Halter

Grateful to Mei Heron and TVNZ's Business Breakfast for shining a light on how we're building Halter. Our President Andrew Fraser shared a bit about what's behind our growth, and as always, it comes back to one thing: keeping farmers and ranchers at the centre of every decision we make. That philosophy drives everything from the product our Auckland team is building, to the teams in New Zealand, Australia and the United States spending their days out on farms and ranches. Thanks Mei for the opportunity to share our story.

A few of the Halter team recently headed back to school. 🤓 Lachie, Tom and Steve, all Francis Douglas Memorial College old boys, returned to the classroom in Taranaki, NZ to work with the next generation of farmers who have introduced Halter onto the school farm. The team shared a few nostalgic memories of their time at FDMC, and then got stuck in highlighting how to use Halter as a tool to improve animal health, pasture management and productivity. Thanks so much to FDMC for having us, we can't wait to see what else is to come.

When we build new technology at Halter, we always do it in collaboration with the people who'll actually use it. Satellite connectivity was no different. This has been one of the most exciting problems we've worked on, and we tackled it alongside farmers and ranchers on country so remote and expansive that we had to learn what it would take to make satellite work from day one. Read how we built it, and what changed for the operations we built it with, in the comments.

Thank you, Natasha Cave, for letting us be a small part of what you and your family are building. 💚

Today marks a major milestone for Halter and for the future of beef producers worldwide. Halter's virtual fencing for beef is now powered by satellite. For ranchers and farmers working on some of the most remote and extensive land in the world, this changes everything. No more tower infrastructure costs or cell coverage needed. Halter is the only virtual fencing system in the world that can run fully via satellite, so you can graze land you never could before. Virtual fencing has already transformed how ranchers and farmers manage their herds. Direct-to-satellite makes it accessible to even more operations, regardless of terrain or location. Sky's the limit now.

In the early 90s, Grady Grissom got a phone call from his old college roommate that ended up changing the rest of his life, and the whole thing came down to four words: "let's find a ranch." Grady and Rob Lovelace met as randomly assigned freshman roommates at Princeton, and somewhere along the way they made each other a half-serious promise that one day they'd be partners on a ranch together. That phone call eventually brought Grady, his wife Lynda, and their five-year-old daughter to 14,000 acres of shortgrass prairie in southeastern Colorado, and it kicked off what would become a 30-year experiment in learning how to listen to a piece of land. Grady spent the first few years on the ranch learning a hard lesson about stocking rates. He had too many cattle and his cows weren't breeding back. Somewhere along the way he came to a realization that became the foundation of everything that came after, which is that you can't force a piece of land to do something it isn't ready to do. That moved him into a long period of learning the ecology of the ranch by paying close attention to the cattle, watching which plants they were grazing and at what time of year, and figuring out how long each pasture needed to rest before he could bring cattle back to it. Over time, his deferral periods stretched from 100 days to 15 months, and his grazing planning shifted from once a year to three times a year. The plant diversity on the ranch came back over those years, with cool-season grasses returning, winter fat spreading from a few small patches to ranch-wide, and native forbs filling in across pastures. But when the grass-fed enterprise grew, Grady's graze periods stretched from two weeks to 45 days, and the plant diversity he'd spent decades building started slipping backwards. That's what brought him to virtual fencing. He's now running graze periods of one to two days, watching for the next ecological threshold to kick in, and chasing two long-term goals for the ranch that come down to getting to no bare ground and capturing every raindrop that falls on the place. Episode 4 of A Halter Series is live! Watch Grady's full story at the link in the comments. 👇

Most conversations about virtual fencing start with grass, but in a recent episode of the Future of Beef podcast, Halter president Andrew Fraser made the case that the bigger story on a lot of ranches is what happens to a rancher's hours once fence repair and driving out to check pastures stop filling the day. His framing is that those tasks are low-value, not low-importance, and that automating them doesn't replace a rancher's job so much as give more of it back. The result is more time for the cattle, more time on the land, and more of the decisions that shape an operation over the long term. That's the kind of work worth coming home to. Links to the Future of Beef episode and the Drovers writeup in the comments!

Barbed wire changed the West. Will virtual fencing change it again? Daniel Mushrush of Mushrush Ranch in the Flint Hills of Kansas is moving cattle from his kitchen table at 4 a.m., skipping 20 miles of daily ATV driving, and managing his Red Angus herd across rocky ground where fence posts just can't go. High Plains Journal caught up with him to chat about what Halter's meant for his cattle operation and get his take on the technology. "The ultimate resource all farmers and ranchers have is hours in the day. Anything that helps us maximize the hours we spend is a net win."

Barb Downey's great-grandmother Marta started the ranch by saving money cooking for coal miners in Wyoming and buying the family's first piece of land. That was four generations ago. The ranch moved states and changed through the Depression and the decades that followed. Today, Barb and her husband Joe manage 6,000 acres of tallgrass prairie in the Kansas Flint Hills with their daughters Laura and Anna. They needed to expand to keep the ranch viable, but at $3,000 an acre, buying more land wasn't realistic. Virtual fencing allowed them to intensify rotational grazing and increase carrying capacity without adding both land and miles of physical fence. "I can't drive T-posts into the ground," Barb says. "But I can draw a break." Read Barb's full story, published by American Cattlemen, at the link in the comments.

Barb Downey runs 6,200 acres of native tallgrass prairie in the Kansas Flint Hills, the last 1-2% of what once blanketed the entire midsection of North America. She didn't inherit it. Instead, she and her dad built it from 457 acres in the late 80s, and neither of them had ever ranched for a living before. What brought them here was five generations of people who had to choose ranching again from scratch. Her great-grandmother crossed the Atlantic pregnant and with two children to start over in Wyoming. Her grandfather lost everything in the Dust Bowl. Her dad spent his whole career as a chemical engineer trying to find his way back to the land. Each time, the ranch had to be rebuilt. Each time, someone chose it. Barb chose it too. Her philosophy is: if you love the land, you evolve it. You burn it on purpose. You cut trees every time you're out working. You graze it the way the bison did. You keep learning from it, or you lose it. In this episode, we spend a day with Barb and Joe on the Flint Hills to see what good stewardship of the land looks like in practice, and why the only way to honor land this rare is to never stop improving how you care for it. This is the third episode of A Halter Series: a year-long documentary project visiting 12 ranchers across 12 states to showcase the incredible diversity of American ranching. Link to the full episode in the comments! 👇