One ranching rule-of-thumb is not to name your livestock — it’s partly superstition, partly prudence to keep some distance from the animals that will eventually be sold to the meat market.
But there Frankie was, the four-day-old blue-eyed, soft-snouted calf curled in his pen while ranchers Richard and Martha Paun got ready to bottle feed it.
The Pauns had initially kept Frankie nameless, per tradition, but he stole the heart of their daughter when she visited the ranch that sat just outside of Douglas, Arizona. The name stuck. Anyway, the Pauns have bigger problems than Frankie’s christening to worry about.
At the top of their list is relentless drought. All around the rangelands of southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, grasses are failing to put out enough green to nourish cattle. Supplemental cattle feed is expensive, so ranchers have been reducing herd sizes, in some cases, selling out altogether.
The loss is more than the slow collapse of a smattering of businesses in this rural corner of windswept fields and open skies.
The Sky Islands grasslands at the US-Mexico border are called the Malpai region, and are some of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the American Southwest. Ranchers here are conservation-minded, and they see themselves as stewards of this 1-million-acre landscape on which wildlife and livestock can coexist.
Malpai ranchers practice rotational grazing, fix erosion, build wildlife-friendly infrastructure, welcome the formation of conservation easements on their lands. Environmental groups call the Malpai method “ranching the right way.”
Ranching runs in the blood of the residents here, as it has for generations. Practitioners still keep to the traditions of horseback riding and rope slinging that their predecessors did in the sunshine of their own days.
But what ranchers consider the worst drought in decades threatens the existence of the Southwestern cowboy. The monsoons are dragging their feet and relinquishing their usual rage, and the gentle winter storms are waning.
Without the clockwork rains and with fewer dispersed livestock to work the soil, the Malpai grasslands are slowly transforming into a shrub desert.
But ranchers aren’t entirely defenseless against the drought, thanks to modern technology that has eased some of the pains. A new breed of ranchers is experimenting with water-smart sensors, GPS gadgetry and artificial intelligence, and these instruments have allowed them to save water, monitor their fields more carefully and lighten the footprint of livestock so drought-strained grazed pastures can heal.
The data-backed approach of precision ranching helps ranchers organize their time, labor and money more efficiently.
Precision ranching can help solve other age-old problems of a tough profession on a tough landscape. The Pauns only need to look at Frankie — he owes his survival to precision technology, a walking testament to what it can do.
In late March, temperatures in Hildago County, New Mexico, were higher than usual. A lone turkey vulture wheeled overhead in a blazing blue sky, an early migrant from Mexico.
“It means summer has started,” rancher Richard Winkler said. So begins that high-strung time of year where ranchers worry nonstop about water.
The owner of the Sunrise Cattle Ranch has already suffered for it. In the past two years, Winkler has sold off two-thirds of his cattle.
Winkler lives in a typical ranching house in this corner of the country. Pets trot through the main door, antler decor hangs off the wall, thick woven rugs brighten each room. But one room is out of sorts with the rugged theme.
In the office stands a desk-sized computer monitor, as big as the screens in a command center for a rocket launch. Instead of satellites, the computer communes with rain gauges on his fields, smart water sensors in storage tanks and scores of GPS-collared cows that orbit his home on thousands of acres of rangeland.
Winkler is one of six ranchers in the Malpai borderlands participating in a three-year precision ranching study led by researchers at New Mexico State University.
Winkler starts his day sifting through sensor data from his computer station. They tell him where he needs to go and what he needs to check on in person, allowing him to budget fieldwork more wisely.
He used to drive 100 miles daily to inspect his water storage tanks. Now, sensors beam back water levels every 15 minutes. A remote-controlled pump enables him to refill troughs from the house. Or he can simply let automatic timers handle that work for him.
Most of his water in the tanks comes from winter catchment. But in the age of drought, he has to supplement that with pumped groundwater. Every drop is precious.
“It takes me all winter to store the water,” he said. “It’s nerve-wracking. You don’t sleep good at night.”
Round-the-clock sensors help him catch leaks sooner than if he visited the tanks himself. When sensors tell him water levels are dropping faster than the pace of cows drinking it, he knows what to patch before all the water drains out.
Many Malpai ranchers have side jobs, so the remote sensors come in handy when they’re off at work and a good distance from their cows.
On the other side of the Peloncillo Mountains, rancher Dawn Strelow works a second job at the extension office in Lordsburg, a good 1.5-hour commute from her ranch. Like Winkler, her ranch is also outfitted with smart sensors that allow her to check water levels on her cell phone. If she detects a leak, she can ring up a neighbor or an extra hand to fix it. The sensors give her peace of mind when she’s so far from home.
Technology can’t solve the drought, but it can alleviate its strains and others. Labor is time is money, so a tool like GPS trackers on cows frees up resources for ranchers to beef up conservation goals or meet already-tight margins.
Roughly the size of a brick, GPS units dangle off the neck like soundless cowbells. The batteries need to be replaced at least once a year, but ranchers aren’t complaining about the inconvenience as much as they are savoring the benefits.
“You can find your cow on Google maps like you find somebody’s address,” Strelow said.
Like the water sensors, these collars are a time-saving measure. On this vast landscape, where brush-dotted hills ripple into baleen-toothed mountains, a cow can be challenging to find. With the collars, a four-hour quest for a cow shortens into a 45-minute trek, Strelow said. These days, she simply pinpoints where a straggler is on her phone, then drives a trailer to pick her up.
The GPS collars use artificial intelligence to analyze the behavior of the cows. They can tell the difference between a languid graze and a diligent march in search of greener pastures. That comes in handy for evaluating which individual has greater gumption for foraging, and which is less inclined to work for it.
As ranchers downsize due to the drought, analytical tools like this help owners select the hardiest cows to keep.
And the collars are an important tool for animal welfare, too. By identifying anomalies in behaviors, the GPS device makes it easier for ranchers to administer care for their livestock, especially in times of emergency.
A few weeks ago, Strelow kept a close watch on a GPS-tagged heifer that was about to deliver her first calf. Pregnant cows usually split from the herd to give birth in secrecy. She ultimately miscarried, but Strelow’s team was able to track her down, whisk her back home and put her on or a regimen of antibiotics. Though the cow lost her baby, she kept her life.
Technology lowers the barrier of entry for newer ranchers in a profession with an aging problem. The Pauns know they aren’t your typical Malpai rancher, having taken over Lee Station Ranch six years ago rather than inheriting it through family. Everything they know now, they learned the hard way from making mistakes on the job.
On the windswept plains of the Malpai borderlands, pedigree cowboy legends walk, including 90-year-old cougar-hunting Warner Glenn and politics-bridging Bill McDonald. Their adventures reverberate in their footsteps all over the countryside. They’ve set a high bar, and the Pauns knew they had to catch up, fast.
“We needed to find an edge,” Richard Paun said. So he and his wife looked to technology.
In March, one of their pregnant cows showed all the signs of an imminent birth. A year ago, before GPS collars arrived, the same cow got pregnant, but returned to the herd with no newborn in tow. Paun combed the wilderness and never found her calf.
But this year, history seemed to be repeating itself — the newly skinny cow went the move again all too quickly. With help from her collar, Richard returned to the exact coordinates where she last kept her counsel. There, among the thorny brushes in the folds on the Perilla Mountains, an hours-old calf quaked, waiting in vain for its wayward mother. Paun brought it back to the ranch in his pick-up truck, with the AC blaring.
If it weren’t for the mother’s GPS collar, “I would have never found (Frankie),” Paun said.
Just outside the Malpai area, near Cotton City, another ranching family has graduated from the NMSU study and is striking out on their own with commercial tech. Three Mile Ranch is the first business in the valley to experiment with virtual fencing, another type of GPS collar built for an even more hands-free style of herd management. The collars deliver audio signals and mild electrical buzzes to coax wearers to stay within invisible, hand-drawn boundaries.
These virtual-fence collars help ranchers move herds into paddocks du jour, saving the labor and materials for building physical fences.
The collars, provided by the New Zealand company Halter, come solar powered. Also equipped with artificial intelligence, they tailor warning signals to the personality quirks of each cow, blaring stronger cues for the more stubborn individuals. Grant funding and company assistance will cover the $72-per-cow annual subscription fees of the virtual fence system for four years.
Ranchers need all the advantages they can get, as the landscape is turning against them. “They say that March is in like a lion, out like a lamb,” ranch owner Kanzas Massey said. Big storms last came by in the fall of 2022 and never returned. Yucca and mesquite are already buckling in the drought.
Spring dust storms occur nearly four times a week, sometimes lingering through summer if the monsoons dawdle. They can shut down the region’s major traffic artery, Interstate 10, and bury entire grasslands in feet-deep sand. And they’re intensifying because of the drought. The Three Mile Ranch also grows supplement feed of alfalfa and hay, but those crops are failing more often as dust storms rage on.
Drought is squeezing ranching’s profit margins, so anything that can shave costs will help keep businesses afloat.
Virtual fences allow ranchers to manage the intensity of rotational grazing more accurately by shifting herds from paddock to paddock more quickly. In the past, Massey’s family had to build new polywire electric fences every time they uprooted the herd. Virtual fencing has saved them the trouble of this three-day chore, and whittled the labor for cattle drives to only a team of two, with the wireless infrastructure acting as the side runners.
From the get-go, the economic benefits of virtual fences were apparent. In the first two weeks of use, virtual fencing already saved the ranch 28 miles of fenceline construction. It costs up to $80,000 for the material and labor to build a mile of fence.
“That’s where collars will pay for themselves very quickly,” Massey said.
Research projects elsewhere have demonstrated that virtual fencing brings ecological benefits. Fewer material fencelines on the landscape means fewer obstacles for wildlife to migrate. One study found that fence-free paddocks make for pollinator-friendlier habitat compared with grounds hemmed in by physical barriers, because intangible infrastructure unwittingly encourages cows to browse more randomly.
And the flexibility of virtual fencing has also allowed land managers to cordon cattle from environmentally sensitive areas on demand, such as riparian zones, with a swipe of the finger.
The Three Mile Ranch owners can’t imagine a future without the collars.
“I don’t know how we’re going to afford this when the program is done, but we’re going to have to figure it out,” Massey said. They’re hoping that prices for virtual fencing collars will drop as competition increases and technology improves.
Precision ranching technology has made fans of its adherents, but they’re still the minority among the broader agricultural community, one that prides itself for keeping alive the traditions of old-school cowboying. Many adopters, including the Pauns of Lee Station, represent a particular species of Malpai ranchers that falls outside the norm: They didn’t come by ranching by inheriting the family business and all its grizzled ways.
The younger ranchers represent a new, tech-savvy breed. Ranching newcomers readily romp on quads and trailers, rather than purely on horseback.
“The biggest obstacle for technology in farming and ranching circles is the age factor,” Massey said. The median age of the American farmer is over 58. At regional meetings, Massey and her husband are often the youngest ranchers there, and both of them are pushing 50.
Dawn Strelow and her sister, Dusti, are fifth-generation ranchers, but as owners of the only female-led Malpai ranch, they stick out among their peers.
“We’re women in ranching, and I think that makes us a little bit more open to change,” Strelow said. “I am not so stubborn that I’m going to spend 16 hours and four days looking for a cow.” (As further proof that she’s willing to buck tradition, Strelow isn’t shy about naming her cows, among which are Baby and Buttercream.)
But these computer cowherders insist that indoor technology can’t replace outdoor ground truthing.
“It is one tool, but it shouldn’t be the only tool,” Winkler said. He still ventures out to patrol his water tanks every three days in the summer instead of daily. Ranchers need to be ready if technology glitches, so there’s no room for a lazy, indoor cowboy.
Still, these ranchers will take any slight advantage they can get, even if their peers might judge them for it.
“My grandfather, no way, would have ever done this. Never, ever in a million years. He’s probably turning over in his grave, laughing at me now,” Strelow said. “But everything has to move forward. And technology is becoming such an important part of everything. It has to become a part of ranching too.”
Back on Lee Station Ranch, the Pauns are making up for Frankie’s traumatic start in life. Frankie receives a bottle of milk three times a day, and each feeding session is a slow and messy affair. Shy little Frankie doesn’t take his milk easily, averting his head and at times refusing to swallow, but he’s no match for the Pauns’ patience and determination.
Baby Frankie — his unusual birth, his rescue, down to his christening — represents the value of breaking away from the old mold. Drought is distorting the Malpai steppe. As ranchers step into new territory, they know it’ll take more than grit and stoicism — they’ll also need to bend to keep up and survive.
Shi En Kim covers environmental issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Send tips or questions to shien.kim@arizonarepublic.com.
Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
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