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  • Australasia

Deal focus: Cattle herding enters the app age

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  • Justin Niessner
  • 27 April 2021
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New Zealand’s Halter is bringing innovation to an industry that hasn’t seen many new tools since the invention of barbed wire. Blackbird Ventures is offering its support

Craig Piggott is possibly the best personification of how New Zealand’s emerging reputation as a high-tech economy is starting to cross over with longstanding strengths in agriculture.

Piggot grew up on a dairy farm, sometimes working up to 100-hour weeks. Rather than pick up the family business, he studied engineering at the University of Auckland. By graduation he had taken a job with local space tech developer and start-up ecosystem champion Rocket Lab. All the while, he was working on an agtech side project, which became his fulltime focus in late 2016.

Halter provides farmers with smart cow collars and an accompanying app to manage herds more effectively. The company recently raised a NZ$32 million ($23.4 million) led by Blackbird Ventures. Rocket Lab investors Promus Ventures and Data Collective also participated, as did Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck.

Blackbird, normally a seed and Series A investor, had missed out on the previous round for timing reasons and made the company its top priority in New Zealand. The investment comes seven months after the VC firm launched a NZ$60 million fund dedicated to the country, co-headed by Samantha Wong.

“There is an amazing first principles thinking that I’ve found in a lot of founders in New Zealand,” Wong says. “Maybe it’s growing up in the wide-open spaces on farms and just having to be resourceful with what is there. It creates a level of resourcefulness and original thinking that is really refreshing. And that turns into companies like Halter.”

Halter’s collars are GPS-enabled and solar-powered. They allow farmers to remotely shift, virtually fence, and monitor their cows’ health and behavior. The collars use sound and vibrations to guide the animals around the farm. Cows walk themselves unsupervised to the milking shed, shaving hours off the work hours for their handlers.

“Craig has the ambition to create something that really transforms an industry. That’s what led him to Halter and what was ultimately attractive to us,” Wong says. “The last big innovation in this market was probably tractors, and before that, fences. This technology effectively enables mind control of a 500-kilo mammal in a way that’s better for its welfare and also better for the land. It ticked all the boxes for us.”

The main problem-solve here is in labor. If Halter can allow for one hire to be removed from a small-sized farm, it can reduce the labor cost by 30% – but wages are not really the issue. Managing and milking dairy cows isn’t highly paid work, but it is a difficult role to fill. The work is seasonal and taxing, typically involving 18-hour days in the field during calving season. Any advancement of this process into modernity has proven welcome.

“We spoke to one customer who’s actually completely changed the way they farm,” Wong says. “They’ve moved to year-round milking, which means they can do it at 9 a.m. That aligns with women in the town who do school drop-off and gives them a bunch of hours in the middle of the day. It’s unlocking this untapped labor supply that wants the year-round work but can’t be in a muddy field at 4 a.m.”

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