Auckland’s Halter pulls off a world-first as cattle collars start talking directly to satellites

Auckland-founded agritech firm Halter has become the first company in the world to put a virtual fencing collar onto a satellite, a breakthrough that the founder says removes the last technical barrier to running the technology across remote and rugged farmland.

The company announced from its US base in Boulder, Colorado that its solar-powered cattle collars can now talk directly to Starlink rather than relying on a network of low-frequency towers built across the property. Farmers can run the system anywhere their cattle can see the sky, including steep hill country, vast Australian rangeland, and the sprawling American ranches that until now have been out of reach.

Halter chief executive Craig Piggott, who founded the company in 2016 after working as an engineer at Rocket Lab, said the new option opens up land that was previously off-limits to virtual fencing.

“Connectivity has been the final barrier to bringing virtual fencing across remote and expansive ranches,” Piggott said.

Halter’s internal modelling estimates that satellite-enabled collars increase its addressable US beef cattle market by 2.5 times, because the company no longer needs to roll out and maintain a tower network on every farm it signs up. The collars are available straight away for beef operations in New Zealand and ranches across the United States, with Australia and Canada to follow.

The new connectivity option slots into Halter’s existing app, which lets farmers create virtual paddocks on a phone and shift cattle remotely by sending sound and vibration cues through the collar. Alongside the satellite launch the company released a set of product upgrades, including all-in-one heat detection, real-time behaviour monitoring, high-resolution pasture mapping, and a feed demand calculator that lets farmers plan rotations based on grass cover.

Lloyd Calvert, who manages the 225,000-acre High Lonesome Ranch in western Colorado, has been among the first to put the satellite version through its paces. He said the change finally allowed remote country to be brought into the system.

“Satellite unlocks the ability to run very remote country while still seeing what the cattle are doing,” Calvert said.

For Halter the launch caps a pivotal six-week stretch. In late March the company closed an NZ$377 million Series E funding round at a US$2 billion valuation, in a deal led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Existing shareholders Blackbird, DCVC, Bond, Bessemer, NewView, Promus and Icehouse Ventures all returned for the round.

Halter now has more than a million of its collars in the paddock across roughly 2,000 farms in New Zealand, Australia and the United States, and operates in 22 American states. The company has previously said properties using the system have lifted pasture productivity by as much as 20 percent through more accurate grazing.

The shift to satellite is significant for the industry as well as for Halter. Virtual fencing has spread quickly through dairy in New Zealand, where paddocks are smaller and connectivity is generally good, but adoption has been slower in beef country. American ranches in particular often run across hundreds of thousands of hectares of mountains, forest and badlands, where putting up cellular or radio infrastructure is impractical and in some cases legally restricted on federal land.

By piggy-backing on Starlink rather than building dedicated towers, Halter sidesteps both the cost and the consenting headache. TechCrunch reported earlier this month that Founders Fund’s bet on the firm hinged on its ability to scale into the United States cattle market without that drag.

In New Zealand the change is most likely to matter on hill country and in the high country, where dairy-style paddock layouts give way to large blocks and where reliable cell coverage thins out. Rural News has reported that one of Halter’s first beef customers, Northland farmer and former Beef and Lamb New Zealand chair James Parsons, runs a 600-hectare Angus stud and was an early adopter of the system.

For New Zealand the wider story is about what a homegrown technology firm built around an agricultural problem can become. Halter started as a Waikato dairy-farm prototype and now sits among the highest-valued private technology companies in the country, with a product list that has expanded from a single collar to a full pasture management platform.

The next test will be whether the new connectivity option pulls in farmers who had ruled the system out before because their land sat outside reliable coverage. Removing the need for towers also removes a fixed up-front cost on the farmer’s books, which on remote blocks could be the difference between signing up and walking away.

Has satellite connectivity changed your view on virtual fencing for your property? Tell us in the comments below.