The 2024 Lonerock Fire burned over 137,000 acres in Gilliam, Wheeler and Morrow counties, much of it rangeland. Ranchers whose lands were destroyed faced a common yet costly hurdle to wildfire recovery: new fencing.
According to the Gilliam County Soil and Water Conservation District, replacing the nearly 300 miles of fence that had burned in the fire would have cost over $9 million. With financial support from Gilliam County, Jason and Anthony Campbell turned to virtual fencing, which they say is a promising wildfire recovery solution. Now, over a year after the fire, they join us to talk about their experience with the technology.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. A year-and-a-half ago, the Lone Rock Fire burned over 130,000 acres in North Central Oregon. Much of that was rangeland in Gilliam, Morrow and Wheeler counties. In Gilliam County alone, ranchers lost more than 300 miles of fences.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Instead of building back traditional fences, some ranchers have taken advantage of public and private support to install a virtual fencing system. Jason and Anthony Campbell are among that group. They are cousins, both fourth-generation ranchers who now operate separate but neighboring ranches. Jason and Anthony, welcome to the show.
Jason Campbell: Well, thank you for having us.
Miller: So Jason, first, do you remember when you realized that the Lone Rock Fire was going to reach the land where you ranch?
J. Campbell: Just about the day it started. It started just barely off of our property on a neighbor’s place. And by that first night, it was on us. By the end of day two, it was up here to the houses in town, so it didn’t take very long to figure out we had a problem.
Miller: What do you do? I mean, what’s the first thing that you do when you realize that there is a fire at your doorstep?
J. Campbell: Well, initially everybody’s out fighting it. And as big fire crews, ODF or these federal guys start showing up and helping to fight the fire, you kind of start shifting into getting cows out of the way. That’s kind of where we were at.
Miller: Anthony, how spread out were your cows?
Anthony Campbell: We had them in two different herds, mainly – one group is on a forest permit – that the fire eventually got to, but it wasn’t really threatening that when it started. The other herd was in a pretty remote area. The access is pretty poor to it, and it was within probably 10 miles of where the fire started.
Miller: How do you actually move a herd of cattle when there’s all this mayhem going on, all these fire crews and encroaching fire?
A. Campbell: Well, it’s pretty challenging, because, like Jason had kind of mentioned, our main priority was to stop the fire before it gets to that point. So we’re out there running our own dozers and our own pumper vehicles, trying to suppress the fire before it gets to there. And then, once you realize that it’s beat you, really the only thing you can do at that point in a lot of this country is go start cutting fences and opening gates, because it’s too dangerous a lot of times to get on your horse and ride out there. It takes so long to get there and then you’re in the danger zone of the fire on your horse, with no escape. So, yeah, it’s open fences and gates.
Miller: And the hope then is that the cattle will just then be free to move on their own to escape the danger?
A. Campbell: Exactly, yeah. You just try to get rid of the fences and all the barriers so that they can get away on their own, escape on their own.
Miller: Jason, did that happen for your herd?
J. Campbell: Oh yeah, absolutely. Most of the time, that’s all anybody can do. There was a certain amount of running around on ATVs and just trying to get them located, and try to get stuff kind of moving in the right direction. But by and large, the best you can do a lot of times is just provide them an outlet, and hope that when it rolls at you, they’ve got a place where they can go and get out.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for the scale of destruction of the rangeland when everything was said and done?
J. Campbell: Well, it’s hard to imagine. You mentioned already over 130,000 acres. I think this thing was like 30 miles end to end and 12 or 15 miles wide. When you’re standing in the middle of something like that and everything is burnt black for as far as you can see in every direction, and you know that if you walk to that horizon and look to the next one, it’s still gonna be black as far as you can see, it’s a scale that’s really kind of hard to picture.
Miller: That was the landscape and, as you and your cousin had mentioned, the best you can do in most cases – including in this case – was just to cut fences and to hope for the best. Did you lose livestock?
J. Campbell: We were fortunate not to have lost any livestock directly to the fire, so nothing burned. We did lose some cattle later that we attributed to it, that the vets mostly said was probably heart failure, smoke inhalation type stuff that started going on, probably about three weeks later.
Miller: Anthony, how much fencing did you lose?
A. Campbell: We lost close to, I believe it was between 60 and 80 miles of fence.
Miller: How long does it take to build that? And how much money had you spent over the years for 60 to 80 miles of fencing?
A. Campbell: [Laughter] Yeah, it would take … Well, we’re in the process of rebuilding some of it right now and I think it’ll be two to three years with two to three crews to get that much rebuilt. The costs, I think, in today’s prices, we’re looking at about $1.5 million.
Miller: And that’s just your ranch. Jason, what about you?
J. Campbell: We’re right in that same kind of area – 50-ish miles. And I haven’t figured all the cost up, because quite frankly, I’m not sure I want to know. Any time you’re measuring this stuff, fence typically charges between $5 to $8 per foot if I’m hiring a crew to do it. And we’re talking about miles, so every one of those $5 or $8 little cha-chings in the cash register times 5,280, times 50 miles.
Miller: So what was your immediate thought about rebuilding, Jason? I mean, when you looked out at that blackened land that, as you said, horizon line to horizon line to horizon line, if you were to keep walking it, it would just keep being black. How did you think initially about rebuilding?
J. Campbell: Well, it took a few months before we even thought about rebuilding, to be honest. I mean, there’s a realization that hits you somewhere in the midst of that, that your life is gonna be in a complete shambles for the foreseeable future. And the first step is just finding a place to put those cows. I mean, we had cows that were coming in and we’re storing them in our hay fields here because they were irrigated and didn’t burn. The immediate need is we had to find a place to go with those cows now, because they gotta eat every day whether we’re ready for it or not.
So you start looking outside your own ranch for any little chunk of ground you can lease, rent or borrow. And then, a lot of times those chunks of ground don’t have fence on them either, so you’ve got that capital you have to lay out. That’s kind of where we started bringing this virtual fence idea into it.
Miller: Anthony, it’s been a little while since we’ve talked about virtual fencing. Can you give us the basics of what this means?
A. Campbell: Yeah, so basically, the virtual fence is a collar that you put on your cattle. We put it on every cow and it has a radio tower that talks to the collar. The radio tower has to be in cell phone coverage. It will basically talk to the collar and then back to you on your phone or your computer, and it has a location service. You can build fences, which are a line that you draw on your map, where it has a shock zone and a sound zone. It will have an auditory sound that beeps when the cattle get close to where they’ll get shocked. And then when they get into the shock zone, it will shock them, try to turn them back and keep them from crossing that line.
Miller: So, those of us who don’t have ranches or cattle, we can think about this as a kind of invisible fencing systems that folks with dogs might have, except it seems like one of the big differences is that you have the ability in vast areas of land to change where the lines are, right? Which is a key point in terms of managing the land.
A. Campbell: Correct. Yes, you can draw those lines truly wherever you want them to be, so if there’s certain areas … For example, if you have a pasture that a wildfire came through and it only burned half of it, you can draw that line across the edge of the burn and keep the cattle from going into that burned area. Or, if you have areas of your pasture that you want to utilize that the cattle don’t normally hang in, you can build your fence there and hold those cattle in a certain portion of existing pasture.
Miller: Jason, do you remember when you first heard about virtual fencing?
J. Campbell: Yeah, absolutely. I want to say probably three years before the fire, so 2021, 2022, somewhere in that neighborhood. I think for a lot of us in this business, it’s a technology we’ve been watching and something that we’ve maybe been waiting to become a little more cost effective as years go by and more and more people take it on. Until this fire hit, that’s really kind of how I have continued to regard it; maybe next year, maybe the year after. And this kind of threw us into a situation where we had to do something or we weren’t gonna be getting back on this rangeland for two and three years. You can’t run a business that way, so that’s really what kind of pushed us into it.
Miller: So, what would you do now? In the areas where you’re using virtual fencing, let’s say that there were another fire two summers from now, how would your approach be different with the virtual fencing system in place?
J. Campbell: Well, in the first place, a virtual fence can be shut off. So as long as we have connectivity to those cows – which probably 80% of the time we’ve got an actual radio connection to those cattle – then we can just go in on a computer and shut those fences off.
Other than that, in a fire event, not a whole lot has changed. From a range management standpoint, I mean, we’re gonna continue to use this, fire or not. It’s allowing us to better utilize our pastures. We have a little more control over where those cattle are, versus just being in, say, a 3,000-acre pasture. We can carve that up into smaller pieces and I want them here this month, and over there the next month, and I want them to stay out of this area. We’re going to be doing that continually, whether fires are happening or not.
Miller: In other words, you’re going to have more control that you’ll actually be using in terms of where cattle are when, within an overall rangeland area?
J. Campbell: Oh, absolutely, yeah. Part of the problem we have on rangelands with traditional fences is you’ve enclosed this big chunk of ground, but you don’t have a lot of control over where these cattle are going unless you’re gonna go out there and physically push them to a certain area every day. We have portions of our range that were being overutilized and portions that are being underutilized just on a continual basis. And now, we can kind of carve those up and change how we manage, almost do it like a targeted or a managed grazing program across these pastures without having to get out there and physically do it. That’s a pretty profound change in what we’re able to do.
Miller: How quickly does any individual cow … and do the calves, have these collars as well or it’s just their moms?
J. Campbell: It’s just the cows. We don’t collar the calves because, of course, they grow. And we’re leery of putting collars on these animals where their neck is going to be getting bigger through the year. You don’t want to get into a situation where you’re hurting something.
Miller: But the calves, they stand next to their moms anyway, so, as long as the moms are …
J. Campbell: I mean, there’s some variability there, and it’s kind of a nebulous thing; you don’t want to picture something where these cows are physically contained in a region. You’re just sort of coaxing them to stay where you want them to stay. So yes, those calves will cross the line and transgress out, but they’re going to come back as long as the cow can’t leave.
Miller: Well, how quickly do they learn where they can go and they can’t go? If they’ve learned that if there’s a tone, if I go past this and then I get a shock if I go past that, and then you go to your computer, you change where the lines are, how quickly do they realize, oh, actually, I can and I will go to this new place?
J. Campbell: You know, it can be pretty fast. It depends on how attractive that new place is. Sometimes they’ll kind of hang where they are and just sort of drift out. Other times if you’re keeping them out of, say, a really lush area where they really wanna be, they can figure it out just about as soon as that change happens.
Miller: Anthony, I want to go back to the money side. As we heard, there had been a hope among both of you and other ranchers for a while now that the price would go down as this technology becomes more common.
A. Campbell: Yeah.
Miller: What is the cost difference currently between virtual and traditional fencing? It also seems like it’s a hard thing to compare since one is a per-foot cost and the other is sort of a system which involves infrastructure but then can be moved. How do you think about the price differences?
A. Campbell: Yeah, it is hard to compare. But I would figure that for our herd, and as many collars as we’re using and cows that we’re using, it would be about the equivalent to building 7 or 8 miles of hard fence, maybe even less than that, with the technology that we’re using.
Miller: But for that price, eventually you’ll actually be able to manage land that would have been fenced, more like 50 or 60 miles of fencing?
A. Campbell: Correct, yeah. And then also you’re not having to build cross fences and things like that because you’re able to put the fence wherever you want it. A lot of us have built, in the past, cross fences to split pastures in places and realized after a couple of years of using them, that that’s not where they should have been or we should have never put them there in the first place. With this virtual fence, we can go in and change that line whenever we want to, and not have to build those permanent hardwire cross fences.
Miller: Jason, could you have done this without support from the Soil and Water Conservation District, the county, nonprofits like Sustainable Northwest?
J. Campbell: Before the fire, we probably could have. In the midst of that fire, it would have been real, real difficult. One of the things they don’t tell you about fire recovery in the ranch business is just how many checks you’re going to write. If you think about what’s happening, these cows are coming out of burnt ground and you’ve got to go someplace with them today. Potentially, you’ve got to haul water to them, you’ve got to truck these cattle. You’re just in freefall, and you’re throwing money at every problem and hoping there’s a big enough net under you when the fall stops to catch you. So, in an ordinary year, we could have swung it. In the midst of all of that, it would have been very difficult.
Miller: Have you seen interest from fellow ranchers who don’t have this system now, since you’ve installed yours? People who say, “huh, maybe I want to do the same thing?”
J. Campbell: Oh, very much so, yeah. I can’t speak for Anthony, but I’m asked on a continual basis how this project’s going and how it’s working for us. And I think we’re getting a lot of attention from people who, like us, were on the fence about this a year or two ago, and now, they’ve got a neighbor that’s in it. So, with anything in this business, that’s the gold standard. If you’ve got a guy that’s already spent the money that you can go ask, that’s kind of what brings us into these new technologies.
Miller: Jason and Anthony, thanks very much.
J. Campbell: Oh, you’re very welcome. Thanks for having us.
A. Campbell: Thank you.
Miller: Jason Campbell is at Campbell Cattle in Gilliam County. Anthony Campbell is a rancher at Lone Rock Ranch, also in Gilliam County. They joined us to talk about post-fire virtual fence building in Gilliam County.
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