Attitude is just as important as innovation to Halter founder Craig Piggott

Craig Piggott

Virtually managed cows are a multibillion-dollar concept, but Halter founder Craig Piggott says their success has been more about the execution.

Grit. Perseverance. Resilience. These words come up a lot in conversation with Craig Piggott, CEO of pioneering agritech company Halter. And it’s easy to see why Craig values these attributes so much. Halter is now one of the fastest-growing companies in Aotearoa New Zealand – hundreds of farms here, in Australia and now in the United States use Halter’s solar-powered smart collar to monitor and herd their cattle and manage their pasture. However, the journey from concept to launch was “extremely challenging”, he recalls. “Not much worked in that first year. Halter was a lot more of a deep-tech solution than I realised initially. It was definitely a year of perseverance.”

Fortunately, Craig doesn’t quit easily – something he attributes to a combination of farming experience (he grew up on a dairy farm) and engineering expertise (he graduated from Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland, with a Bachelor of Engineering majoring in Mechanical Engineering). “Engineering is all about solving problems. And a lot of farming is just about grit – you have to get it done no matter what,” he explains. “The fact that we were working every weekend and every night, and it still might come to nothing – that didn’t matter. I was pleased that I was giving it a go.”

He suspects that it was this tenacity that saw him land a role as an engineer at then fledgling start-up Rocket Lab during his final year of university. Craig met Rocket Lab founder Sir Peter Beck at an event run by the Business School’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE). With a growing interest in entrepreneurship, Craig had already participated in CIE’s Velocity Ideas Challenge competition – winning a cash prize in 2016 which he cheerfully admits he and his teammates probably spent on pizza and beer – but it was the encounter with Sir Peter that proved truly pivotal in terms of shaping his future career. “I approached him after he finished speaking and got talking to him about a side hustle I was working on. He was interested in that, which led to me getting a job.”

Craig spent nine intense months at Rocket Lab. “I learned so many things – the value of having a high-performing team, what hard work truly looks like, how contagious it can be when you’re surrounded by people who want to achieve amazing things,” he recalls. “But the key takeaway, I think, is that you can dream really big.” Emboldened by this revelation – and with the support of Sir Peter, who became one of Halter’s first investors and remains a critical role model and mentor for Craig – he took the leap and launched Halter at the end of 2016.

That initial persistence paid off. The product Craig and co-founder Max Olson worked so hard to perfect has become the world’s smartest farm management system for dairy and beef cows, with over $NZ200 million raised from investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, DCVC, Icehouse Ventures and of course Sir Peter, who is now an adjunct professor in aerospace engineering at the University of Auckland. Halter’s collar and accompanying app enables farmers to remotely shift, virtually fence, manage pasture, and monitor cow health, feed and behaviour. It’s the only system in the world that can guide animals between paddocks or to the dairy shed.

Halter achieves this by substituting a cow’s typical visual cue – a fence – with sound and vibration cues. These complement a cow’s senses, as cows’ hearing is better than their vision. Cows wearing a Halter collar hear where a virtual fence is. They are given directional guidance if they cross a virtual boundary, and vibration cues encourage them to walk in the correct direction. Remarkably, only seven days of training is all it takes for these intelligent animals to learn how to respond to these cues.

Halter’s development was driven by Craig’s desire to solve common problems affecting farms – particularly issues around pasture management. “Dairy farmers are really grass farmers. It’s all about managing the grass well, and we set out to come up with a better way to manage grass,” he explains. “Paddocks or fences aren’t that good compared to the flexibility and precision of a virtual fence – so that’s what we tried to build.”

Halter also helps farmers to manage their animals’ health, welfare and reproduction performance – issues that no other single product had addressed, says Craig. “So we thought, we’re just going to focus on solving them. And if we can solve them the fastest, then no one will catch us.”

This fast-paced, incessantly innovative approach remains their MO. “We’re always building on the existing product and releasing new products,” he notes. Last year’s biggest launch was an AI machine learning product called Pasture Pro, which collects data from a variety of sources, including satellites, and then provides farmers with highly detailed information on the growth and quality of their pasture.

It’s unsurprising, then, that last year the company doubled its customer base, launching into beef farming to meet huge demand; this year, it’s on track to double its base again. Halter has also recently deployed on its first ranches in the United States. It’s this international expansion that Craig is most excited about. “Early signs are that there’s a really big market to serve and our product is in a really good position to solve those problems,” he enthuses. “Watch this space.”

Craig’s far from complacent about Halter’s success. As you’d expect from someone who worked 50-hour weeks simultaneously holding down a role at Rocket Lab, developing a game-changing product and completing the final year of an engineering degree – graduating with first class honours, no less – he’s firmly focused on future challenges, not past performance. “The lesson we keep learning is that it doesn’t get easier – because the moment we’ve solved something, we just keep trying to go faster and bigger until it’s hard again,” he observes. “That’s the governing limitation.”

He’s keen to impart this learning to other entrepreneurial aspirants. “Make sure you’re really passionate about your venture, because it’s hard work. But it should be hard – if it’s not, you’re probably not pushing hard enough. And if you care enough about it and you’re willing to put the work in, there’s no reason you can’t make it happen.”

The result of this effort is not just success, but resilience – so essential in the unforgiving entrepreneurial space. “Working through these challenges produces really clear benefits,” he says. “As a by-product, we’ve built this incredibly resilient, hard-working team that can run through brick walls because they’ve done it twenty times before.”

Interestingly, it’s this aspect of his entrepreneurial journey that he’s most proud of. “I could say it’s the team we have, or the culture we have, the customer stories or the impact we’ve had on the industry,” he muses. “But I think it’s that when people spend some time here, they leave feeling like they’ve achieved way more than they ever thought possible.” It’s now his turn to inspire people to “dream really big”. “If I’ve helped set people up for what they’ll go on to achieve, helped them to understand what they’re capable of – I think that’s very cool.”

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