As the hours of daylight get fewer, they become more precious on a hill farm. Like a lot of other farmers I also have a full-time job off farm, so farming work must be done before and after work. I am lucky that my employer, the National Trust, allows me to work flexible hours, but checking animals that graze remotely can be difficult during the winter as our belted galloway cows can take more than an hour to find.

We decided to try some new technology to help us save time, and it is working really well. The cows are wearing electric collars that show you their location via a phone app. In the morning, before I leave the house, I can see they are grazing at around 1,200ft near one of the masts that sit on top of some fells.

I head straight up, not wasting time looking in the woodland at the bottom. The cattle are grazing in tall grass as part of an environmental scheme to restore wood pasture. This grass, or deferred grazing, is used during the winter rather than bales of hay, but it can make the cows difficult to spot, especially with the trees and shrubs too.

On my phone, my location dot is moving closer and closer to where the cows are … then I spot two black ears. I would never have found these cows so easily otherwise. There is also the capacity to create virtual fencing (the cows respond to a noise from the collar when they reach a “boundary”), so that they avoid some areas and graze others for habitat restoration, although I have not tried this yet. In November we have to TB-test the cows and they will be in the fields around home for four days, so we will hopefully train them on the virtual fencing then.

Invisible fencing could be a gamechanger for habitat restoration. It will not be necessary to fence off areas that are excluded from grazing in inaccessible areas, they can just be drawn on your phone. I don’t think artificial intelligence will ever be able to check the health of animals without a farmer, but the collar can send an alert if the animal is behaving in an unpredictable or unexpected way.