Nofence Virtual Fencing
Solar-powered smart collars for cattle, sheep, and goats
Description
Nofence Virtual Fencing is a solar‑powered collar with cloud‑connected app system that creates and manages virtual fences for cattle, sheep and goats. There are two collar types being offered: the cattle collar is built tough to withstand the strength and wear from cattle while sheep and goal collars are relatively smaller and lighter. Key features include drawing digital boundaries on a smartphone, collars guiding animals with audio cues before a mild pulse, real‑time herd visibility, remote boundary edits, and Bluetooth beacons that suspend virtual fences inside barns or shelters. Nofence addresses agricultural and technology challenges such as time‑ and material‑intensive fence construction, inflexible grazing layouts, difficult terrain where physical fencing is impractical, and limited animal visibility—while coping with power/connectivity constraints via solar charging and LTE‑M/2G backhaul.
Technology
The collars use solar cells, a tough and durable collar with solar panels wherein surface scratches will not have a significant impact on the collar’s efficiency. The solution also comes with rechargeable batteries that can last longer if farms have large pastures and good mobile coverage. Meanwhile, Bluetooth technology captures signals from shelter beacons, which deactivates GPS whenever the animals are in shelter. Lastly, NOfence leverages different GNSS constellations such as GPS to determine the position of the animals, that can be accessed through a mobile application.
Target
Primary beneficiaries are livestock farmers—smallholders through large commercial operations—seeking flexible, low‑labor grazing and better herd oversight. Agriculture cooperatives and farm advisors benefit from scalable digital livestock management practices that can be disseminated across members and clients.
Business model
Users can request for pricing on the solution’s website. A complete cattle collar with battery, chain, and neck strap costs £ 249 pounds but the mandatory initial 12-month subscription for each collar is not included. Meanwhile, the sheep and goal collar with the same features and excluded subscription costs £199. The subscription for 5-49 collars is £45 per year per collar, which reduces to £29 if there are more than 50 collars.
Impact
Based on the resources available online, Nofence assisted in remote monitoring of the herd, changing the way farmers and owners operate.
Partners
Fingal County Council; Old Irish Goat Society
Four Betters
Better production
