Halter founder and CEO Craig Piggott at his firm's Auckland HQ. Photo / Jason Oxenham
“Often you’ll hear dairy farmers say they’re actually grass farmers,” says Halter CEO Craig Piggott.
“That’s because pasture is 85 per cent of the profitability on these farms.”
Halter started with its “virtual fencing” smart collars, which now help to monitor and control the movements of more than 100,000 head of cattle.
Now, fresh off an $85 million Series C raise, the Auckland and Waikato-based firm is branching out into what might be called “smart grass”.
Its new Pasture Pro app pulls data from drones, satellite images, Halter collars and other sources to help farmers manage their paddocks.
“A lot of what we’re doing wasn’t even possible as recently as a couple of years ago. [It’s] based on the developments in AI [artificial intelligence] and machine learning.”
He says analysis of “residuals” - what’s left behind after cows finish grazing a paddock - is an example of where Pasture Pro can help day-to-day.
“It’s a really important KPI [key performance indicator]. If you graze it down too low, you sacrifice growth in the future. If you leave too much behind, you’re wasting grass.”
Another key factor is grazing when grass is at the right leaf stage.
Pasture Pro lets you take a picture of a paddock on your phone. It’s then interpreted by Halter’s AI, which has been trained on over 10,000 images of residuals on a range of dairy farms, using modelling developed by pasture scientists. The idea is that the artificial intelligence will offer better and better advice over time as new photos are added to the mix and it “teaches” itself about your farm.
Pasture Pro works with Halter’s smart collars in two ways, Piggott says. The app uses local weather data collected by the wireless collars and the “virtual fencing” set-up enabled by the collars (which use audio cues to keep a herd in a certain area). “Right now, [most] farmers manage their farms with paddocks. Paddocks are a fixed shape. They don’t change very often or at all unless you manually put up fences. The collars enable you to allocate any amount of grass.”
Halter retains ownership of its smart collars, which are periodically upgraded. A farmer gets each collar for free, then pays a monthly subscription per cow for the software that runs it.
The firm recently cut its pricing by 40 per cent to $9 per collar per month for its “Core” software, which includes virtual fencing and guidance, and basic pasture metrics.
A “Pro” package, with bespoke pricing, includes automated daily pasture cover reports, constant tracking of leaf emergence rates and residuals assessment.
Piggot says the price cut was possible because of Halter’s increasing scale.
But he acknowledges it also suits the new lay of the land.
“The milk price has been coming down, as well as on-farm costs going up,” he says.
“But farmers know that constraints breed innovation. [Those factors] force you to try new things and to be innovative.”
Halter’s investors - a number of whom come from the US - will know that Pasture Pro won’t find much of a market in North America, or other territories where feedlots and grain bags are the norm, and the locals balk at the taste of grass-fed beef.
Nevertheless, its founder bills Pasture Pro as the most sustainable solution - and the most economical.
“Grass is the cheapest form of feed and it’s the [most low-emissions] form of feed versus buying in imported feed grains or palm kernels,” Piggot says.
“So the more grass we can grow on a farm, the better it is for a farmer’s bottom line, but it’s also more sustainable and better for these farmers.”
He adds, “Zooming out, half of the world’s habitable land mass is agriculture. So the goal for us is: how do we build tools and give those farmers the tools to be more productive and more sustainable?”
On a more immediate commercial level, Pasture Pro gives Halter a feature edge over eShepherd, the Australian smart collar maker bought by Gallagher Group in mid-2021.
Piggott, 29, grew up on a dairy farm near Morrinsville (his parents would later become his first customer, and still host Halter’s test farm).
After completing a mechanical engineering degree in Auckland, he joined Fisher & Paykel Appliances for a year before landing an engineering role at Rocket Lab - founded by F&P Appliances alum Peter Beck.
While at Rocket Lab, he told Beck about his idea for Halter. Beck encouraged him and helped to bankroll the start-up.
“At first I worked on Halter as a side hustle, on weekends and evenings,” Piggott said. “When I told Peter, he was super-supportive.”
Today, Beck is still on Halter’s board and a frequent touchstone.
Piggott is also paying it forward. He recently invested in subleasing start-up Kiki, whose youthful founders are launching in the US following a $10m seed round.
His own firm’s capital-raising effort continues to set local benchmarks.
“At the start of the year, we raised $85m,” Piggot says, referring to his firm’s Series C round, led by Bessemer - a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that was one of Rocket Lab’s early backers.
“The work that we’ve been able to do on Pasture Pro, and a lot of this investment into the product, has been a direct result of that fundraising,” Piggott says.
The round followed a $32m Series B raise in 2021, which was led by Australasian VC Blackbird Ventures, with Beck, Icehouse Ventures and others chipping in (Icehouse Ventures CEO Robbie Paul recently said his firm has put more than $15m into Halter, making it one of his firm’s biggest punts).
And back near its genesis, in 2018, Halter staged a $7m raise from backers including Beck, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Sir Stephen Tindall’s K1W1, the Chicago-based Promus Ventures (another of Rocket Lab’s early backers) and the Palo Alto-based DCVC (ditto).
At that stage, the four-man Halter’s tiny office had a student meets science lab feel.
Today, the firm employs around 160 and is headquartered in an atrium near Auckland’s Victoria Park that used to house Trade Me. The facility also includes an R&D lab and warehouse (manufacturing is done in China).
Piggott won’t reveal financials, but it was notable how his firm defied the venture capital drought in March with its $85m Series C.
We're stoked to see Halter CEO and Founder Craig Piggott in the lineup of exceptional speakers for #Sunrise22 by @blackbirdvc in Auckland on September 6.
— Halter (@halterHQ) August 8, 2022
If you want to meet 500+ of Aotearoa’s startup community, come along.
Tickets: https://t.co/XNKuLWyba5 pic.twitter.com/sZAcV8rlMx
“Last year alone, we added or trained 100,000 cows. It was that momentum that laid the foundation for the raise,” Piggott said.
He would not give an update this month, but said: “We’re still deploying farms every day. We have expanded into Australia.”
The Australian push has been in Tasmania - New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT currently ban collars that deliver electric shocks. Halter has an animal welfare advisory board and says its solar-powered collars don’t hurt animals. They deliver 100 to 200 times less charge than a standard electric fence.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
The dairy co-op says it continues to explore potential divestment options.