Halter’s latest tech helps farmers grow more grass and use it better

Farming tech company Halter has come up with another innovation that it says will help farmers grow more grass, use it better and make more money.

Halter chief Craig Piggott said farmers could grow an extra two tonnes of grass dry matter per hectare by using the new Pasture Pro app.

Dry matter is the amount of nutrition left after the grass has been dried.

The agri-tech innovator is known for the Halter cow collar, guides cows around a farm using sound and vibrations, allowing farmers to automate herd movements and create virtual fences.

The collar is controlled via a phone app and gave cows cues to move through vibrations in the collar.

Piggott said the new pasture app combined machine learning, weather data and satellite imagery to help farmers grow and harvest more grass.

The pasture cover of every square meter of a farm is updated every day.

The traditional method of determining when to graze a paddock could lead to grass value being lost, he said.

“Pasture harvested per hectare drives at least 85% of profit for most farms and is the cheapest form of feed.”

Piggott said during key periods of the season, not having accurate pasture data or the flexibility of virtual fencing to easily act on insights, meant sacrificing more than 10% of potential pasture yield.

If cows grazed a paddock before there was sufficient grass on a regular basis it reduced the available grass and could lose farmers hundreds of dollars per hectare, he said.

“Such daily inefficiencies from conventional farming practices compound significantly over a season,” he said.

Piggott said many farmers grazed paddocks at specific intervals every season, but if conditions changed daily, so should those intervals.

Pasture Pro automatically estimated pasture cover and grass growth rates, no matter the weather.

Other satellite grass growth tools were often limited during bad weather or cloud cover, he said.

It used hyper spectral satellite imagery, collar data from all grazing, data from images captured on a farmer’s phone, plus regional and seasonal pasture growth rates to do this, Piggott said.

The new innovation also had environmental benefits, he said.

“Increasing pasture harvest will help to reduce inputs like fertiliser and supplements,” he said.

“At a time when most Kiwi dairy farmers are facing sustained financial pressure, including Fonterra’s milk price forecast adjusted down to $7 kg/MS, Halter’s new Pasture Pro tool could unlock significant new pasture gains to drive increased profit for farmers,” Piggott said.