Farmers care deeply for their land and animals - but agriculture, one of the world’s oldest industries, hasn’t yet fully benefited from modern technology. That gap is a massive opportunity to unlock greater productivity and sustainability.
We think the answer lies in pasture management. Smarter rotational grazing makes better use of the land, boosts productivity and improves soil health. Productivity doesn’t have to come at the cost of sustainability. With the right tools, farmers can deliver both.
“Farmers are the backbone of our country, and I was determined to help the industry make change for the better. So, I left my job building rockets, recruited Peter Beck (my boss) as an investor and board member and got to work on the family farm in the Waikato.”
Pre-Series A, we had Big Bird (our cow), a collar, and our team with some big ideas in their heads. Progress was slow, so we set a challenge: in eight weeks, we’d fly to San Francisco to raise money. The pitch? A live demo where an investor would see Big Bird listen and respond to collar cues from halfway across the globe, and show what she'd learned.
It was all or nothing. As Craig soared over the Pacific, we had the collective realisation that we’d overlooked the time zones. 10am in San Francisco, 4am in New Zealand - not so fun for us, but almost milking time for Big Bird!
Let’s set the scene. A floodlit paddock with Big Bird chewing her cud, waiting for milking. From a meeting in San Francisco, Craig sent the cue from his laptop - and Big Bird did exactly what she's learned to do - she walked towards the gate chosen by the investor. We proved cows could understand cues from a collar, forming the core of Halter.
A legendary Halter cow - our first milestone belongs to Big Bird.
To go from concept to reality, we needed to create durable hardware for our cows. Solar was the logical option to power our collars, but when Craig's initial solar panel calculations came back requiring a bath mat-sized panel for each collar, we knew we had a problem. That one was solved by hiring someone better at math…
The next challenge was finding a solar panel tough enough for a cow because the ones we had were breaking too easily. We figured out that the solar panel needed to withstand the energy equivalent to driving a golf ball off the tee.
Having explored many options with suppliers across the world, we eventually landed on using technology similar to bullet-proof glass. That wasn’t what we expected, but that’s life at a start-up - solving problems we didn't even know existed.
Once we had our collars functional and ready for their new home on a customer farm (and we'd convinced someone to be our very first Halter farmer), we switched our focus to installing towers and getting the farm ready for "go-live".
The day before the installation was planned to go ahead, the company we'd lined up to construct the towers fell through, which was spanner in the works number one. That wasn't going to stop us though - a few of the team jumped into a ute, picked up supplies in Auckland and headed down to the Waikato, and spent all night welding, drilling and building the towers by hand in Craig's dad's milking shed.
Thanks Malcolm!
Once the towers were ready, we found our spanner number two - the tower install sites on the customer farm were inaccessible to industrial trucks, so everything had to be done by hand, including lifting the towers into their respective positions.
We ran back out and purchased over 2000kg of concrete to mix, jugs to carry water by hand, and a wheelbarrow and many shovels to do this work manually. Talk about elbow grease. After a good few days of working dawn till dusk, a lot of laughter and plenty of sweat (sometimes coming out our eyes), we had our first farm installed.
Our first farmer was so chuffed at the end, he even bought us a box of beers. We chalked this experience up as a massive win, and a massive learning curve.
When collars first started landing on New Zealand soil ready to be deployed onto a customer farm, they weren’t quite ready. They first had to be calibrated so that they knew the difference between North and South (quite critical when you’re moving a cow around the farm!). How did we calibrate them? Well, we invented a Calibration Festival.
Each time a new farm needed to be deployed, the entire company would cram into utes and head down to Morrinsville. We would get out into the paddock, and each and every collar would require a very specific series of movements for five minutes before the pretty colours flashed telling us it was done. Rinse and repeat for thousands of collars.
After a few of these, we nicknamed the events Cali Fest, and they always came with great snacks, an in-house DJ, and a short aftermath ‘function’. This was critical work, and it simply couldn’t be done without great music, great snacks, and a lot of great attitudes.
Eventually we worked out a way for the collars to arrive into New Zealand calibrated, and so saw the end of these much anticipated festivals. So long, Cali Fest, see you (hopefully not) soon.
Our first winter with collars on cow was hardcore. We hadn’t yet worked out how to keep the batteries alive for longer than a couple of days, especially with less solar to power them up in the depths of winter. To keep up with our necessary pace of learning (spoiler alert: a very rapid pace), we transformed a shipping container in Morrinsville into a full-time collar charging station, and each frosty morning a different crew would swap hundreds of collars onto the chargers.
Nights were a flurry of activity at Auckland HQ as our Hardware team worked tirelessly to develop and manufacture new collar designs. Machines hummed (or screeched) through to the early hours, much to the annoyance of our neighbours who had the noise complaint company on speed dial.
Sorry!
Each and every morning in the Waikato, the team (two removing old collars and two fitting the new ones) ensured that the process was as seamless as possible, and that a cow never had a collar on her neck that wasn’t charged up and doing its job. This swapping system became a daily routine that year, with every member of the company stepping up to volunteer in this vital operation.
We made it through our first winter with a heap of learnings, a heap of memories, and even more respect for the early morning work required to keep a farm humming.
Our Series B raise was fuelled by the unwavering support of our first five Halter farmers. We believe their enthusiasm for Halter helped us secure funding to take Halter from five farms, to thousands of farmers.
One of the original adopters moved to France and was able to maintain visibility of his farm (being well looked after by a farm manager) in Te Awamutu from France. C'est bon!
Another, looking straight down the barrel of a camera, told us with a straight face, "I'd retire from farming if I didn't have Halter."
One of our first customers even bought a personalised plate that simply read "Halter." We wondered why we didn’t think of that first, but then again, it’s quite a story for a farmer to show their support in such a way.
It was a sign that things were starting to work. Most importantly, it showed that people truly believed in our product and our mission. And that’s what it’s all about.
