Once again, we’re literally heading out to Left Field for this week’s startup. We’ve covered TRIC Robotics fighting mold & mildew with UV light and Carbon Robotics zapping weeds with lasers. This time we’re going a little bigger.
Perhaps the biggest field of them all. And certainly one of the most important. The one that feeds us, from a Pittsburgh-style steak (Mitch & Zach) to a pint of Jeni’s ice cream (Peri).
That’s right. We’re talkin’ cows. And I know what you’re thinking — what kind of startup centered around cows could possibly be interesting enough for Left Field? How about one worth $2 billion?
Introducing this week’s company… Halter. A New Zealand-born company that makes solar-powered GPS collars for cattle. Farmers and ranchers can draw virtual fences from their phones, rather than moving physical wires or gates and guiding the herd on horseback or 4-wheelers.
As simple as that sounds, it’s a massive market with a problem that hasn’t really changed since barbed wire. So a farm guy from a country famous for its dairy decided to do something about it.
Okay but how
First, let’s talk about the traditional method. Moving a herd meant riding out on a 4-wheeler with a dog to wrangle the herd into the next pasture. Fences, gates, and a lot of work.
The Halter way works in two pieces... a collar and an app.
The collar looks more like a heavy-duty dog collar, with two solar panels at 10 and 2 o’clock and a small weight at the bottom to keep it from turning upside down.
Inside the collar is a GPS that tracks every cow at all times, plus a sound/vibration/pulse feature that talks to the cow.
Sound cues give the animals directional guidance.
Vibration cues encourage them to move in the right direction.
A LOW-energy electric pulse only kicks in when an animal ignores the sound and vibration cues.
And don’t go getting upset about the pulse. It’s significantly weaker than a standard electric fence. Halter says dairy cows take ~7 days to train, while beef cattle take ~10. Once trained, a vast majority of a cow’s cues are sound and vibration.
Two solar panels power the collars using Ray Baker (the sun). Satellites can connect to the collars, giving farmers and ranchers a live feed on every animal like Find My Friends, but for a herd of cattle.
The app lets farmers draw fence lines with their fingers and also send a herd to the next pasture with the push of a button. It’ll even flag when a cow starts acting differently, which may mean something’s up with Betsy and you should go check on her.
So the whole idea is to take a once labor-intensive job and hand it to tech that guides smart animals to where they need to be next. Can’t do that with a barbed wire fence.
The guy who started it
Craig Piggott. A farm kid through and through. He grew up on a dairy farm in Matamata, New Zealand, and worked 80-hour weeks with his parents… like most farmers across the world.
So he understands the never-ending, brutal work that farming is. No days off when the cows need milking.
Craig eventually pushed his way into Rocket Lab. He knocked on the front door, was turned away a couple of times, and then essentially cornered Peter Beck (the founder) at an event and talked his way into a job. Turns out it worked. He got the job and reported directly to Peter.
Watching Beck build an entirely new industry from New Zealand opened his eyes to what else was possible. If you can launch rockets from New Zealand, why can’t the industry the country is actually known for get an upgrade?
So in 2016, Craig started building Halter on the side. He didn’t tell his boss, or even his parents, until he knew it had legs. When he finally fessed up, Beck didn’t fire him. He invested, joined the board, and became his mentor.
What came next was years of ups and downs. I highly encourage you to read the six milestones on their website. Calibration festivals aka “Cali Fest,” 4 a.m. demos, and a lot of shit product until they got it just right. It’s a great startup story.
The honest take
Halter isn’t the only one doing this. Gallagher, Nofence, and Vence all sell virtual fencing too. So is this a race to the bottom? Maybe. But when your herd is your livelihood, you don’t want the Amazon knockoff version. You want the best of the best, with boots on the ground to support you. That’s what Halter provides… field teams that work alongside ranchers.
And back to the pulse. Some people will have a problem with it no matter what. Zapping an animal isn’t natural. Fair. But Halter says a trained cow typically goes a whole week without a pulse. And fences aren’t natural either. Out West, pronghorn run into fences all the time along their migration routes (shoutout MeatEater for teaching me this). So fences do wild animals a disservice too.
The cost. It’s not a one-time expense like a fence. It’s a subscription that doesn’t end. And if you’ve already got a fence up, it’s a tougher sell. Actual costs vary with herd size and acreage, but when Halter’s beef system launched in 2023, it ran $96 (NZD) per collar per year. But what it buys you is time, and it’s hard to put a price on that.
And it shows up on the bottom line. A study of 10 New Zealand dairy farms found a 13% average lift in profit before tax using Halter.
Plus all the info you’d never have without it. Which cows might be sick. Which ones are ready to breed. A Nebraska ranch put its first-time mothers in their own group on the best grass. Out of 91, only five or six didn’t get pregnant.
If they pull this off
Picture a collar on most of the cows on earth. Fewer fences across the West, which is a good thing for migratory animals, better grazing practices, more food from less land, and time handed back to the people who make it all happen.
For Halter, that’s massive. A win for them, a win for farmers, and a win for the earth. Another triple crown in Left Field.
And farming and ranching become more accessible. Two of the biggest barriers to entry are labor and the cost of fencing. Now a rancher can draw a fence from their phone and, instead of riding out to move the herd, call it like an Uber.
Open the damn gates.
Want to work out there?
This is one of the best careers pages I’ve seen. Before you even get to the open roles, of which there are many, Halter tells you real success stories from inside the company. And they reward performance over qualifications.
Put simply, there’s an enormous amount of opportunity at Halter. Engineers, product people, and the folks who work directly with farmers across the world. Because if you’re going to put a collar on every cow on earth, you need to meet farmers and ranchers on their own turf.
Open roles → https://www.halterhq.com/careers
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