This NZ Startup Is Herding Cows With Apps

Farmers are up against the wall when it comes to numbers. Cold early mornings mustering. Fuel burned on quads moving stock. Staff retention and burnout. Finally the looming specter of keeping as green a business as possible and protecting waterways. All of it is a number on a chart, a sunk cost, a calculation to be made. Hopefully the number is green at the end of the day when the milk and beef have been sent off for processing.

Halter is an agritech startup spun up in 2016 and based in Auckland by founder and CEO Craig Piggott. Piggott was working at Rocket Lab while his parents still worked the farm, and this put him in a unique position to view the farming life he’d grown up in from a different angle, and let him put his engineering skills to good use.

The business primarily pivots on solar powered GPS collars worn by herds that can remotely guide and control the cows without the need for motorbikes, dogs, or fences to keep them in line. Farmers simply draw zones on their phones that they want the cows to stay within, and then leave them to it. Once cows reach the edge of their zone the collar will let them know with a sound, stepping up to a buzz, and then an electric pulse if they get stroppy. Adjustment period to train them takes a day or two.

It can even act as a bit of a Fitbit for cows, which means you can pinpoint any livestock out of a herd that needs special attention or vet care. The data can also be sent to Protrack systems, an automation farming solution that usually requires manual data entry for certain applications. Now farmers can get a bead on when a cow is in heat or possibly pregnant.

Fenceless farming is a game changer that has already proven to lower expenditure on fuel and labour costs, as well as maximising grazing. It can even help protect waterways and increase soil carbon sequestration to reduce net emissions.

Northland hill-country farmer and former Beef and Lamb New Zealand Chair James Parsons owns a 600ha Angus stud farm and is one of Halter’s first beef customers. He says the system is a ‘game-changer’.

“Effortless rotational grazing on hill country beef farms is an untapped lever for achieving more sustainable and profitable production; Halter is a technology that can make best practice possible and bring hill country farming into a new era,” says Parsons.

“Within our first month, cows have been trained and are now on daily shifts. Uncollared calves are creep-grazing ahead of mum, which we anticipate will bring a significant jump in weaning weight. This was impossible to achieve even with expensive conventional fencing.”

Kiwi ingenuity didn’t end at number eight wire, in fact, Kiwi ingenuity  might do away with wire entirely.