadow known as Tom Miner Basin, where her family continues its cattle operation today. Like many other ranching families, the Andersons embrace an adaptive approach to raising cattle and are learning and adjusting day by day in order to keep the ranch profitable within the context of a wild landscape.
Over the last 50 years, the population of grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park has increased from 136 in 1975 to an estimated 728 in 2019. NPS PHOTO
A lot has changed for Western ranchers since Story drove his longhorns into Paradise Valley. One shift, in particular, is the way today’s ranches share the landscape with predators. Many predator species were nearly extirpated from the Lower 48 by the mid-1900s, at a time when carnivores were viewed as competition for game species and dangerous for livestock. However, modern wildlife management recognized a need for balance and the valuable role carnivores play within the broader ecosystem. Five decades of robust conservation programs throughout the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—a diverse 34,000-square-mile area around Yellowstone National Park in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming that is recognized as one of the largest nearly intact temperate-zone ecosystems in the world—have led to growing populations of wolves, mountain lions and grizzly bears.
As carnivores have returned, livestock producers that were accustomed to operating without as much of a risk of predation have had to make changes that address human safety and safety for livestock, while simultaneously creating space for predators to exist on the land.
The Anderson Ranch is one of eight Paradise Valley operations participating in a new program known as Smart Ranching, a cooperative project between the Upper Yellowstone Watershed Group and Montana State University-Extension that is paving a way for livestock producers to further learn and adapt. Playing on the use of “Smart” in the context of advanced technology, the group is working to reduce problems like livestock depredation with cutting-edge technologies retrofitted for drones, game cameras and livestock ear tags—an innovative approach to ranching with carnivores.
The Footprint
Paradise Valley is dominated by expansive agricultural lands along the Yellowstone River that often serve as seasonal habitat for wildlife. PHOTO BY STEVEN J. DRAKE
Anderson-Ramirez calls home to an area above Paradise Valley that is swaddled by mountains and sky. Tom Miner Basin rests in a grassy nook north of Yellowstone National Park and is where Anderson-Ramirez grew up with two sisters and two brothers on property her grandfather purchased in the 1950s. The family raised cattle and sheep and Anderson-Ramirez says growing up in a wild place gave her a particular connection to the land.
“I grew up with the notion that my footprint—my impact on the land—is out of good-will and a place of compassion and understanding,” she says. Her words are deliberate, poised, and from the very tone of her voice, it’s clear her ethos is to work with the landscape, not to dominate it. “I ask myself, ‘What will my footprint look like when I’m gone?’”
In the 1990s, wolves began returning to Tom Miner Basin and Anderson-Ramirez says her family had to adapt in order to maintain its livelihood. They retired from raising sheep and shifted their focus solely to cattle, recognizing that certain landscapes are better suited for certain livestock and that a mountainous area bordering Yellowstone that supports a high predator population wasn’t the best place to raise small livestock like sheep.
When grizzly bears started showing up in the basin, she says ranches in the area had to change practices once again. In 2013, her sister-in-law, Hilary Zaranek-Anderson, started the first range-riding program in Tom Miner and since then, Zaranek-Anderson and other range riders have tracked wildlife and monitored cattle in an organized effort through the Tom Miner Basin Association to reduce predation on livestock. Over the last decade, the association has grown to offer financial assistance to ranchers in the basin in order to provide range riding, electric fencing, fladry, carcass management and wildlife tracking.
Anderson-Ramirez says it’s important to remember that working landscapes are often distinctly unique from each other, whether it’s due to differences in operation—take a ranch that raises calves to weaning compared to one that feeds cattle to maturity, for example—or the result of physical variations in the land. Because of these differences, and because ranching in Montana comes with significant seasonal shifts within a diverse ecosystem, there isn’t a single silver-bullet solution that is going to stop any given conflict with predators every time for every producer. Instead, ranchers need multiple strategies for reducing carnivore predation on livestock and they need the flexibility and knowledge to be able to use the best tool for the particular situation at hand.
Through the Smart Ranching project, participants hope to learn more about the effectiveness of technology in reducing livestock loss and are piloting the use of advanced game cameras, drones and ear tags. The ranchers will try out various equipment brands and software programs and provide feedback on what works and what doesn’t.
“The idea is, let’s develop and test technology so ranchers have good data that helps us achieve the goal of less challenges on the land and living with wildlife with less conflict,” Anderson-Ramirez says. “Once we know better, we can do better. Let’s be open to using innovation and new technology to preserve and sustain the rural way of life and to keep these ranches intact, to keep them profitable.”
Innovative Thinking
These Smart AI cameras by GrizzlySystems.io are among the cutting-edge technology being tested in Paradise Valley. PHOTO BY CODY GOLDHAHN
Down the Yellowstone River from Tom Miner Basin, Jeff Reed’s farm is a piece of the many working lands that dominate the valley bottom. Emigrant Peak bounds toward the sky just to the east of Reed’s hops fields and hay pastures, where elk and deer are seasonal sojourners as they move between winter and summer ranges.
“We, as ranchers and farmers, are stewards of open spaces,” Reed says, adding that wildlife depend upon open spaces made possible by working lands. “Without those private ranches, the land is going to get purchased and subdivided, and you’re not going to have wildlife migration. It’s really the private lands that are going to make a difference for wildlife.”
Reed, who grew up in Billings but spent the summers of his youth in Paradise Valley, worked for three decades building a successful career as a software developer for major companies like Microsoft and T-Mobile before returning to his home state about five years ago. He operates Reedfly Farm where he produces alfalfa and commercial hops and offers guest accommodations and tourism adventures.
An advisory member of the Upper Yellowstone Watershed Group, Reed is assisting with the Smart Ranching project. “I want to do anything I can to help ranchers preserve their wide-open spaces. That’s good for business, it’s good for the health and soul of the locals, and it’s good for people who want to visit here,” he says. “Sitting around and talking about things has zero interest to [UYWG]. We work on actual projects. The truth lives in a grey box. It doesn’t live in black and white—it lives in complexity.”
Recognizing that landowners and livestock producers need a suite of tools, UYWG established a working group for the Smart Ranching project that consists of researchers with MSU-Extension and Paradise Valley producers. In 2021, the group conducted preliminary field work to establish base-line data on livestock lost to carnivores and between 2022 and 2025, participants will test the effectiveness of new technologies such as satellite imagery and drones to estimate elk population numbers, advanced camera traps to understand wildlife and livestock interaction or conflict, and GPS ear tags for livestock tracking and wildlife conflict. The participants will compare these new tools with older technologies like guard dogs and range riding to determine what tools work best in different settings and scenarios. The new AI-based game trail camera technology from GrizzlySystems.io was tested against and beat the IR trigger capabilities of cameras from the popular Browning and Reconyx brands. “AI- and web-based device management portals are completely going to change the game camera industry and bring it a step closer to what is happening in the home and industrial markets,” Reed says.
AI for Bears
One of three TEAL Tag prototypes Anderson-Ramirez is currently developing. These cattle ear tags connect with a solar LoRa gateway system in order to provide Anderson-Ramirez with GPS locations of her cattle. PHOTOS COURTESY OF TEAL ENTERPRISES
According to Reed, the latest advances in Artificial Intelligence can be adapted for ranching just as they have in homes, healthcare and even cars. He says drones can be equipped with Lidar and thermal sensors like you might find in new vehicles, which can help a rancher detect animals even if there is tree cover, while cameras with thermal imaging could assist a rancher in detecting the presence of predators around calving pastures.
Reed adds that there are major advances in game camera technology that would allow a rancher to specify exactly what kind of pictures they want the camera to take. Rather than getting images of everything that moves, which often includes grass blowing in the wind, cameras can be outfitted with the same kind of facial-recognition technology found in doorbell or home security cameras. This allows someone to set parameters so that a trail camera only captures images of what they care about—perhaps grizzly bears or wolves for example. Then if the camera is able to send an alert to a rancher’s phone, he or she has useful information about what’s happening on the land and that can play into decisions like when to check cattle or where to graze them.
“The more a rancher knows about how many bears there are, when they come out or how they’re moving through the terrain, the better,” Reed says. “Then they can maybe change their grazing patterns to mitigate conflicts.”
In addition to testing drones and cameras, the Smart Ranching project is proving out GPS-equipped collars or ear tags with accelerometers. The latter, which Anderson-Ramirez has been developing under the name of TEAL Tags (short for Technology, Education, Agriculture and Landscape), can help a producer monitor the health of his or her cattle much like a Fitbit. The tag, which has a small microchip that is in contact with the animal’s ear, can be paired to a smart phone and send alerts if a cow exhibits a fight or flight response.
“If a cow moves in a certain way, it’s predictive that there is a grizzly bear or a wolf in close proximity,” Reed says, adding that the tags could also provide a mortality signal so a rancher knows about a loss in real time.
Last year, as the fall season brought cows down from the mountains and grizzly bears sought out food in preparation for winter, Reed, Anderson-Ramirez and other collaborators finished up initial data gathering from the field season. In 2022, they will pilot the use of these types of tools in order to test whether the technologies can be useful and effective for ranchers. And by proving out software and products, the team also hopes to drive the cost down.
“It’s not about technology for technology’s sake,” Anderson-Ramirez says. “We don’t want a whole bunch of stuff we don’t need. It has to be easy and it has to be worthwhile. We’re working on simplifying the technology to drive the price down because all of this has to be affordable.”
Ultimately, the hope is to empower landowners with the knowledge and tools they need to effectively live and work among wildlife, whether that’s elk, wolves or bears.
For more information and to support the Smart Ranching and TEAL initiative, visit tealenterprises.org, grizzlysystems.io (website coming soon), or contact Malou Anderson-Ramirez at malou@tealenterprises.org.
Jessianne Castle lives west of Montana’s Flathead Valley and is a freelance writer, editor and founder of the Grizzly Bear Collective. An advocate for solutions journalism and thoughtful storytelling, she passionately writes about the experiences of living in the West.