Armstrong will lead the commercial launch of Nofence
Nofence has brought in an agtech professional with more than a decade of experience to lead its commercial launch in Canada.
Kalon Armstrong, a co-founder of Enriched Ag, an Alberta-based data insight company focused on ranching and grazing management, is Nofence’s managing director for Canada.
Nofence is a precision livestock management company founded in Norway.
With its N3 virtual fencing cattle collar, farmers can direct livestock movement, monitor herd activity, and reduce labour demands from a smartphone.
A tool capable of working on Norwegian farms should do well on Canadian farms too.
“There are a lot of analogues to its inception developing in Norway that will transfer well to the Canadian landscape, whether it’s from climate, grazing conditions (or) landscape,” Armstrong told Farms.com. “I grew up on an acreage and went to school with a lot of farmers and ranchers. I have an appreciation of the cold climate that can occur up north in -35 Celsius and getting a lot of the tech to work.”
Nofence cattle collar (Nofence photo).
Nofence’s plan is to launch commercially in Canada next year.
In the meantime, work is ongoing to provide some producers with Nofence to serve as anchor sites, Armstrong said.
During his professional career Armstrong used visual tools to help farmers who made operational and grazing changes and wanted to see how the land responded to those decisions.
Systems like Nofence can take that kind of management to another level.
“It would take me a few years to really see (the changes) unless there’s a lever that is a precision grazing platform to initiate that change,” he said. “So having a platform to monitor the animals and implement their moves is extremely valuable.”
One specific area Armstrong believes Nofence can benefit Canadian producers with is grazing leases on Crown land.
Jurisdictions like Alberta, Ontario, and British Columbia, for example, put the onus of fence maintenance requirements for grazing leases on the leaseholder.
Using the N3 platform farmers can draw virtual fences on their smartphone, which the collars can reflect in about two minutes.
The ability to produce tangible data showing care for the land could go a long way for leaseholders during the renewal process, he said.
“Imagine you stack up several years of Nofence data, animal locations, and grazing decision making,” he said. It becomes a pretty compelling package for a producer to use in their own way to prove they are doing right by the land. I think right out of the gate that’s going to have immediate high value to producers who are constrained by leases.”
Armstrong is also actively involved in looking at using satellite technology to fill in connectivity gaps where cellular dead zones exist.