Introduction
Cows are the heart of a cattle farm. Happy and healthy cows are productive cows. Farmers take care in managing their cows to produce food that feeds society, and are the backbone of economies throughout the world. The future of food production hinges on questions like: How do we feed the world's growing population without compromising our natural resources? At Halter, our mission is to enable farmers to run more productive and sustainable farms while caring for their animals and the environment.
Every day, farmers face mounting challenges such as increasing productivity demands, rising input costs, labour shortages, animal health and welfare priorities, and environmental and compliance pressures. Halter has built a farm management system that helps farmers to overcome these challenges. At the core of the system are virtual fencing and animal guidance technologies. In the years ahead, technologies like Halter will play an increasingly important role in supporting farmers to care for their animals.
Our Animal Welfare Charter explains how the Halter system works, Halter's commitment to protecting animal welfare, our partnership with leading veterinarians and animal welfare experts, and a summary of studies in the field of virtual fencing and animal welfare. This information was first published in September 2023, updated periodically, and will continue to evolve as our system evolves.
For anyone interested in seeing the Halter system in action, please contact us. We conduct Open Days on Halter farms in regions throughout the markets we operate in, and anyone is welcome to attend and see the system in action.
Halter in a nutshell
The Halter system includes a collar per cow, a Halter app on the farmer's phone, and a communications network on each farm.
Cows learn over a short training period to respond to two primary cues - sound and vibration. Through learning, these cues become predictable and controllable for cows. The training takes approximately 7 days for dairy cows, and 10 days for beef cattle.
Sound cues guide animals left and right if they cross a virtual boundary. Vibration cues encourage animals to walk in the correct direction.
The collar also has a secondary cue - a low-energy electric pulse - used to reinforce the primary cues if cows choose to ignore them. The pulse is mainly used during the training period, and thereafter only when animals choose to ignore the guidance cues. It is significantly weaker in energy than the 'shock' from a standard electric fence.
Once trained, the guidance cues that a typical cow receives each day are almost entirely sound and vibration. These cues typically make up only 1.6 minutes per day per cow, so for over 99% of the day the typical cow does not experience any cues.
Halter follows a set of standards and safeguards to ensure that animal welfare is protected when training, containing and guiding animals with virtual fencing technology (see Section 3).
Users can continuously monitor their animals' location and behaviour (dairy and beef cattle), while Halter can alert users to dairy cows potentially showing signs of poor health and dairy cows on heat.
Our team works closely with an independent Veterinary Advisory Board composed of six leading veterinarians in dairy husbandry, production and animal welfare who advise our team across a range of areas.
Halter also partners with leading animal behaviour experts from the Tasmanian Industry of Agriculture on research studies focused on pastoral dairy cows and virtual fencing technology.
Halter has one of the largest datasets on cow behaviour in the world, with hundreds of millions of cow-days of data. Halter uses this data to do extensive research on animal behaviour, health and welfare.
¹ Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture - 'Managing dairy cows with Halter virtual fencing technology', Dr Megan Verdon (2024)
Note: these videos depict dairy cows in typical dairy farm scenarios. Beef animals are guided using passive shifting, not active shifting.