> 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?

>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.

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.

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

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

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.

What is the Matrix?

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.

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

Using on animals is only phase 1 of his plan.

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.

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 obsessed with futurism 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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.