Latest / Talking Dairy / Precision Dairy Farming Series: Craig Piggott on building Halter | Ep. 4

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Precision Dairy Farming Series: Craig Piggott on building Halter | Ep. 4 · Talking Dairy

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Talking Dairy.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host Jack McGowan from DairyNZ.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: This episode is part of a special series recorded at the 2025 Precision Dairy Farming Conference in Auto Tahi Christchurch.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm with Craig Piggott from Holter.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Craig grew up on his parents' farm in the Waikito, graduated with first-class honours in engineering from the University of Auckland, and went to work at Rocket Lab.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: At just 21, he left the world of satellites and space exploration to found Holter, building smart collars for cows.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: The company has since raised over 200 million and become one of New Zealand's fastest growing businesses.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: Our keynote on innovation and disruption really captured how much farming has changed.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome, Craig.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for joining us.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me on.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Can you give us the elevator pitch?
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: What is Holter and what problems does it solve for farmers?
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Holter is the leading way to run a pasture-based dairy or beef farm.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: A collar that goes on a cow.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's an app that goes on the farmer's phone.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: That collar can fence and shift cows.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so from the phone, we kind of couple that with a lot of insights and data around pasture, how much cover you have each day, how it's growing.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: We kind of forecast that for farmers as well, as well as heat detection and health and things like that.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really kind of built out to be this operating system, I guess, that farmers use, saves them a bunch of time, enables them to be more efficient, lifts their productivity or production, kind of whatever the goal is, we try to be a tool that enables that.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: I miss this, but I'm very curious how did you go from rockets to cow collars?
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like what's the link there?
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: The motivation was Rocket Lab was the first I was ever exposed to like a startup or this idea you could chase a crazy mission with a talented team and people would fund you to do that.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so the moment I knew that that was possible, obviously I grew up in agriculture and dairy farming.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so I wanted to do that for farming.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was kind of as simple as that.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: I remember saying to Peter Beck, who was my boss, the founder of Rock Lab, hey, I'm going to go start this company called Holter, and I want to bring technology into farming and push the industry forward.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't exactly know what that's going to look like, but I want to give it a crack.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that was it back in 2016.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: Did the idea for virtual fencing, is that something you had seen or like how?
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: How?
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: No, it wasn't something I'd seen at all.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: I guess as an engineer, it was like a first-principled idea in the sense that fences are really like the main way you have control of your land.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Controls obviously where cows graze and how you rest land.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that's just such a big lever for farmers in terms of their grazing management or their pasture management.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so being able to do that virtually where you're unconstrained, you can shift it as much as you want.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's very precise.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to fit into paddocks.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like I think that was the idea or the logic.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Also, obviously saves a bunch of time, which every farmer's time poor, so that's a good thing.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that was the initial thesis.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: And how did Holter develop from that concept to a product that is being used on real farms?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, that's been a multi-year, very hard journey.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's been about nine years total.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: But I guess how the answer's probably we've hired really well.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: We have a really strong team that I'm really proud of.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: We have partnered really well with farmers.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think Holter really has been built by, you know, New Zealand dairy farmers and who are some of the best in the world.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that feedback and kind of partnership's been really key.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we've worked hard and had a lot of grit, to be honest.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I think when we started Holter, we were quite naive about how hard it would be.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And by the time we worked out that it was going to be very difficult, we had the confidence we knew how to do hard things at that point.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, a bit of naivety that's probably turned into a good lesson on how much you can achieve if you just don't quit.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm assuming, because most tech goes through sort of prototyping and testing.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: How did that work?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: We're constantly iterating and improving it.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Even today, half of the team, we have a team of about 300 or 350 people.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: About half of that is on the engineering side.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Engineering, design, machine learning, hardware, software, like kind of all of the above.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Constantly working on improving what we have and releasing new features and trying to solve new problems for farmers.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's still core to who we are today.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: But once upon a time, that was all we had.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a very long journey of hundreds of hardware prototypes and trying to work out if it was even possible.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because for the first few years, you know, it was more likely to fail than it was to succeed.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so did you test with real farmers early on?
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: We developed in the field.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: We had an office on my parents' farm in the Waikato.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: Were your parents the first guinea pigs?
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, totally.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: And we partnered with some key farms pretty early on as well, before the product was at all finished.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: I guess it's never finished, but you get the idea.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, from that just kept building and iterating.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: These things couldn't be developed without those kind of farmers that are willing to take a bit of a chance, right?
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think holter could have been developed if you weren't in New Zealand.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think New Zealand dairy farmers that are so progressive and so willing to push the boundaries, like that's what's enabled us to exist.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: What have you learned from farmers who are using Holter collars day-to-day?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: We have learned a lot and we continue to learn a lot.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, every farm, land, animals, like all of that can be very different.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: And farmers have the best context to how they want to manage that for their operation.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is why when we build features, we try to get them in the hands of farmers really early and see how they use them and and what benefit there is to it and what value there is to it.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then from that we learn and either go kind of advance the product further or sometimes delete the product and you know do something else.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Fail fast.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, totally.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: You're you're always trying to learn as quickly as possible, and that can mean failing.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I think farmers have just been caught at every part of the product that we've built.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Really haven't built anything that hasn't been kind of like in the field from day dock.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: What does this virtual fencing tech enable farmers to do that they couldn't do before or couldn't do as easily?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Farming is full of constraints or farmers would say like just the practicalities of farming.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Often that's your paddocks, which are you know, if you if you're to work through the first principles of I've got this many cows and I'm trying to feed them this amount at this point in the season, that should be, you know, this much megajoules of of energy or the tons of kgs of dry matter.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's never going to be a paddock.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: A paddock's just like a close approximation.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it's pretty good.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: But and so the most abstract answer is you become unconstrained.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: You can be as precise as you want to be, as much flexibility as you want to be.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: But in reality, it means you usually are harvesting more grass and you're doing so in a way where it's just less effort and requires less labor.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: So for some customers, they run a high performing farm.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: They see a really strong increase in their profit or their bottom line.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: We recently released an independent study across 10 high-performing dairy farms, five in the North Island, five in the South Island, done by uh a couple of like external firms.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that showed, I think it was a 13% lift in profit across these 10 farms.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then obviously, these other customers that want to spend more time with their kids and want to have a better work-life balance.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that's awesome as well.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, that's just as meaningful to us as anything else.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so we don't tell farmers their goals, we just want to be a tool that helps farmers achieve them.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: There was another speaker here at the conference that was talking about technology in horticulture.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: He was talking about how orchards have moved from 3D trees to 2D, you know, imagine a vineyard, and how that new layout allows now the possibility.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: So it was done for, you know, solar radiation and probably access of vehicles, but now that allows the possibility for robots.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was curious what you saw as possibilities, aside from Holter, but how Holter or virtual fencing, you know, the removal of fences, might create other opportunities on our dairy farms.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Today, obviously, when we deploy onto a new customer's farm, it works with the infrastructure they have.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: So you don't have to remove fences.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Typically, after a farmers build confidence and and they want to push the system further, they will start to pull out.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: How long does that usually take?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, some farmers, obviously, if you like say if you're a share milker, you're probably not going to do it at all because it's not your capital.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: But for like an owner operator, we have some that some do it actually before they even put outside on.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm going all in.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Let's just say for the sake of an example, it's it's a yeah.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the bigger your paddocks or your blocks, the more flexibility you have.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: You can feed exactly what the cows need each day.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you get more out of your grass.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's better for the animals, more consistent.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that's, you know, farmers love that.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I had a farmer the other day describing this big maybe 10 paddocks put into one.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, it's just my favorite part of the farm to graze because I just can do whatever I want.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Full control.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: I've got full control.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I think that also does make a lot of other things easier, right?
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like getting around your farms easy, checking water troughs and putting furd on, or whatever it is, like it's also a lot easier to manage.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I think just technology in general will open the door for AI and and like lots of other things as well that that we're obviously working hard on.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, that was going to be my next question.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: So, where do you see your technology going in the next few years?
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we try and be led by our customers.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: So whatever we're hearing that they're interested in or problems they have, right now there is definitely a big wave coming through.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's probably the biggest advancement we'll see in our lifetime in terms of AI, or at least, you know, so far.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think it has huge potential within farming.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think the data in farming is quite noisy.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: It can be quite hard to interpret.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I think AI is really good at that.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: I also think farmers are very like natural language.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: They like to have a conversation.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I think these tools could and probably will, and we're working on this, but enable farmers to kind of ask a model or an AI, like anything about their farm or be a soundboard for decisions.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there's so much potential in that.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: But we're also working on, yeah, lots of other features as well at the same time.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that natural language thing, you might have seen that Darian Zed just launched Daisy, which is, you know, an online AI chatbot.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that was one of the key things for us was like you have to be able to talk to it like a human and get human responses from it.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what's next for the technology.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: What's next for you?
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Broadly, 90% of my time is obviously older, which is what you would expect.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think I still stay pretty close to RD and new products, but I do spend a lot of my time on growing the team and expanding that.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: We're hiring a lot at the moment and obviously running the exec team and the board and things like that as well.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I think my time changes a lot, as it should, but we are very focused on trying to hire a lot of people and trying to really like rally that team behind the mission and just the opportunity we have and have in front of us.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, it's an exciting time.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm having a lot of fun.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: I feel very lucky and very fortunate.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm traveling a lot, as you would expect.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it's been it's been an awesome journey so far.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: Sounds like you're very busy.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: What do you do when you're not working?
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: Are you ever not working?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: I work, yeah.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: I guess no different to farmers in a way.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like you kind of are working all the time.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Outside of work, I have a dog, uh, bought a collie.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: She's got the same energy as you, I think.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, she's awesome.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so she keeps me busy either running or whatnot.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's probably my main outside of work thing.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Running's good for clearing the head, you know, when you got to work through a difficult challenge.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: But otherwise, it doesn't feel like work in many ways.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like it is just the fact we get to serve farmers and and build things which they enjoy, I think, is is really cool.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so now we love what we do, and I think that's true for most people at Holter.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much, Craig, for making the time to chat with us and for sharing the Holter journey and your journey.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: The message here is that New Zealand developed technology is giving farmers new tools for remote livestock management, and that's helping them to work a lot smarter, not necessarily harder, and give them a lot more control over their farm system.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much, Matiwa.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: If you'd like to get connected with DariNZ's latest advice, research, tools, and resources, whether it's reading, scrolling, listening, or in person, you can visit dairynz.co.nz forward slash get connected, and don't forget to hit follow to keep up to date with our latest episodes.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: As always, if you have any feedback on this podcast or have some ideas for future topics or guests, please email us at talkingdairy at dairynz.co.nz.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening and we'll catch you next time on Talking Dairy.