Peter Thiel's big bet on solar-powered cow collars (opens in new tab)

My brothers a dairy farmer in NZ and uses this.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Why do you think that, per the article, one million cattle are wearing these collars?

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...

As far as the product is at the moment, it's not that clear - [1] they're not saying much apart from noise, sounds, or "how it actually works" - I see instead cotton candy pages - the sort of stuff not mentioning the important stuff but rather touting a chorus of AI This sort of site page promoting what sets them apart - might work for some high end cattle managers that don't have a hard or long background in cattle management and more have a business only background. For those who have been in the agriculture industry here in Australia I doubt many would recognise Halter as a brand of product that has something to do with farming cattle as leading; when Gallagher would surely be recognised by the farmers here who have a bit of age on them and around the industry for some time. [To put in context, Gallagher for most cattle folk in Australia would be synonymous in familiarity as IBM or mainframe for most HN readers]

Gallagher does have a virtual fencing system as well, [2], and for any perspective customers, clearly inform in regard to the basics or premise of their e-shepherd system. Noise to prompt ... but eventually if ignored electrical stimulation - yeah that works

Virtual fencing is an untapped market, even if one is not aiming for the whole herd, but just as a representative of the herd, or perhaps the ring leaders and trouble makers.

I'm not sure too many run of the mill cattle farmers in my parts would appreciate the cattle being monitored via AI or even systems that are probably at some point going to be subscription based or require online access to function [3]

I like real fences but I do like the idea of an adjustable virtual fence, virtual drover via a collar, but as someone (in Queensland, Aust.) who has seen the issues with a supposedly unobtrusive NLIS tag, where a small percentage get snagged and pull out, the idea having to chase up a collar which has stopped working or later found the beast has actually managed to lose it somewhere ... replacement costs would need to be low.

What I would like to see is a programmable cattle minding drone solution (flying shepherd) with their own solar power recharging stations - ideally not only mind the herd, but arseholes who've ignored the biosecurity or no entry signage

[1] https://www.halterhq.com/our-technology

[2] https://am.gallagher.com/en-AU/Solutions/eShepherd/

[3] https://4tags.com.au/shop/grazertrack-cattle-collar-kit/

Is this really that much of a euphemism? It's the same idea as electric fences for dogs, except the range involved is obviously quite different.

As opposed to the actual fence, which is an electrified wire at 10k volts.

They explicitly say that the signals are audio and vibration, not electric shock.

Using on animals is only phase 1 of his plan.

>As long as they don’t require The Cloud

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.

> Halter has accumulated what is likely the world’s largest dataset of cattle behavior.

Something tells me you don't acquire the largest dataset of cattle behavior with opt-in cloud analytics.

Given the trends elsewhere that seems inevitable. Or are farmers/ranchers particularly averse to those features?

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.

What is the Matrix?

We don't need Bio-Industry. So yes, this is typically killing the earth evil.

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.

It's pretty doable, given enough will.