Fences work, really really well. And cows are quite easy animals to herd. They have a natural tendency to just follow along with the group. You can literally move hundreds of head of cattle with about 4 people (I've done it).
There is some value in collecting biometrics and location information. But the entire "move the cow with a vibrator" thing isn't an innovation I think any rancher really wants or needs.
I just have a hard time seeing this as being something that actually solves a need. The "20% savings" seems really fishy. The majority of the labor for a herd is feeding them.
Nz farmers will milk twice a day, early morning and afternoon. In the middle of the day the cows return to their paddock from the morning. In the evening they’re moved to a new paddock.
Grass consumption is the aim of the game. If you let cows out on a full paddock for the day they’ll partially graze and then starve themselves (relatively speaking) in the afternoon.
This is bad for milk production and also pasture quality for the next rotation.
The solution to this is to set a break, a temporary electric fence in the middle of the paddock. So, they arrive to half a paddock then in the morning the farm worker takes it down for the afternoon and sets it up in the next paddock for the night. Probably takes 30-45 minutes depending on paddock size, weather and enthusiasm of the farm hand.
x2 for 2 herds, 7 days a week for 8 months a year.
Now, my brother just draws a line on a map and it takes care of itself.
Once you get them together, sure, but it appears from TFA that this is about gathering them from mountain meadows or other far flung environs. A herd could be spread over thousands of acres, canyons, mountains, all sorts of places to be out of site.
These are operations that don’t use fences. The article mentions this is a NZ company, but the American West would have a similar issue where ranchers can run cattle on land leased from BLM. I would imagine Australia would have a similar problem to solve.
It's called a herd for a reason. Usually if you've found one cow you've found them all. In the wild any cow with genes for aloofness quickly got culled by predators.
The exceptions are the lame & sick ones, but no fancy gadget is going to bring them in; you've got to take a truck to them.
We put our cows out to pasture in the mountains in the spring/summer.
Without the fancy tech it takes about a day to gather them all up.
But you have to realize, this is a job we do once a year. Gathering the cows from the winter pasture is easy because it's a lot smaller.
This is why I said the location information could be useful. But, we used horses and anywhere the cows can go a horse can go.
> These are operations that don’t use fences.
Nope, ranchers own (or lease) the land they put their cows out to pasture on. It's all fenced.
> but the American West would have a similar issue where ranchers can run cattle on land leased from BLM.
I'm in the american west. And BLM land that is used for grazing is fenced. In fact, that's part of what you are paying for when you buy a lease from the BLM is to maintain the fence.
> Livestock theft, agricultural gear theft, is a real thing in AU/NZ as I suspect it is where you work.
I mean, I don't want to jinx it, but it's not really been an issue for us. The main theft we've had to deal with is feed theft and that was solved by switching from 50lbs bales to 1 ton bales.
> And these collars are principally targeted to dairy operations that move herds about on a daily basis.
Yeah, makes sense why it'd doesn't make sense to us. We didn't raise dairy cattle.
We did have a couple of dairy cows, but that was more for my family and a few members of the community. Not for any sort of actual real production. I could see how it'd be a time saver in that case as you do have to twice daily gather the cows to get milked.
On an IT aside, the challenge facing yard, barn, and road security cameras in Australia is parrots .. flocks of several thousand intelligent airborne can openers that follow grain rail lines and rivers and love nothing more than tearing wiring apart.
You have to build to extreme anti vandal standards.
Changing bale sizes works well to deter casual thieves .. serious shitheads turn up with their own trucks and lifting gear.
> flocks of several thousand intelligent airborne can openers that follow grain rail lines and rivers and love nothing more than tearing wiring apart.
Lol, oh that stinks. Yeah not a problem in the PNW. We have some woodpeckers that are annoying if you own wood paneled things (like barns and homes) but otherwise there's not a lot of fighting against nature beyond infections.
> serious shitheads turn up with their own trucks and lifting gear.
It may just be the location and community where I'm from that makes that somewhat unlikely. There's enough people along the roads that someone would see you trying to make off with a giant bale and where I'm from everyone waves at everyone when you drive by :).
It's a combination of being rural enough that everyone knows everyone else yet not so rural that you see the extreme sort of isolation that I believe is possible in Australia.
There's massive amounts of community support in rural Australia .. and occasional opportunistic teabags (thieves), we all wave and coordinate on fire fighting and harvests, keep an eye out for carpet baggers, and rescue outsiders that keep getting lost / stranded.
> someone would see you trying to make off with a giant bale
If you ever get into high luxury car theft, in London one crew pattern was to all wear high vis jackets, someone has a clip board, and the team lifts a high end car straight into a Faraday cage lined truck in plain and open sight.
If the alarm goes off and people look, someone on the crew just visibly shrugs and mimes putting their hands over their ears and gets back to knicking a car.
Point being, successful thieves often look like they're supposed to be doing what they're doing and they don't register .. unless someone specifically knows that hay bale and the owner of that land .. but that's an aside.
> the extreme sort of isolation that I believe is possible in Australia.
The vast majority of people in Australia live near the coast and to each other, it's quite bunched up.
My state is 3x the size of Texas, has a bit over 2 million in population now, but they mostly all live in and around Perth, the Capital city (and famously described by one US astronaut as the most isolated city on the planet) - I'm from quite some distance from that City in a region with considerably less people.
Still, I got to travel the planet doing geophysics and related things.
Fences need to be maintained and are not always where you want them. Cows are big, mostly they are gentle but they can accidentally kill you without trying. Pasture rotation is a big thing but that increases labor costs.
Some ranchers love these because they enable things they should do but won't.
I'd have guessed the biometrics and location information was the most useful part.
But as others have pointed out these are primarily for dairy cows, which is pretty different from raising beef cattle (which is what I did).
There is a need to twice daily gather the cows to have them milked. And the pasture rotation is much more of an involved process than what we needed to deal with. We just plopped a gaint bale of hay down for the cows to munch on.
I think the advantage is being able to move the cows on a daily basis. If I had to guess, the 20% savings comes from rotation grazing. Rotation grazing is a lot easier on your pasture, allowing you to have more cows per acre. Rotation grazing can easily be done manually -- it doesn't take much training before moving cows between paddocks is as easy as opening the gate between the two paddocks and yelling out "I've put your tasty bribe in the next paddock, come and get it". Well that's not what you yell at them, but that's what they hear.
But just because it's easy if you do it daily it quickly adds up to a lot of hours.
And the small paddocks of rotation grazing take a lot of expensive wire.
these big names at the top (thiel, musk, etc) ive really just started to tune them out. they're all bored, have too much money, and are obsessed with futurism & getting people to follow them into their lame visions of the future at all costs. they're p much entirely decoupled from the economic plights you and i face, they just play a different game altogether and any potential gamble for savings is never framed as a "this can make things better for everyone" but more or less just funneled through ... uh, i dont know shareholder opportunity or something.
i don't doubt there's plenty of upside in agriculture/farming to be had with technology, i just no longer find it meaningful when people from this social class are trying talking about them. something is really off putting now when silicon valley types try to be authority figures on completely different industries, it's super presumptuous. think they've lost the plot quite a bit here, i dont think anyone should be interested in their ideas of the future at all. they've done enough damage. all these dudes ever needed was to go to therapy, all we need now is for them to leave us alone. the incessant need to be the guy with the big ideas these guys are constantly displaying is just so exhausting at this point. wish they'd just go buy a beach and drink liquor out of coconuts and disappear, no one needs to move fast and break things and shake cows
Yeah, any time something farming related comes up here there's a bunch of comments from tech bros who clearly think farmers are just idiots waiting around to be rescued by the tech bros' superior understanding of what farming is and what technology it needs, based on...
Possibly you're just not cynical enough to appreciate the need it could solve. Get it working on cows then move on to people. This is Peter Thiel we're talking about.
Ok I totally misread the title as "... cow dollars" and thought this was going to be some commodity trading blockchain with a proof-of-livestock scheme. That might actually be able to work using these collars. It would be really cool if the farms of the future were doing something like automated silviculture using robotic judas goats and electronically-controlled gates to herd the animals from one area to another. A roomba-type robot could follow along and collect fecal samples to monitor for parasites and diseases.
It's staged shocking also - cows first hear beeping / buzzing, followed by mild shocking - less than a regular electric fence, then a greater shock.
It also reduces physical fencing costs and adds the ability to herd by "moving" the virtual boundaries so that cows can be moved from pasture to pasture.
The RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Australia) is still reserving judgement on this, so far in seems that in "normal operation" animals recieve less shocking than with trad roll out electric fence lines (which are mostly a visual bright white tape cue that often are unpowered once animals "learn") .. BUT there's also a question of "how bad can this get in fail conditions".
Sure - save for the "live updates of boundaries" part -
the worst case fail situation here is likely a boundary being broadcast that was on the opposite side of the planet ("a simple error of plus/minus sign") and the entire herd is constantly(?) being buzzed and shocked.
The signals are audio and vibration Backed UP by an electric shock.
CHARLIE BAKER: Cows learn that a sound cue and increasing beat is a warning that they're approaching a virtual boundary, and they learn to turn away from that boundary.
In the first few days of training, if they ignore that sound cue, they would get a low-energy pulse. That's significantly weaker than an electric fence, but it's enough to give meaning to that sound cue.
Oh, IOT shock collars. Hope this company takes security more seriously than most IOT players, or some sick people are going to take hacking into these devices as an opportunity for animal cruelty. :(
Pretty soon they will release something similar to track humans en mass. They could strap it on your wrist instead of you neck, perhaps call it a “Smart Watch” (because big brother is watching you).
If the idea takes off, I don's why a DIY approach can't be viable. Produce your own collars (you'd need many thousands, a factory would be happy), plant your own towers with your own transmitters (likely bog-standard LoRa, or similar), write your own open-source firmware for all that, and an open-source control app.
That's relatively straightforward for more technical people, but I _really_ can't picture farmers going through all that trouble unless someone gets the foundation ready to go.
This is exactly why a startup plans to sell all that to farmers in a neat package, maybe along with a subscription to cover the towers maintenance costs.
Animals don't give off much waste heat. They evolved not to. And it's very hard to extract energy from small temperature gradients. The thermoelectric chargers that convert body heat to energy are only ~1% efficient. Compare to sunlight, which gives ~20x the watts per square inch, and can be converted at 20% efficiency. So a body heat charger needs to be roughly 400 times as big as a solar panel does.
Maybe I am slightly paranoid or reading too much dystopian fiction, but the collar thing does not seem to really be about cows, if Thiel is involved. More like a portable prison, fully decentralised and highly technological.
Fences work, really really well. And cows are quite easy animals to herd. They have a natural tendency to just follow along with the group. You can literally move hundreds of head of cattle with about 4 people (I've done it).
There is some value in collecting biometrics and location information. But the entire "move the cow with a vibrator" thing isn't an innovation I think any rancher really wants or needs.
I just have a hard time seeing this as being something that actually solves a need. The "20% savings" seems really fishy. The majority of the labor for a herd is feeding them.
Nz farmers will milk twice a day, early morning and afternoon. In the middle of the day the cows return to their paddock from the morning. In the evening they’re moved to a new paddock.
Grass consumption is the aim of the game. If you let cows out on a full paddock for the day they’ll partially graze and then starve themselves (relatively speaking) in the afternoon.
This is bad for milk production and also pasture quality for the next rotation.
The solution to this is to set a break, a temporary electric fence in the middle of the paddock. So, they arrive to half a paddock then in the morning the farm worker takes it down for the afternoon and sets it up in the next paddock for the night. Probably takes 30-45 minutes depending on paddock size, weather and enthusiasm of the farm hand.
x2 for 2 herds, 7 days a week for 8 months a year.
Now, my brother just draws a line on a map and it takes care of itself.
The exceptions are the lame & sick ones, but no fancy gadget is going to bring them in; you've got to take a truck to them.
That said, when they see the whole group moving they want to join in.
On bigger open ranges you do have to count and go explore to find the two rebels that decided they wanted to be on the other side of the mountain :)
Without the fancy tech it takes about a day to gather them all up.
But you have to realize, this is a job we do once a year. Gathering the cows from the winter pasture is easy because it's a lot smaller.
This is why I said the location information could be useful. But, we used horses and anywhere the cows can go a horse can go.
> These are operations that don’t use fences.
Nope, ranchers own (or lease) the land they put their cows out to pasture on. It's all fenced.
> but the American West would have a similar issue where ranchers can run cattle on land leased from BLM.
I'm in the american west. And BLM land that is used for grazing is fenced. In fact, that's part of what you are paying for when you buy a lease from the BLM is to maintain the fence.
Livestock theft, agricultural gear theft, is a real thing in AU/NZ as I suspect it is where you work.
One advantage (but is it economic?) to GPS collars on animals is tracking and warnings should they all suddenly accelerate to road transport speeds.
There's potential for heartbeat monitoring to warn of fallen / removed collars or predator takedowns.
> this is a job we do once a year.
And these collars are principally targeted to dairy operations that move herds about on a daily basis.
> I'm in the american west. And BLM land that is used for grazing is fenced.
I'm from the Kimberley .. what's a fence?
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5EQ1NZN6A
I mean, I don't want to jinx it, but it's not really been an issue for us. The main theft we've had to deal with is feed theft and that was solved by switching from 50lbs bales to 1 ton bales.
> And these collars are principally targeted to dairy operations that move herds about on a daily basis.
Yeah, makes sense why it'd doesn't make sense to us. We didn't raise dairy cattle.
We did have a couple of dairy cows, but that was more for my family and a few members of the community. Not for any sort of actual real production. I could see how it'd be a time saver in that case as you do have to twice daily gather the cows to get milked.
On an IT aside, the challenge facing yard, barn, and road security cameras in Australia is parrots .. flocks of several thousand intelligent airborne can openers that follow grain rail lines and rivers and love nothing more than tearing wiring apart.
You have to build to extreme anti vandal standards.
Changing bale sizes works well to deter casual thieves .. serious shitheads turn up with their own trucks and lifting gear.
Lol, oh that stinks. Yeah not a problem in the PNW. We have some woodpeckers that are annoying if you own wood paneled things (like barns and homes) but otherwise there's not a lot of fighting against nature beyond infections.
> serious shitheads turn up with their own trucks and lifting gear.
It may just be the location and community where I'm from that makes that somewhat unlikely. There's enough people along the roads that someone would see you trying to make off with a giant bale and where I'm from everyone waves at everyone when you drive by :).
It's a combination of being rural enough that everyone knows everyone else yet not so rural that you see the extreme sort of isolation that I believe is possible in Australia.
> someone would see you trying to make off with a giant bale
If you ever get into high luxury car theft, in London one crew pattern was to all wear high vis jackets, someone has a clip board, and the team lifts a high end car straight into a Faraday cage lined truck in plain and open sight.
If the alarm goes off and people look, someone on the crew just visibly shrugs and mimes putting their hands over their ears and gets back to knicking a car.
Point being, successful thieves often look like they're supposed to be doing what they're doing and they don't register .. unless someone specifically knows that hay bale and the owner of that land .. but that's an aside.
> the extreme sort of isolation that I believe is possible in Australia.
The vast majority of people in Australia live near the coast and to each other, it's quite bunched up.
My state is 3x the size of Texas, has a bit over 2 million in population now, but they mostly all live in and around Perth, the Capital city (and famously described by one US astronaut as the most isolated city on the planet) - I'm from quite some distance from that City in a region with considerably less people.
Still, I got to travel the planet doing geophysics and related things.
Are you.. mansplaining how herds work to a cow farmer, because you've read an article on HN?
Knowing the perversity of the world it’ll sell millions for unknown reasons.
(An argument that it could Defence the west would be a better one, removing herd fences could have value for wildlife).
Some ranchers love these because they enable things they should do but won't.
But as others have pointed out these are primarily for dairy cows, which is pretty different from raising beef cattle (which is what I did).
There is a need to twice daily gather the cows to have them milked. And the pasture rotation is much more of an involved process than what we needed to deal with. We just plopped a gaint bale of hay down for the cows to munch on.
But just because it's easy if you do it daily it quickly adds up to a lot of hours.
And the small paddocks of rotation grazing take a lot of expensive wire.
i don't doubt there's plenty of upside in agriculture/farming to be had with technology, i just no longer find it meaningful when people from this social class are trying talking about them. something is really off putting now when silicon valley types try to be authority figures on completely different industries, it's super presumptuous. think they've lost the plot quite a bit here, i dont think anyone should be interested in their ideas of the future at all. they've done enough damage. all these dudes ever needed was to go to therapy, all we need now is for them to leave us alone. the incessant need to be the guy with the big ideas these guys are constantly displaying is just so exhausting at this point. wish they'd just go buy a beach and drink liquor out of coconuts and disappear, no one needs to move fast and break things and shake cows
It also reduces physical fencing costs and adds the ability to herd by "moving" the virtual boundaries so that cows can be moved from pasture to pasture.
There's more on this on Landline
* https://www.thetvdb.com/series/landline/episodes/11325308
* https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/programs/landline/2025-09-...
The RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Australia) is still reserving judgement on this, so far in seems that in "normal operation" animals recieve less shocking than with trad roll out electric fence lines (which are mostly a visual bright white tape cue that often are unpowered once animals "learn") .. BUT there's also a question of "how bad can this get in fail conditions".
Yea, that’s basically exactly how the electric fences people have used for dogs for decades work.
the worst case fail situation here is likely a boundary being broadcast that was on the opposite side of the planet ("a simple error of plus/minus sign") and the entire herd is constantly(?) being buzzed and shocked.
It's pretty doable, given enough will.
Given that you hear frequently (even on the front page of HN today)
- people getting locked out of their cloud accounts and then facing a Kafkaesque faceless bureaucracy
- physical products turning into bricks because the cloud account disappeared with the company's failure
I would certainly hope that a cloud account is optional.
Something tells me you don't acquire the largest dataset of cattle behavior with opt-in cloud analytics.