Field Operations Team Lead

AgTech convergence: virtual fencing collars bring precision dairy metrics to beef production. Halter's new Beef Pro collars bring advanced dairy-style pasture management and virtual fencing to beef farms, driving a 12.5% feed efficiency gain. Following the launch of Halter's Beef Pro product, New Zealand livestock producers report double-digit feed efficiencies and aggressive carcass weight gains. The commercial boundary between dairy and beef herd management is rapidly dissolving as advanced wearable technology crosses over into drystock production systems. According to New Zealand technology developer Halter, beef producers are rapidly adopting its newly launched "Beef Pro" smart collar system. While early iterations of livestock wearables focused almost exclusively on virtual fencing to eliminate physical wire barriers, the modern platform integrates satellite connectivity to provide extensive land management tools, real-time rumination tracking, and predictive pasture metrics that dairy operators have utilized for over a decade. The commercial adoption of the technology has been swift, with 500 beef operations connecting to Halter's satellite solution and 185 fully adopting the advanced software tier within two months of its market release. The system functions by combining satellite forage signals with automated grazing records and behavioral heat maps. By linking real-time animal activity directly to pasture availability, the platform allows farmers to shift away from traditional, rigid rotation schedules and adopt highly dynamic, data-driven grazing architectures. Early field data from commercial operations highlights a substantial increase in feed conversion efficiency. At Spring Valley beef farm in Masterton, producer Matt Wyeth reported a projected 12.5% efficiency gain in feed conversion since deploying the collars. The operation is on track to reduce its feed-to-meat ratio from 24 kilograms of dry matter down to 21 kilograms per kilogram of carcass weight produced. This metabolic optimization is supported by minute-by-minute rumination monitoring, allowing the management team to run daily health dashboard checks to ensure the cattle remain on an ideal nutritional plane. Similarly, intensive bull-beef operations are leveraging the technology to increase stocking densities and total meat output per hectare. At Greenhill Farming in Northland, managers have deployed the collars across a herd of 600 Friesian bulls, shifting from a biennial rotation to daily pasture changes. By breaking the herd down into smaller, low-stress mobs, the operation has improved pasture utilization and is on track to harvest 360 kilograms of carcass weight per hectare this season - a major increase over their historical three-year baseline of 280 kilograms, with long-term targets reaching the mid-to-high 400s. Ultimately, the software allows large pastoral properties to be managed with unprecedented geographic flexibility. Rather than applying a blanket grazing strategy across an entire property, the system allows producers to segment their land into dozens of distinct, digital "farmlets," each with its own customized rotation lengths and growth targets inside the application. By providing intensive beef systems with the precision tools required to optimize forage consumption and monitor individual animal health, wearable agtech is fundamentally restructuring the profitability and carbon efficiency of grass-based red meat production. You may be interested in. Legal Notice Related notes.

Outage, hardware issues hit Halter on farms. July 15, 2026 Some collars replaced, and in an unrelated connectivity issue, system experienced 'a brief outage across multiple farms'. Reading Time: < 1 minute Halter has run into hardware and connectivity snags over the past few weeks. The communications manager at Halter, Ashleigh Gilchrist, told Farmers Weekly the company is constantly making changes to the hardware components to ensure collar performance and reliability for farmers. An issue meant they had to support a small group of impacted customers on some collar replacements. "Separately, and unrelated to the hardware issue, last week Halter experienced a brief outage across multiple farms, which has since been resolved. "All the impacted farms are now back online. "There was an issue with one of its connectivity providers and Wool Online Ltd. is working hard behind the scenes to ensure it doesn't happen again. "During the outage Halter's system switched to back-up mode for those affected, meaning farmers were able to manually move their animals where necessary. "Cows were otherwise maintained within existing virtual breaks," Gilchrist said. Halter did not respond to a question on how many properties were affected. A Southland dairy farmer, who did not want to be named, said hundreds of properties were affected by the connectivity issue and that a local relief milking contractor was used to help with technical issues. The contractor, who also did not want to be named, did not confirm what specific issue they helped with. How much do you value independent rural journalism? As much as Wool Online Ltd. enjoy producing content for you, it comes at a cost. Back its team of journalists, so they can continue to back you and your team for years to come.

Halter launches major upgrade to help American beef producers graze smarter and boost animal performance. * News Release * Posted: June 30, 2026 BOULDER, Colorado - Halter, the ag-tech company transforming cattle ranching, has launched Beef Pro, a product designed to move American beef producers beyond just virtual fencing and into active on-ranch performance management. Halter's existing beef product lets ranchers virtually fence and shift herds from a smartphone, without the labor of physical fencing. Beef Pro adds a data, planning and decision-making layer, helping ranchers get more from their land. Beef ranchers can now access a wealth of data on feed demand and grazing; satellite forage signals, grazing intensity heat maps, behavior monitoring, and automated grazing records, providing a singular platform to replace what ranchers currently manage in their heads, on whiteboards or spreadsheets. The innovation follows less than two months on from the introduction of Halter's satellite-enabled smart collars, unlocking large tracts of American ranchland previously unable to utilize virtual fencing due to poor connectivity. Already more than 600 ranches have signed up for the service. "Beef Pro adds the measurement and planning layer on top of the execution layer that is virtual fencing," said Toby Hurley, Director of Product at Halter. "Ranchers can quantify what their herds need versus what their land can support, have this data drive planning, and build a record of how each grazing performed. That feedback loop compounds into better decision-making, building on the pasture utilization uplift that virtual fencing alone achieves." A strong case for pasture utilization, as input costs rise. Meaningful production and high-quality pasture is often lost to under-grazing and over-grazing. Wasted forage becomes the main prize; every percentage point of utilization captured back is worth real money, compounding every year. With traditional grazing, a typical US cow-calf operation runs at 20-25% pasture utilization1 - some forage is intentionally left as residual, but the rest is waste. Hurley says that while Halter's existing product unlocks some improvements through rotational grazing, "with Beef Pro, it's realistic to think about ranches utilizing 30-40% on rangelands - gains that would be unattainable without this tool." "Every 1% of utilization lift is worth about $5000 on a 500-head, 2500-acre operation2. That's from one mechanism alone - less forage wasted - so everything else - from time savings, animal oversight, compliance records and replaced tools - stacks on top. We consider this way of managing land and animals a major leap for beef ranchers," Hurley says. Building on American momentum. Since launching in the U.S. in 2024, Halter now operates in more than half of America's states, with approximately 1000 American ranches using the system, more than quarter of a million collars sold in the U.S. and over one million sold globally. Beef Pro complements Halter's direct-to-satellite service launched in April in partnership with T-Mobile, powered by Starlink, which made Halter the world's only virtual fencing provider to offer a satellite service. Halter has already sold nearly 400,000 of the satellite collars globally - more than half in the U.S. Koy Holland from Holland Ranch, has collared a third of his 1750-cattle herd in Dillon, Montana. He says: "Being a good steward of rangeland comes first. Beef Pro provides data from our herd and works alongside what we see every day on the ranch. This helps us make informed decisions to improve our range management so we can adapt to drought and other challenges." Beef Pro is now available to new and existing Halter customers across the U.S. More information at halterhq.com About Halter. Halter serves more than 3500 farmers and ranchers across the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, and has sold one million of its solar-powered GPS-enabled collars. The company is headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand, with a U.S. office in Colorado, and Australian operations in Melbourne. To learn more, visit www.halterhq.com.