Peter Thiel Is Betting Big On Solar-Powered Cow Collars (inc.com) 87
Halter, a New Zealand agtech startup now valued at $2 billion, has raised $220 million to expand its AI-powered cattle management system. "Halter is now valued at $2 billion following the Series E, which was led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund with participation from Blackbird, DCVC, Bond, Bessemer, and several others," reports Inc. From the report: Halter plans to use the funding to expand its existing footprint in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand, as well as to grow into new markets such as Ireland, the U.K., and parts of North and South America. The round is one of the biggest to-date in the industry, and comes amid growing adoption of the technology among U.S. ranchers. According to Halter, U.S. ranchers have erected some 60,000 miles of virtual fencing since the company's launch in 2024.
Halter's technology works through a system of solar-powered collars and in-pasture towers that collect data -- some 6,000 data points per collar per minute -- from grazing cattle and feed it into a cloud-based platform and app for farmers. The collars are ergonomically designed to be comfortable for the cattle wearing them, and leverage AI to play audio cues or vibrate when it is time to move to a different grazing location or if they step outside of a predetermined zone. The collars can also deliver an electric pulse if an animal does not respond.
Halter's app also creates a digital twin of a ranch, which essentially means a digital replica that leverages real-time data to accurately reflect conditions. Farmers can consult the app to check on their herd, or fence, and move cattle with just a few clicks. Halter also has a proprietary algorithm that it calls a "Cowgorithm" trained on seven billion hours of animal behavior. Altogether, this technology is meant to make ranchers' lives easier when herding cattle, help them save money on building physical fencing, and provide insights about pasture management to improve soil health and pasture productivity. Halter says some 2,000 farmers and ranchers currently use its tech worldwide.
Halter's technology works through a system of solar-powered collars and in-pasture towers that collect data -- some 6,000 data points per collar per minute -- from grazing cattle and feed it into a cloud-based platform and app for farmers. The collars are ergonomically designed to be comfortable for the cattle wearing them, and leverage AI to play audio cues or vibrate when it is time to move to a different grazing location or if they step outside of a predetermined zone. The collars can also deliver an electric pulse if an animal does not respond.
Halter's app also creates a digital twin of a ranch, which essentially means a digital replica that leverages real-time data to accurately reflect conditions. Farmers can consult the app to check on their herd, or fence, and move cattle with just a few clicks. Halter also has a proprietary algorithm that it calls a "Cowgorithm" trained on seven billion hours of animal behavior. Altogether, this technology is meant to make ranchers' lives easier when herding cattle, help them save money on building physical fencing, and provide insights about pasture management to improve soil health and pasture productivity. Halter says some 2,000 farmers and ranchers currently use its tech worldwide.
Get a Border Collie (Score:3, Insightful)
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Silicon Valley.
What's interesting is that this article leads with "Peter Thiel". Why? It's just standard VC stuff.
Dr Evil (Score:3, Funny)
>>What's interesting is that this article leads with "Peter Thiel". Why?
When the AI-controlled stampedes head for blue cities during the election, don't say you weren't warned.
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Silicon Valley.
What's interesting is that this article leads with "Peter Thiel". Why? It's just standard VC stuff.
New experimental system for mammals (like humans) which are controlled by electric collars that trigger when one of "thousands" of data points goes outside expected boundaries. Who did you expect to be behind this? Tom Hanks? Margot Robbie? Big bird?
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Everyone blames the bird. Snuffy is pulling the strings.
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Still, Slashdot doesn't have to play along with their weasel wording. For example, "ergonomic collars that deliver an electric pulse" - just say "shock collar". Don't help them whitewash what they're talking about.
Re:Get a Border Collie (Score:5, Insightful)
The real question is it cheaper and easier to slap a collar on something than put up fences, train dogs, and hunt down strays. Manual labor is expensive and ranchers aren't exactly the type of folks to spend on new fangled tech that doesn't work. There's plenty of other ag tech that's been adopted over the years from milking machines to GPS-enabled tractors getting data on fertilizer placement. And the farmer's that haven't been pushed out of business have enough sense to do the calculations on return on investment on how tech investments will affect their bottom line.
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"Virtual fencing" is literally the first part of the Halter sales pitch. Whether that works as well as the sales pitch remains to be seen. From their home page:
Virtual fencing and shifting
Re: Get a Border Collie (Score:2)
Re: Get a Border Collie (Score:5, Interesting)
It really does work. My family's ranch has been using a similar product called e-shepherd for a couple of years now. Doesn't take the cattle very long to learn what they collars want them to do.
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Farmers have been using GPS collars to manage cattle grazing in a way that supports the restoration of fragile environments. Essentially mob grazing but without the need to put physical fences in areas here the terrain would make that prohibitively expensive. It's not the cheapest thing in the world but it does work well.
https://presscentre.nature.sco... [nature.scot]
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I'd say the other real question with adopting this solution is what happens to the AI-driven cloud-dependent Enterprise farming operation when the internet or AI service goes down. Hard. And they're flying blind.
Once the farmer has "maximized efficiency" with a click-and-deploy wrangler team activated via text message, I'm guessing they'll do what everyone else does. Fire everyone else deemed "extra". Making downtime very expensive.
Also, unpredictable future costs, even if it worked perfectly. The bor
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Re:Get a Border Collie (Score:5, Interesting)
Border collies generally work with sheep, cows not as much simply because cows don't really give a damn.
But sheep you have to be careful with - an entire flock in the UK had to be euthanized because they figured how to escape their fencing, and if that knowledge spread, it would basically render all farms using that fencing to keep sheep worthless. They apparently are very good at teaching fellow sheep things like that, and it was only a matter of time before the one or two that figured out how to escape taught the rest of the flock, and that flock would then teach neighboring flocks on neighboring farms and so on. It was cheaper to euthanize the flock than to have the entire country's farms re-fenced.
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Re:Get a Border Collie (Score:4, Informative)
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Great points. I forgot about those other aspects. E-sheperd sends a warning to the phone if an animal doesn't move for a while.
That said, herding definitely is a part of it. These systems can actually move cattle around a pasture. The cattle learn pretty quickly what the collar is trying to get them to do.
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The herding portion is actually relatively new, originally it was purely a cattle-management solution and they were running their trials in places where where you had cattle spread out over an impractical-to-keep-an-eye-on area. They spent a lot of time figuring out how to make the things both cow-proof and outdoors-environment-proof, making something IP54 isn't too hard when it's bolted onto a wall and there are no size constraints but doing it when it's strapped to a cow and as small as possible was a hu
Re:Get a Border Collie (Score:4, Informative)
I can tell you are not a rancher.
There's a Canadian company doing something similar called e-shepherd. It's more than a virtual fence. It's part of an integrated grazing plan. Currently there's a certain number of acres required for a certain number of cattle. The cattle don't graze randomly, so you end up getting areas that are overgrazed and the grass damaged. With e-shepherd or a system like this one, the cattle can be slowly moved around the pasture. This basically allows you to keep the same amount of cattle in a much smaller area, as you can move them more frequently without a lot of gates and fences. It doesn't take long for the cattle to figure it out, and it's quite remarkable how the collars can train them to move when you (or the AI!) want them too. It really does work.
Who's dumb?
Test run (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing to see here. Just a test run of the human collars coming in ~2040. Shocking, I know.
Re:Test run (Score:5, Funny)
Haha, no. Humans' collars are already here, we just keep them in our pockets and pay for them ourselves.
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The eventual goal of these guys is (Score:2)
compliance collars for the masses, along the lines of the Star Trek episode "The Gamesters of Triskelion".
Go Vegan and Nobody Gets Hurt (Score:2, Interesting)
Rather than thinking of better ways to raise more beef, it would better to reduce beef consumption.
Industrial beef production uses 70% of agricultural land for feed, pasture, water, etc. including lots of chemical inputs and massive amounts of CO2 produced by the cattle and the all of the agricultural activity.
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The conspiracy theorist in me wants to point to the Lone Star Tick being genetically modified for this purpose... but that would be silly.
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Nature has a way of correcting human errors.
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Cool, but you could've argued the same without a vaguely threatening title.
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I was talking about threats to farm animals, not humans. /s)
Vegans are generally known to be non violent. (Just don't try to take away their tofu.
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Historically speaking, most humans are non-violent right up until you threaten their preferred protein abstraction layer. Vegans have tofu; carnivores have brisket; programmers have semicolons. Remove any of the three and the error handling gets energetic.
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Yes.
As far as humans getting hurt, it also could apply to the well documented health damage of meat... Heart disease, cancer, etc.
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How is meat-eating not threatening from the perspective of a cow?
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The tech bros previously were investing in fake meat. It went through something of a boom and bust cycle as people eventually realized it wasn't all that healthy and still doesn't taste exactly like real beef. Beyond Meat is close to bankruptcy. [thestreet.com]
It kind of makes sense, when you think about that most Americans are collectively fine with driving around in a machine that literally pollutes the air as part of its normal operation - from a big obvious tailpipe sticking out the back, no less. The idea that cow
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It's actually not even "cow farts". The problem is from the other end... cow burps. They produce an incredible amount of methane in their dual stomachs.
Would be interesting of these AI wired up cows would also monitor their CO2 production but the oligarchs probably aren't interested in that.
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And yes, we'll have cattle for a long time at least.
But eventually, we can eliminate cattle. And return the prairies to their original inhabitants. The buffalo. Who will commence grazing and burping methane.
Re: Go Vegan and Nobody Gets Hurt (Score:2)
Bison don't produce as much methane as cows
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[learn to internet]
Everyone who cares about this already knows this
You don't actually care
So fuck off
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In case anybody is taking this seriously (I think it is supposed to be a joke):
Domestic Cattle: ~1 billion (USDA) to 1.5 billion (FAO).
American Bison: Once 30-60 million (now much less)
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Domestic Cattle: ~1 billion (USDA) to 1.5 billion (FAO).
That's globally. US cattle number around 88 million. And that's the number which will be replaced by bison. Because bison are not native to other countries. They all have their own varieties of ungulates that will step in to a cattle vacuum. And even more important: Very few other countries are willing to "go vegetarian" and get rid of their cattle. Brazil (240 million cattle) and India (195 million) would just laugh. And India doesn't even eat them. Between Hinduism and lactose intolerance, they have no
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Correct, Google AI was mistaken by sticking that word "Domestic" in there along with "USDA". Only 94.2 million cattle In the USA, which the maximum number of Bison was somewhere around 30 million. This matches the 3x to 4x increase that I expected. I am surprised that the USA has such a small portion of the world total however, but the 1.5 billion number was backed by multiple sources.
I have also heard that both Bison and grass-fed cattle emit less greenhouse gasses than most farmed cattle, not sure what th
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People could go Vicken and avoid beef and pork.
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As about 40% of American Corn and Soya is used for biofuel you might want to check your claim on 70%. Outside feed lots its demonstrably false, in the UK almost all beef is grass fed either directly or in the form of silage over winter and as a consequence of the rising gas prices the quantity of fertilisers have been dropping year on year.
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Biofuel is made from corn, not soy.
70% of farmland, water, chemicals, transportation fuel, is used to support industrial meat production.
Honey, wake up, new hellscape just dropped (Score:2)
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It's not 100% ironclad; but penetration is broad enough that you've basically got the majority carrying highly fingerprintable RF beacons and the minority standing out for their relat
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Phones for all their surveillance uses still won't serve up information about your body state to your employer, which constitutes some of the hype around a future of employers requiring wearables. The public applications are of the sort people would volunteer for: payment and identification including for physical access.
Granted I'm sure there are other technologies that could obsolete needing a chip, but my overall point is that these technologies are presented to the public as a negotiation of conveniences
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Udderly terrible (Score:5, Funny)
It sounds like Peter Thiel is really trying to moo-ve the needle on AgTech.
If these collars are solar-powered, I guess you could say the 'steaks' have never been higher.
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App should be called co(w)pilot!
I have an idea (Score:1)
But since it's Thiel, he'll just use it to control people and try and take over the world some more. I hope he gets kicked in the nuts by a cow.
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Seems logical. (Score:2)
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Needs one more thing (Score:2)
Where is Taylor Sheridan though? (Score:2)
Unless it has the Sheridan seal of approval, I am not investing.
Didn't Gary Larson think of this years ago? (Score:2)
This idea seems solid (Score:5, Insightful)
But this idea seems solid and worth pursuing. It’s a real market, for real goods, that probably could benefit from some tech. There’s use case is extremely low on buzzwords. No AI. No blockchain. No crypto. Just a solid case for a hardware/software system that could probably improve actual physical productivity in an easily measurable way. The argument for using cloud infrastructure is pretty compelling.
The kicker is if costs can be low enough to justify, that’s a LOT of fairly advanced hardware to purchase, install, and deal with wear and tear in an aggressive outdoor physical environment, in order to get my cows to grow 20 percent better. Is it worth it? I have no clue, but that’s gonna be the main question to answer. Agriculture is a very-low-bullsh&t industry.
To the people who are griping about Thiel planning to use this on humans. Your worries are 5 years too late. We’re already shackled to devices that monitor and occasionally prod us in various directions. They’re about 7cm by 14cm by 1cm and we THINK that we’re the ones in control but who are we kidding?
Re:This idea seems solid (Score:5, Interesting)
But this idea seems solid and worth pursuing. It’s a real market, for real goods, that probably could benefit from some tech.
Agreed. I live in the mountain west, and our forest and mountain landscapes are just covered with fencing, even though most of it is public land, because it's BLM "multi-use" land -- a lot of cattle graze on it. Fences are expensive to build and expensive to maintain. If you think a fence is something you build once and then ignore, you've never dealt with cattle.
Cowboys (and sheep herders) have a term "ride fence" as in "Bob, you're gonna ride fence today", and it's a regular and tedious task that means "get on your horse (or ATV) and ride past miles and miles of fenceline, looking for places where the fence is broken or going to break, and fixing them". It's necessary and expensive drudgery and having all of those fencelines is bad for other uses, and bad for wildlife. I've put down a few deer that jumped a barbed wire fence and didn't quite clear it, slicing their guts open and leaving them in agony as they slowly die.
In addition, there's an obvious tension between the cost of building and maintaining fences and the cost of rounding up cattle when it's time to move them. Obviously if you slice the land up into lots of small fenced areas, the cattle will be easy to find -- but they're also going to graze it out fast, so you're going to have to move them more often. If you use very large enclosures (common on BLM land), then your cows may have hundreds of square miles to roam and feed... but when it's time to move them you have to find them. Luckily they're herd animals so when you find a few you've found them all, but still. And occasionally, singles get separated from the herd and you just lose them, which isn't great since a cow is worth about $2k.
So... if we can replace those miles of expensive and constantly-breaking fences with virtual fences, that's good news for everyone. Wildlife and outdoorsmen can roam unimpeded, cattle can be far more tightly controlled, strays quickly identified, located and reunited with the herd -- via remote control!. This is an innovative idea that is worth quite a lot.
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We've been doing this in the UK in the highlands where the terrain makes fencing very expensive. So far it seems to be working well, this is an example: https://presscentre.nature.sco... [nature.scot]
Re:This idea seems solid (Score:5, Informative)
Another advantage to rotational grazing for organic ranching is that the life cycle of worms requires reingestion of fecal material into a new host within 30 days. By making sure the herd never returns to a given area within that interval removes the need for de-worming agents (which we can't use-we accept decreased growth or treat and then sell severely infected animals). This is good for non-organic ranchers also because routine use of de-worming agents leads to parasite resistance.
Another advantage for all ranchers is tracking cattle. Cows about to deliver will often go off from the herd into isolated parts of the pasture. If they run into trouble and need help with delivery, the rancher first has to find them. With this technology, the rancher can set up a separate virtual paddock and give the cow(s) separation from the herd while retaining the ability to keep an eye on her/them.
For me, the issues are cost and proprietary software. The cost is naturally high, about $350-500 per animal for the equipment and an annual monitoring fee. That's pretty steep for me since my profit margin is low (organic certification alone is expensive). And, the devices communicate with a proprietary service. If the company goes out of business or decides to stop the service, the hardware becomes useless. I don't think I'll be buying the equipment until I find a work-around for that problem.
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I feel like this needs something (Score:3)
With a mobile app and some QR codes on the cattle, now you've got everything you need for dockless cow rentals!
Who do they consider stupid? (Score:2)
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Do they consider cows stupid that the cows don't get it that there is nothing more to graze and they have to move, but that seems too complex a task they need a shock to get it? ....
Not stupid. Cattle are quite clever when it comes to finding food to feed the bacteria in their fermentation vats (the rumen, their first stomach).
The issue is that each pasture has grasses of better and lesser quality. The cattle will eat the better grass before eating the poorer grass. The rancher wants the cattle to eat just the better grasses about 50% of the length of the leaves. If the cattle are moved elsewhere at that point, the better grasses will grow more vigorously so there will be more of them
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"some 6,000 data points per collar per minute" (Score:2)
Washington State ... (Score:2)
What? (Score:2)
How did early agrarian society ever survive without an AI telling your cows when to move to a different patch of grass to munch on?
As my father is a dairyman, this seems like a really expensive and stupid solution to a question that nobody ever asked in 5000+ years.
The cow already knows when to move to different pasture, because the grass is fucking short where they are.
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They survived by manually moving the cattle frequently, using fences and gates. This worked pretty well when you've got lots of cheap labor. Heck people used to live amongst the flocks, keeping an eye on them, and driving them to the better pastures.
I'm not sure you've actually ever seen cattle grazing. They will graze the good grass right to the ground, leaving the other grasses they don't like as much, and then they'll follow each other to some other area. It's not random; you can't just expect that o
I'm betting.. (Score:2)
On Peter Thiel being a rich white asshole.
Hey, I won!!!!
Is this a Cow version of the Running Man? (Score:2)
Your collar will explode if you go past the lollipops Daisy,
Eleventy Seven bazillion points of value. (Score:2)
..some 6,000 data points per collar per minute..
If the investors aren't actually asking what in the hell someone could possibly be measuring at that rate from a creature moving at a top speed of 3 farts per minute (that's 7.2 cud-gnaws per minute for you Northerners), then maybe they deserve to have their AI bubble popped too.
Know that any bankruptcy attorney is going to involuntarily snort and cry out "Bullshit!" when one tries to blame the Cowgorithm for their losses.
We should remember that data is AI's waste stream until it's processed and turned into
Solar (Score:2)
Solar power is woke and gay, why don't they power the collars with Beautiful Clean Coal?
Solar-Powered Cow Collars (Score:1)