Halter

12 past 12.

A great southern farmer who's one of the first in WA to adopt Holter's virtual fencing technology says it's going to be a game changer for his business.

Bevan Ravenhill farms at Many Peaks, about 440 kilometres southeast of Perth, and has bought more than 500 collars for his beef herd.

Up until now, the only virtual fencing company approved to sell collars in WA was Gallagher.

But that's changed, with Holter now also approved to operate in the state.

Bevan Ravenhill says it's good to have options.

Yeah, Holter virtual fencing technology for us is and will be a game changer.

We've been waiting for Holter to arrive for quite a while because what we can see that it's going to do to our business in terms of pasture management, reproduction and all those livestock health benefits are going to be really game changing, yes.

The two systems work side by side.

Employee Tim Saltmarsh says that recent updates of halter collars provides more health information than the robots alone.

It allows us to look for cows before they go down to some degree, preemptively treat for milk fever and things, and we use Holter data for all of our mating.

We don't use heat patches or tail paint, and we've had good success with that.

It's also given us our pregnant autumn cows, so not doing a preg test on the autumn herd, so it's saving us there.

Dr Megan Verdon has studied Holter's use in Tasmania for a decade.

and says research into the use of these two systems side by side is needed.

She believes that in any such system, cows cannot be moved individually.

I feel bad for them on that level, but they sure don't need to take me out of business by eating all my calves.

So looking forward to using Halter next summer.

We saw some videos when you and I went up to Montana.

that the cowboy that was herding those cows showed us of a bear being chased off by the herd of cow-calf pairs, a grizzly bear, because they have that herd effect rather than that bear getting the one-on-one.

And those have been the building blocks of New Zealand's economy for some time now.

And we've started to see some really, really strong Obviously, stories come out of the likes of Xero and Trade Me and lately, of course, Holter as well.

And there's some real green shoots in other industries and technology as an export has become a lot bigger for the country.

You mentioned, of course, that Raygun itself is a tech export.

Like I say, you know, everybody still has to eat.

But what we will see is the ability to improve the effectiveness of those categories that we're operating in to make them more more effective.

The example you had there is Holter.

Holter was a great example of agriculture plus tech equals multi-billion dollar business opportunity.

I mean, they can create moving grazing boundaries literally on their phone and manage their herd and forage across a large landscape in ways that they just weren't able to do before.

So with that, today we're joined by Theo Beaumont, head of partnerships at Halter.

In addition to leading partnerships for Halter, Theo works extensively with large ranch operations across the West, giving him a very unique perspective on where this technology is working, where the economics make sense.

and where it might be headed.

Let's start by you giving us a little background about yourself and a little bit of background about Halter and what you're up to.

Sure.

Thanks for having me on, team.

So I was at school for ag for four years down in the South Island of New Zealand.

Hey, John, last time I

chatted to you on the country, you were just about to get Holter in.

So three months on or two months on since we last chatted.

Do you love it?

So good luck to that guy.

I think he's done a fantastic job.

Well, the Holter was originally invented for the dairy industry, but it's, you know, future applications very much in extensive beef country.

Hey, John, got to go.

The breakout story of the last eighteen months, though, is what happens when you add GPS and actuation to the collar.

Halter makes solar-powered GPS collars that use audio cues and gentle vibrations to keep cattle inside virtual boundaries drawn on a phone.

No wire, no posts, no riding out to move the herd.

In March 2026, the New Zealand-born company closed a two hundred twenty million dollar Series E at a two billion dollar valuation led by Founders Fund.

In the cloud, herd-level analytics, cross-farm model training, dashboards, and long-term trends.

GrazeMate, for example, stores data locally and syncs when it reconnects to its base station.

Halter went further and connected its collars directly to satellites.

Both are responses to the same constraint.

You can start great companies in New Zealand.

Um, you can scale those companies now out of here, a- a la Rocket Labs, the Halters of this world, et cetera.

Uh, and you can take those companies to the world without having to be based over there.

And so, you know, I think we've got an amazing proposition now, um, collectively when you think through fiber, SpaceX, and the satellite technology, um, mobile connectivity, um, that actually enables growth in New Zealand.

Um, so we're in the final stages of purchasing.

I just got a, another email today, "Hey, we're sending some paperwork." So, um, we're gonna be deploying Halter virtual fence collars, so that'll be a, a real game changer for us.

Yeah.

I think going satellite is...

You know, there's r- some tremendous benefits of Halter over other companies, but the satellite aspect is just, it knocks them out.

And for so many ranches that, you know, you don't have service, you n- you know-

No cellphone service, no Wi-Fi.

To have the ability to do that from our phones, from an app.

And we use Halter, by the way.

And so we, to be able to manage those things, these different ecosystems differently has been such a huge unlock for us and allowed us to really expand what we thought we could do.

I like i like cow calf so that's kind of where we sit you know you find something that you like and