Innovation Awards 2017

EVALUATOR COMMENTS
Now that's innovation with excellent market potential! It's no surprise Halter has attracted such a high calibre of staff and investors. This is
poised to be a real disruptor for the farming community and presents real value to farmers.
Innovation Systems
& Performance
Improvement
HALTER
D
escribed as an “Uber for
cows” (as recently as last
year, as a matter of fact),
Halter is one of those innovations
that just begs the question of why
people didn’t think of it sooner.
In short, Halter makes collars
that negate the need to manually
herd cows – effectively turning
them into automated “robo-cows”
(but not zombie cows, thank
goodness) that can be controlled
from the comfort of a farmer's
living room.
Halter uses stimuli, such as
sound, to provoke and manage
cow movement. The collar’s
hardware allows farmers to
use software to remotely set
geographic boundaries in the
form of virtual fences, which the
cows then can’t pass. In other
words, it creates fences without
the need to build expensive
physical fences and removes the
need for time-consuming herding.
The collars also have GPS
tracking and are solar-powered,
so farmers can always know
where each and every one of their
cows are at all times.
That all sounds like something
straight out of an Isaac Asimov,
N. K. Jemisin or Arthur C. Clarke
sci-fi novel. But the Aucklandbased
company has built some
significant buzz. In March this
year, Stuff said the company has
“billion-dollar” potential. And
at the ICE Angels Showcase in
September last year – an event
that brought together some of
Australasia’s biggest investors
– the company was one of 12 to
pitch for investment, and won the
audience favourite award.
As of this year, Halter has
raked in about $700,000 in
government grants and equity
funding. It has eight employees
and it boasts Tuhua Ventures’
Mark Macleod-Smith as a
investor-director, and none other
than Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck
– who also believes in Halter’s
billion-dollar potential – as an
independent director.
As the young founder Craig
Piggott told Stuff: “New Zealand
has been world leading in
dairy for years because of our
geography. We have had this
head-start and now we just
need to innovate to make sure
we are always in front of other
countries.”
And these kinds of simple but
effective agritech solutions are
exactly what the country needs.
Craig Piggott
innovationawards.org.nz / 33