The Mt Benger manager and part-owner of the farm on the south bank of the Hurunui River expects to take possession of the virtual technology early in the New Year.
Halter’s GPS-controlled and solar-powered collars have gone from a novelty to an accepted system for feeding and managing dairy herds.
Some estimates have 20% to 25% of the nation’s nearly 5million dairy cows wearing collars produced by them and other agri-tech companies.
Halter has just made a tweaked collar system available for the beef industry. The company believes the new virtual fencing product — Halter Base — will transform pasture grazing, efficiency and productivity in the hill country.
Mr Fraser is scratching to find a reason why he shouldn’t take them on.
The only potential sticky point he can possibly see is their cost — just under $100 per collar per year for the base system — might put off some farmers.
"We heard about this reasonably early from a professor at Lincoln University and were having a yarn with him that they were looking for Halter beef farms and I said, yep, I would love to talk to them. That’s $50,000, but we hope to recoup that in 18 months to two years. Who knows, it might take longer, it might take less, but if we don’t try it we don’t have that opportunity."
For him, there are only upsides for putting collars on their 425 mixed age Angus, Hereford and Short Horn cross cows and 55 replacement heifers.
The fourth-generation family-owned Mt Benger that he calls home with wife, Jo, and their three children, has an English investor who brought into the property in 1994.
Mr Fraser returned home to the 2850ha property in 2017 after spending five years working as a diesel mechanic in Western Australia mines. The intention was to set up his own business until the offer was made to him by his parents and business directors, Duncan and Jane Fraser, to become the station’s manager.
Next year the family will celebrate 100 years at Mt Benger with the new collars lining up alongside going from a Corriedale to crossbred flock as perhaps the biggest farming changes seen on the property.
"We’ve kept an eye on the collar’s development as Mt Benger has a share on a dairy farm in the North Island and on that farm is a 420 cow herd that we were one of the early people to put a Halter collar on them. So we’ve been watching it up there from that standpoint and been incredibly impressed with it. Ever since it came out we always thought maybe we could use it for our country."
Mt Benger is on 80% reasonably steep hill country clad in matagouri, under-developed and more developed pasture.
They liked everything about the collars at the dairy farm between Taupo and Rotorua — its virtual fencing, health system, heat detection for mating and staff drawn to the technology made recruiting easier.
They’ve been happy with the return on investment from increased production on the once-a-day milking operation and the ability to allocate feed where it is best needed.
Their aim is to run the collars on their Mt Benger beef herd in the hill country to control pasture through the autumn and now.
"We are a simple operation pretty much — sheep and beef — and the cattle are there to do a job which is to improve the quality of the pasture [from grazing grass low for good regrowth] for the sheep pretty much so we get that good quality feed — the legumes, sub clover — coming away for lambing in September."
Mt Benger has blocks ranging from 20ha to 220ha and this is where the technology is also expected to earn its keep.
"With the cost of fencing at close to $30,000 a kilometre why not put that into something else? It’s getting more and more expensive to permanent fence things and we would only fence to pretty much control pasture on the south-facing faces where it’s hard to get stock pressure on. We have the option of doing that now with Halter."
Further savings are expected to come from reduced hours shifting stock with the plan to strip-graze the larger blocks.
"The calves can creep-graze ahead of the cows and there’s more benefits that way as well as following up behind with ewes. It also gives the ability to draft lighter cows so you can priority feed them so the options are endless. It’s just nice to have the ability to do this."
Previously, they managed the larger blocks mostly on more under-developed parts of the farm by putting in larger mobs of 120 cows and 2000 ewes for two to three weeks to try to keep on top of pasture control.
The Frasers have good cellphone coverage on the farm other than a few patches and will be able to track the progress of mobs while working elsewhere.
Other hill-country farms have network shadows and Halter has produced easier-to-install towers for better coverage and upgraded its communications system so cell reception isn’t needed to talk to collars.
The range has been extended for larger properties and it is more equipped to handle the challenges of rough country on beef farms.
Halter’s beef collars won’t, however, have the same animal heat and health monitoring alerts that dairy farmers can choose as an add-on feature.
Beef farmers will still be alerted if cattle haven’t moved in a set amount of time.
The guidance system for beef is simpler because cattle don't need shifting to the cowshed everyday like dairy cows. Beef farmers will be able to simply shift stock to the next break within the same paddock.
Mr Fraser said they don’t need to know what their cattle were doing every three minutes on a beef system and couldn’t shift mobs as quickly as dairying anyway as there were more contours and gullies on a sheep and beef farm.
But smart phone monitoring would let them know the cattle were where they were supposed to be and were being well fed, he said.
"We are obviously not expecting a direct return like a dairy farm straight away. The biggest role for the whole system will be as a pasture management tool and that could take 18 months to two years to see a return from better pasture quality on the hill from higher weaning rates for lambs off Mum and numbers off Mum. That will be where we probably see our biggest gains from and also indirectly from the cattle and calves themselves."
They would probably increase ewe numbers from better pasture than cattle numbers as there would be a faster and higher return from their lambs, he said.
Halter collars are also expected to provide the environmental benefit of keeping stock excluded from Mt Benger’s creeks and water holes and swamps on the flats.
Mr Fraser said dairy cows were expected to take two to three days to adapt to the collars, but it may take up to three weeks for their beef cows as they were older and more stubborn.
The company’s commitment to improving technology also attracted them to an "exciting"opportunity.
"There’s always small things we see that you won’t get an automatic return from like the likes of getting people into farming. Finding staff is bloody hard, but there are a lot of dairy people that would rather work on a Halter farm than anywhere else and if we can create those sort of situations that would be good."
They have the option of putting collars on younger stock and for grazing of winter feed, but want to concentrate on the mixed age mob first as that’s where they see their biggest gains.
Halter’s expansion in the beef direction follows rapid growth in the dairy market with the company doubling its New Zealand and Tasmania customer base the past year.
For pasture based farms, the global beef market is five times the size of the global dairy market.
New Zealand’s beef market is worth an estimated $760million and globally billions of dollars.
New Zealand has about 4million beef cows with beef farms making up more land than dairy farms.
However, there’s a gap to be closed with pasture utilisation on beef farms ranging from 40% to 70%, compared with dairy systems’ 80% to 90%.
Halter founder and chief executive Craig Piggott said virtual fencing would open the way for more beef farms to adopt more efficient and cost-effective rotational grazing.
He said rotational grazing was proven to be better for grass regrowth and quality, with daily allocations and back-fencing preventing overgrazing or undergrazing of pastures and optimising the feed intake of animals.
This had been limited previously, he said.
“We see virtual fencing as the next big breakthrough for beef farms in New Zealand.
"Pasture management no longer has to be expensive, labour intensive and restrictive — instead, farmers have the power to convert previously underutilised areas to increase pasture utilisation, and productivity."
The benefits are increased liveweights, improved calving, higher calf weaning weights, and, for sheep and beef farms, improved sheep performance from the pasture grooming role that cattle perform.
Mr Piggott said many beef farmers had been “watching and waiting” for the collars.
"Timing wise, the beef industry is excited about Halter’s arrival as they understand how virtual fencing can protect waterways and prevent land erosion — essentially preserving the environment while growing profitability and saving time."
Northland hill-country farmer and former Beef and Lamb New Zealand chairman James Parsons is one of Halter’s first beef customers on a 600ha Angus stud farm.
He said the system was a "game-changer" for them and could bring hill country farming into a new era.
Within the first month, cows had been trained and were now on daily shifts with their collar-less calves creep-grazing ahead of them.
He said they were expecting a significant jump in weaning weights as a result which would be impossible to achieve even with expensive conventional fencing.
Mr Parsons’ early modelling of the gains from the beef collar system predicts growing 6.5 tonnes of dry matter a hectare will be possible and it will make use of 59% on an extensive hill country farm.
This would achieve a 21% lift in pasture use and one tonne increase in dry matter production through better grazing management by the second year.
That works out to be an improved gross margin of $348/ha, assuming a gross margin of 16 cents per kilogram of drymatter.
Mr Piggott said traditional continuous grazing would be unable to supply the forecasted world food demand and rotational grazing unlocking greater productivity would fast become a necessity.
The beef system cost half of Halter’s full dairy package, because it was simpler than the dairy system, he said.
