Category: Customer stories

A Nofence collar is not used in a controlled environment.

It rides on sheep, goats and cattle through forest, mountains, rain, heat and mud — and it has to stay on, keep working, and help the farmer manage grazing without a single physical fence.

That’s the problem Nofence set out to solve. And it’s exactly the kind of problem where material choices, plastic components and production quality decide whether the product holds up.

A digital boundary in a physical world

With Nofence, the farmer draws grazing areas digitally in an app instead of building and maintaining fences.

The animal wears a solar-powered collar that uses audio cues and, when needed, a gentle electric pulse, to learn where the boundary is. The result is grazing that bends to the farmer’s needs: animals are easier to move, difficult terrain becomes usable, and pastures can be rotated so one area rests and regrows while another is grazed.

By 1 January 2026, Nofence had sold more than 200,000 collars. Farmers have created 40,683 pastures, drawn 75,000 kilometres of virtual boundary and managed 2.5 million hectares of land, generating data from 20 million grazing days along the way. The technology is now live in six markets — Norway, Sweden, the UK, Ireland, Spain and the United States — and is used across all 50 US states.

What that’s worth looks different on every farm. In the Nordics, it can stretch the grazing season by at least two months. In Spain, animals graze high-risk land to prevent wildfires. In the US, farmers move stock more often to spare drought-stressed ground. The thread running through all of it is flexibility: the less a farmer depends on fixed infrastructure, the faster they can respond to weather, terrain and the animals themselves.

The product can look simple. The conditions it survives are anything but. The collar sits on animals that move, scratch, shove and snag on whatever they can find — and a cow can weigh close to a tonne. It has to take impact, stretching, temperature swings, moisture and years outdoors. That puts the mechanical design and material choices at the centre of everything. The collar doesn’t just have to work; it has to work every single day, on real animals, across very different markets.

Alvi’s role: engineering support, testing and production

The collaboration began in Leksvik in 2019, when Alvi (more specifically IV Moulding) was asked to develop a neck-strap component on a tight deadline. It has since grown into a close technical partnership spanning plastic components, tooling, material selection, prototyping, testing and production.

For Nofence, the real value has gone well beyond manufacturing capacity. It’s the competence to ask the hard questions early: Which material can take the stretch? How will the component behave over time, in heat, cold and damp? Can it be welded, assembled and produced reliably at scale?

Testing in the right material

Digital models and 3D prints are useful, but they only go so far. To understand how the collar would actually behave, Nofence needed injection-moulded test parts in the real material. Working with prototype tooling, Alvi and Nofence evaluated strength, ultrasonic welding, solar-cell integration and material performance — finding and fixing problems before committing to full-scale production tooling. For a scale-up, that’s risk taken off the table early.

Built to scale

Nofence has grown from a Norwegian technology company into an international scale-up, and that kind of growth demands a supply chain that can keep pace on quality, technical level and lead time. Alvi’s mix of local engineering support, industrial production experience and group-wide capacity — paired with the short distance between the teams in Trøndelag — has made the partnership work. But the thing that matters most is the way the two companies work together: direct, technical and honest.

Practical technology for a more flexible future

Nofence is helping farmers rethink grazing — not by replacing the farmer, but by handing them more control and more ways to use their land well. For Alvi, it’s the kind of project that shows what industrial expertise brings to sustainable technology: not big claims, but practical decisions, tested materials and dependable production.

When more than 200,000 collars are out in the world, it’s the small details that count. They’re what keep the product working — day after day, animal after animal, pasture after pasture.