Dairy Focus
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www.guardianonline.co.nz
Halter - Kiwi ingenuity at its best Pat Deavoll
RURAL REPORTER
A
re we seeing the end of number eight wire and the electric fence? Fenceless farming, waterways protected and an extra three hours of farmers’ time saved each day is the claim of technology breakthrough Halter. And if it’s investors are anything to go by, it’s a pretty good claim at that. The result is a solar-powered, GPS enabled collar that goes around the cow’s neck, and lets farmers manage and shift them remotely. This smart system guides cows around a farm using sound and vibrations, allowing farmers to automate herd movements and create virtual fences. The sound helps the cow understand where she can’t go, and the vibration helps her understand where she can. The technology can also tell a farmer when a cow is hurt or on heat. Halter is operated from a
mobile application (cell phone or tablet) which also allows farmers to schedule moves and set virtual boundaries. Matt Redmond is the operations manager on a 147 hectare, 520 cow Craigmore farm in the Culverden Basin, North Canterbury. The farm adopted Halter a month ago and is already seeing the benefits. “There were a few reasons why we adopted Halter,” Redmond says. “Mainly because we are passionate about sustainability and also people welfare. “It has enabled us to give our staff a better lifestyle, focus on management jobs which are more high value than sitting behind cows.” Redmond says since Covid the farm had found it hard to recruit staff to its junior roles. But with the attraction of Halter, they have been able to fill these roles, plus have a manager and 2IC keen to learn and adopt the new technology on pasture management and animal welfare. “We have seen the labour benefits and are now starting to get the cows’ health and mating data coming through. We have also noticed the cows are a lot
calmer walking to the shed without having the pressure of a motorbike behind them,” Redmond says. “Halter gives us the ability to see where our cows are at all times. It gives us the ability to monitor nutrients when the cows are spending time on the paddock. “The ability to create virtual fences within a paddock and hold cows so we can focus on our residuals is invaluable. The cows learned the virtual fence within a day which was amazing. “Now we are working on training the cows for drafting which will allow us to pull individual cows out of the mob and get them to walk to a designated paddock. This will save us hours of time. “It has also enabled us to split the herd – we are running a skinny, lighter herd and the main herd- so we can preferentially feed the skinny cows without requiring any extra labour. “It’s allowing us to run 520 cows with two-labour units, whereas before we would need 3 labour units,” Redmond says. Halter also monitors the wellbeing of cows. It collects data on a cow’s normal behaviour
Halter’s patented solution consists of a solar-powered collar that sits on each cow and a mobile application that enables farmers to shift, manage and monitor their herds remotely.
and then compares it to a current reading to monitor an animal’s health. Cow collars that use heat sensing technology have been around for about a decade but none of them had the same capabilities as the Halter collars, Craig Piggott, founder and CEO of Halter says. “Those ones are kind of like fancy pedometers. They are good at what they do but they are simple devices.” “To summarize what Halter does,” says Piggott in an interview with Matchstiq, “we built a system or a set
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of technologies that go from hardware all the way through to an app on a phone, and we use that system to understand everything about the movements of a dairy cow in both real-time and long term. “We track things like health and train cows to respond to a set of cues. And with that, we’re able to guide animals around a dairy farm, reduce labour challenges, increase milk production, and improve animal welfare. It’s a full system to help manage a dairy farm.” Piggott, who has an engineering degree and worked