Halter provides data-driven pasture management for dairy farms. It delivers daily updates on pasture covers, growth rates, and leaf emergence by combining satellite imagery, local weather, biophysical models, grazing data, and seasonal trends. Farmers use the information to decide where and when to graze, optimize fencing and shifting of livestock, and allocate pasture efficiently to boost animal performance. The platform also hosts a community where farmers share experiences and best practices. Halter’s subscription-based service gives farmers ongoing access to the data and tools they need to run their operation more productively and profitably. Goals include helping farmers maximize pasture use and animal productivity, improve resilience to environmental changes, and build a collaborative farming community.
Company Size
501-1,000
Company Stage
Series E
Total Funding
$428M
Headquarters
Auckland, New Zealand
Founded
2016
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New Zealand agtech startup Halter has raised $220 million in Series E funding led by Founders Fund, valuing the company at approximately $2 billion. The startup has sold one million solar-powered GPS collars that replace physical cattle fencing with app-managed virtual boundaries using audio cues. Halter charges farmers recurring subscriptions of $5 to $10 per animal monthly. The collar uses GPS and wireless connectivity to monitor livestock location, movement patterns, eating behaviour, and health indicators. Farmers can manage and move herds remotely through a mobile app. The company plans to expand operations in the US, Australia, Ireland, and the UK. Participating investors include Blackbird, DCVC, BOND, and Bessemer. Halter claims to have collected over seven billion hours of animal-behaviour data through its proprietary analytics system.
Halter's Clank AI cuts engineering time in farm tech. Wed, 23rd Sep 2026 (Today) Halter has introduced an AI agent called Clank to automate engineering work across its connected livestock platform, saving more than 215 hours of engineering time. Built on Amazon Bedrock using Anthropic Claude, Clank investigates technical issues, prepares code changes and handles routine workflows for the New Zealand-founded agritech group. Over an 11-week period, the agent automated more than 90 weekly tasks and processed more than 2,500 code changes. Halter said an AI-generated code change can now be reviewed and embedded into its systems in 48 minutes. The move highlights how agricultural technology companies are using generative AI in internal operations, not just customer-facing products. At Halter, the software supports a platform that lets farmers manage cattle remotely through connected collars and a mobile app. The system allows farmers to set virtual boundaries for herds and monitor animal wellbeing and behaviour. That requires Halter's engineering teams to keep a large, always-on technology platform running across multiple countries and time zones. Halter says the business has more than 16,000 Amazon CloudWatch alerts monitoring components across its systems. Before Clank, engineers responded to more than 40 alert tickets a day when technical support was needed, manually investigating root causes and deciding how to respond. Clank now analyses alerts automatically, runs root-cause investigations and prepares fixes for engineers to review. It is integrated with Slack, GitHub and Linear, allowing it to work directly within the company's existing workflows. When an alert is triggered, the system retrieves logs and other data before sending the issue to Claude through Amazon Bedrock for analysis. It can then generate a code change before an engineer starts work, shifting the team's role from manual triage to review and approval. Halter described the development as part of a broader effort to reduce time spent on administration and operations, both for farmers and internal teams. Its products are designed to let livestock farmers manage herds remotely, including moving animals without being physically present on the farm. "With Halter, farmers no longer need to be out on the farm at 4am to move animals. They can manage their operations remotely and spend more time focusing on their business and their families," said Kurt McAlpine, cloud architect, Halter. That customer proposition depends on system reliability, especially because the company's technology is tied to day-to-day livestock management. Halter said this shaped its approach to using AI in engineering operations. "There's an animal on the other end of that technology, so it's very important to us that everything is robust and scalable," said McAlpine. "We chose Amazon Bedrock as it gives us the reliability and data privacy we need to be secure and confident in deploying Clank." AI in farming The announcement comes as New Zealand agricultural businesses consider a larger role for AI. Research cited by AWS found that 61% of agricultural businesses in the country expect AI to transform large parts, or all, of their industry within five years, while only 9% said they felt very or fully ready to adopt next-generation AI technologies. For Halter, the immediate use case is operational efficiency inside the business rather than direct automation of farm decisions. By using AI to handle repetitive engineering work and the first stage of incident response, the company is seeking to reduce downtime risk and free staff for product development. One internal measure points to the scale of that shift. "On an average day, Clank works the equivalent of 231 hours," said Antony Southworth, lead data engineer, Halter. "That's nearly 29 times a typical engineer's workday - at an inference cost of approximately US$30 per hour, making AI-driven incident response both faster and significantly more cost-effective than manual triage." Halter said the time saved by Clank is being redirected into work on new models and improvements to the farmer experience. The company argued that reducing engineering effort on platform incidents creates more scope to develop features that help farmers manage herds with fewer interruptions. McAlpine linked that internal shift to the wider adoption of AI across agriculture. "AI is completely reshaping what's possible for our industry, and we at Halter are proud to support farmers through this next phase of evolution to make their lives easier than ever," he said. "AWS have helped us to transform into an AI-led business, skyrocketing our opportunities to scale our farming technology to the world and be a leading key agricultural exporter for New Zealand." AWS said the Halter deployment reflects growing interest in practical AI use cases among New Zealand businesses. "Across New Zealand, we're seeing organisations embrace AI to solve real-world challenges, improve productivity, and create new opportunities for growth," said Manuel Bohnet, country manager, New Zealand, AWS. "Companies like Halter demonstrate how cloud and generative AI can help agribusinesses innovate faster, operate more efficiently, and build leading, globally competitive businesses - right from the heart of New Zealand."
Cheaper compute, bigger bills as businesses grapple with the economics of AI workers. Wed, 23 Sep 2026 0 Comments / 0 New OpenAI's Satya Tammarddy says AI costs are "rightly" getting more attention. Photo / BusinessDesk One of Halter's newest workers can put in 231 hours in a day.Clank does not sleep, take annual leave or collect a salary. Instead, the artificial intelligence agent can work on multiple jobs at once, check failed software patches, examine farm data and investigate engineering problems. All while Halter's human employees are doing something else.Speaking to a packed audience at the New Zealand International Convention Centre for the AWS Cloud Day conference in Auckland on Tuesday, Halter's vice-president of product and eng... * Deeply researched, twice-edited and fact-checked news * Annual subscribers also receive a complimentary subscription to The Wall Street Journal * Personalised email news alerts, plus gift up to 5 stories a month to non-subscribers Minimum password length of 8 characters. Require at least one upper and lowercase, numeric, and special character. Annual - including full access to The Wall Street Journal $349.00 Monthly $44.00 All subscriptions auto renew but are easy to cancel. Not convinced yet? Technology sponsored by Fortify Your Cybersecurity Are you smart enough to beat the Quizmaster? Our fortnightly round-up for public sector news and reckons. After years of development, a new resource management system has become law. 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Storytelling as A catalyst for change at Climate Week NYC Film Festival. Lights... Camera... Food system action! Storytelling is a powerful catalyst for education, connection, and transformation, and filmmakers and documentarians are highlighting inspiring people and unsung innovations in food systems across the globe. "Stories and food are what make us human," says Haven Worley, Director of "Irish Farmers: A Love Story," at the All Things Food & Agriculture Film Festival, hosted by Food Tank in partnership with Kat Taylor, President of TomKat Foundation; Halter; The Henry Ford; The Rockefeller Foundation; and Groundswell during Climate Week NYC. "As conveners, as storytellers, we can share what's working across the country," says Spence Medford, Senior Vice President and Chief Advancement Officer at The Henry Ford, after screening the foundation's new "Farm to School Lunch Across America" film. "There's innovation that's happening in the food system right now; people just don't know about it." At Climate Week, the packed audience also enjoyed a screening of clips from the documentary short "Language of the Land," produced by Halter. The film follows 5th-generation ranchers Kacie and Zach Scherler-Abney of Scherler-Abney Land & Cattle, as they transition their Oklahoma farm to regenerative practices. "It's a beautiful thing to see producers from different parts of the world who share this goal and really want to work with one another," says Helen Moore, VP of Commercial Strategy at Halter. "Especially with our generation, there's a huge interest in agriculture and...a real genuine interest in connecting with food sources," Zach Scherler-Abney added. In introducing the "Powered By Community" film series, a grassroots project highlighting local changemakers, Big Green president Madeleine Nelson reminded the crowd that "Small can scale." "These local projects are part of the solutions that we need to change the food system for the better," she says. Jennifer Sherman, Program Director at the Alice Waters Institute, echoed this sentiment. "There is no change that is too small," she says. Then, Kat Taylor, Founder of TomKat Ranch and TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation, and director and producer Rebecca Harrell Tickell took the stage with clips from "Groundswell," the feature-length documentary that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. "The farmers are not only right; we should be listening to them more often and enabling them more, and giving them more agency," Taylor says. When pitching the film project, back in 2013, the team faced pushback from producers who didn't believe regenerative agriculture was actually transformative, Harrell Tickell recalled. The film has been its own proof-of-concept. "They laughed us out of Hollywood," Harrell Tickell says. "We were filming a movement as it was coalescing... It feels like we're just getting started even though it's been over a decade to get to this point." Stories like these, filmmakers said, only reinforce the importance of storytellers following their passions and telling true stories. "We have to fight to curate and support and bubble up hope," says Sara Farley, Regenerative School Meals Co-Lead and Vice President for the Food Team at The Rockefeller Foundation. She presented clips from "Food 2050," which she described as a radical listening project. "The future isn't written," she continued. "Use the creative part of your brain to imagine the future." % buffered Explore the entire Food Tank event schedule during Climate Week NYC 2026, and live-stream every Summit on FoodTank.com and Food Tank's YouTube channel. Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can Real Meals Campaign please count on you to be part of its growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.
Film Festival highlights the future of agriculture. On Monday evening, Sept. 21, Food Tank will host a food and agriculture film festival during Climate Week NYC 2026, in partnership with Kat Taylor, President of TomKat Foundation; Halter; The Henry Ford; The Rockefeller Foundation; and Groundswell. The invitation-only festival will feature a screening of Food Tank's first original documentary film, "Irish Farmers: A Love Story," which follows three Irish farmers across three generations. "Farmers are storytellers. There is a love story in every practice of agriculture, and as we face an increasingly mechanized world, stories coming from the heart is the path towards a more sustainable, prosperous, and empathetic future," says Director Haven Worley. "It is an honor to be part of a story bigger than ourselves and to come together in a festival that highlights farmers, advocates, artists, ranchers, and community members as the storytellers of a resilient climate future." Through film and conversation with filmmakers, farmers, and food system leaders, the event will explore the challenges and opportunities shaping the future of agriculture while celebrating storytelling as a catalyst for education, connection, and action. "We believe there is real opportunity for innovation in our food system, and we're seeing it happen in communities across the country," says Spence Medford, Senior Vice President and Chief Advancement Officer at The Henry Ford, a national cultural and educational institution that uses the stories of American innovation and ingenuity to inspire people to imagine a better future. The evening will kick off with a clip from "Farm to School Lunch Across America," The Henry Ford's film capturing a national school-supported agriculture initiative, which uses school food dollars to buy fresh, nutritious food from local and regional farmers and producers. "It means better food and better fuel for the next generation, while supporting farmers who are taking care of the land and creating a dependable market for what they grow," says Medford. "Through our Farm to School Lunch Across America initiative and new documentary, we're bringing people together and sharing the stories of the school meal leaders, farmers and chefs who are already showing us what's possible." This will be followed by a fireside chat with clips from "Language of the Land," a film showing how Oklahoma ranchers Zach and Kacie Scherler-Abney embraced technology to achieve environmental and economic sustainability. "For Zach and Kacie, what started as a personal health journey quickly became a soil health journey; a testament to their commitment to producing healthy and nutritious beef in harmony with the landscape they ranch on," says Mikaele Ymker, Sustainability Lead at Halter. "Learning and mentorship are at the heart of Zach and Kacie's ranching philosophy... We hope the audience will come away with an understanding of how ranchers are developing solutions that balance economics and ecology, without compromising their quality of life." Another discussion will feature clips from "Groundswell," an award-winning environmental documentary following farmers, scientists, and Indigenous leaders who are rebuilding topsoil, restoring ecosystems, drawing down carbon, and fighting desertification across five continents. "The films at this festival bring overdue visibility to the farmers and ranchers who feed us, regeneratively steward the soil, and are often the bedrock of local communities. We are bringing those stories to the fore and helping people see that agriculture writ large could be so much more than what currently ends up on grocery store shelves," says Kat Taylor, President of TomKat Foundation. "Regenerative agriculture, to us, is the largest delta solution to climate change, quelling up to 30-40% of global greenhouse gases, while re-sequestering 200 gigatons of carbon every decade in American acreage alone. I hope audiences leave as inspired as I have been by the glimpse these films give us into the way farmers and ranchers are already showing us what a new-old economy rooted in community, resilience, and care for the land and each other can look like." The evening's final discussion will include clips from "Food 2050," a documentary film narrated and executive produced by Academy Award winner Viola Davis that explores how to sustainably feed a projected global population of 10 billion people by the year 2050. "The vast majority of films and books set in the future offer a dystopian nightmare - a world no one hopes becomes real. By giving such little creative effort to imagining the future we actually want, the hope we need to write a better tomorrow feels like it's dwindling," says Sara Farley, Regenerative School Meals Co-Lead and Vice President for the Food Team at The Rockefeller Foundation. "Food 2050 proves that when invited and empowered, communities are ready to put forward inspirational, transformational and totally feasible blueprints for the year 2050 that show we can live connected to food systems that are nourishing, regenerative and equitable." The event will begin at 6:30pm at WNYC-NPR Studios' The Greene Space in New York City, with food, drinks, and live musical performances. A reception will follow, with programming concluding at 9:45pm. Speakers include Xiye Bastida, Climate Justice Activist, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Re-Earth Initiative; Sweta Chakraborty, CEO of North America, Foodtank Don't Have Time; Mary Culler, President, Ford Philanthropy; Sara Farley, Regenerative School Meals Co-Lead and Vice President for the Food Initiative, The Rockefeller Foundation; Spence Medford, Senior Vice President and Chief Advancement Officer, The Henry Ford; Helen Moore, VP of Commercial Strategy, Halter; Danielle Nierenberg, President, Food Tank; Kacie Scherler-Abney, Fifth-Generation Rancher, Scherler-Abney Land & Cattle; Zach Scherler-Abney, Rancher, Scherler-Abney Land & Cattle; Jennifer Sherman, Program Director, Alice Waters Institute; Kat Taylor, Founder, TomKat Ranch and TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation; Rebecca Harrell Tickell, Director and Producer, Groundswell; and Haven Worley, Director, Irish Farmers: A Love Story. The Food and Agriculture Film Festival will also feature a special musical performance by Brandon Burks, a Broadway actor, singer, and dancer currently in the new show Midnight. He will be joined by Elijah Caldwell, an OBIE Award-winning actor, singer, pianist, and music director whose credits include A Strange Loop Off-Broadway and the national tour of Shucked. This summit will be streamed live on FoodTank.com and Food Tank's YouTube channel, here. Join the Food Tank newsletter list for reminders, and click here for Food Tank's full lineup of events at Climate Week NYC 2026. Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can Foodtank please count on you to be part of its growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.