George van Vlaanderen used to spend hours each day moving fences so his dairy goats could graze on fresh forage. Now an app does the job. Van Vlaanderen, who makes cheese and kefir at Does' Leap Farm in Bakersfield, moves 45 goats around his fields using Norwegian technology called Nofence. He uses the Nofence app to draw a GPS-defined virtual enclosure in his pasture. The app sends the GPS information to the goats' solar-powered collars, which beep insistently to warn the animals when they approach the invisible fence, then deliver a shock if they try to cross it. "When the herd wants to come in for milking, or it's buggy or hot, they're all just waiting there on the boundary," said van Vlaanderen, who estimates it took just three days for the goats to learn their limits. "I can set up the pasture on my phone in minutes, and the whole herd is contained." High-tech innovations such as Nofence are increasingly finding a place on Vermont farms, where software and new machines can ease the workload and guide decision making. Some dairy cows, for example, sport Fitbit-like devices that transmit information about their behavior and health to farm managers. An array of sophisticated data-gathering systems helps crop growers fine-tune their planting and fertilizing, minimizing waste and runoff. Tech plays a role in the maple industry, too. In some operations, when a squirrel chews a hole in a maple sap collection tube, sensors can alert the sugar bush manager immediately that the vacuum pressure in the system has changed, and where. And indoor cannabis growers rely on sensors and software to adjust humidity, light, fertilizer and other environmental conditions with the aim of producing healthy, high-value plants. Tools that use satellite imagery, AI, machine learning and data have been helping out on farms, even small Vermont ones, for a while. But the rate of change is accelerating, according to Laura Ginsburg, who runs the Northeast Dairy Business Innovation Center, hosted by the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets. A decade ago, Ginsburg said, so-called precision agriculture was largely limited to field-based practices such as using GPS on tractors to help farmers map fields. Nowadays, computers on farm equipment can make a lot of important decisions instantaneously while rolling through a field, for example by adjusting the pressure used to put seeds in the ground according to variations in…