Halter Implementation Ashgrove – 1. The First Two Weeks

Background

Matauri Angus is located in the Tangowahine Valley, north of Dargaville. 600 ha’s total, comprising 535 ha’s effective with an additional 45 ha’s leased. With only a few flats the farm is mostly very steep Northland hill country. Paddocks average on the hills around 20 ha’s. The farm winters 500 stud angus cattle, including 250 breeding females and additionally 1300 ewes and replacements. In late 2023 they started on a journey with virtual fencing. James Parsons the managing director shares the journey.

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In March 2023 at the Northland Agricultural Field Days, I bowled into the Halter tent and asked one of the friendly team when they would have something for beef. Timing was perfect as Halter were deliberating on a beef strategy and weighing up how to get started. As a hill country farmer, I’d been watching the virtual fencing space for a while and was getting impatient. Several months later we became the inaugural hill country beef farm using their specialist beef product called Halter Base.

All my calculations looked compelling as to the return on investment for hill country beef farms. Primarily due to the current low pasture utilization on hill country around the 50% to 60%. If we could achieve 80%, that’s an additional 1 to 2 tonnes of drymatter eaten. Not to mention improved grass growth, feed quality and environmental benefits. I’d seen the benefit of subdivision numerous times particularly in bull cell systems where extensively grazed low performing farms are turned into high producing ones. Animals going from weekly to 2 weekly shifts down to 2 daily shifts enabled by fences and water. But that infrastructure investment is getting up to $1700/ha and shifting electric fences is not practical on big hill country. In our case we already have 66km or $2m worth of fences on our farm, and we are building more. A lot of our fences are getting to the end of their life and $30 to $40 per metre to replace them is quite a big expense. Could virtual fencing be the disruptive technology us hill country farmers are looking for?

Nine towers were installed across the farm and the Halter App downloaded on our phones which included a detailed farm map. The big day arrived and as a starter we collared 102 cows comprising two mobs with calves at foot. All calves remained uncollared.

The team and I are pretty excited about what this would enable for hill country farming but mentally preparing ourselves; it is highly likely things won’t go as planned. Rarely does new technology work out as well as you hope.

We are pushing boundaries with collars on hill country with beef cows.

A lot of questions were circling in my mind such as:

• how will the collars work on steep hill country like ours?
• will the cows freak out because the uncollared calves have access to wander around a 20 ha paddock, but the cows are contained to 1 ha of that paddock?
• when we try and shift the cows will the collars unwittingly push them over a bluff?
• how will the team of staff handle the new technology?
• how big an issue will our water infrastructure be?
• what will neighbors think of us? If it doesn’t work they’ll all have a chuckle at our expense.

Yet amongst all the questions I kept telling myself it is working on dairy farms already, so this isn’t completely new kit. Secondly if we can achieve daily shifts on our extensive hill country the pasture utilisation gains and improved pasture quality on offer are compelling.

Collaring the cows was pretty quick. We used the head bail with the help of an anti-backing bar up behind the cows in the crush, about 2 minutes per cow. Tried collaring a few just up the drenching race but that seemed more clunky so reverted back to the head bail.

The collared cows with calves at foot headed out to two of our few flat paddocks where they were to be trained. The virtual perimeter was set up and an electric hot wire was set another 10 meters beyond the virtual perimeter. A gang of us stood out in the paddock and watched the cows interacting with the virtual perimeter. They worked it out really quickly.

Next blog I’ll cover how long training took. We are itching to get the cows up into the hills and off the flats to see if these collars work on real hills.

Read more here