4. Animal health benefits

A healthy cow is a happy and productive cow. Halter improves a farmer's ability to manage animal health in ways conventional farming doesn't always allow. Cows are stoic animals that tend to hide early signs of sickness or injury - an evolutionary hangover from being a prey species to avoid threats from predators. This makes it difficult for farmers to consistently detect early signs of sick or injured cows. Furthermore, conventional animal husbandry practices typically involve a small number of people observing hundreds, and in some cases thousands of cows, a couple of times a day, to identify and treat sick cows. This is on top of the countless other jobs they juggle on farm every day.

The Halter system provides 24/7 monitoring of the behaviour of each cow. Halter continuously monitors each cow’s grazing, rumination, resting, movement and location. The Halter app displays each cow’s real-time and historical data across these behaviours. Halter compares each cow’s actual behaviour against her historic or ‘usual’ behaviour and that of her mob. Every Halter farmer has access to this data in real-time, affording them deeper insight into the behaviour of each cow and mob.

Farmers can also receive proactive health alerts of cows showing early signs of poor health. This helps farmers be proactive at managing and maintaining animal health. Many Halter farmers create a "resting" or "sick" mob for close monitoring and treatment, in response to a health alert.

There are two types of cow health decline relevant to the Halter health alerts:

• Gradual health declines: For cows showing behavioural signs of their health gradually declining, Halter typically detects and alerts, on average, approximately 75% of these cows. This proportion is based on training our model which used 3.6 million days of cow behaviour data. Our latest revision of the health model (75% accuracy) was released to customers in August 2023.

• Rapid health declines: For cows showing behavioural signs of their health rapidly declining, unfortunately Halter is not yet able to identify and alert about these cows. We are working on developing our health model to be able to detect and alert for cows showing a rapid health decline. This is technically challenging, for example, differentiating between a cow that might be rapidly deteriorating in health and the hundreds of cows around her that might be resting. We are soon releasing a feature to detect and alert for a small subset of these cows, and we are optimistic that we will unlock more of this capability in the future. We will continue working closely with farmers and veterinary advisors, and will continue detailed data analysis to keep improving the accuracy of our health alerts.

Every day, Halter alerts farmers to thousands of cows that may be displaying early signs of illnesses. This allows farmers and veterinarians to then analyse that cow’s historical behavioural data and physical condition to directly assess them. Animal health detection technology is complex - no monitoring system, whether human or digital, is perfect at detecting every health issue of every cow. While Halter’s health alerts are a significant complement to ongoing human observation of cows, the Halter system does not yet detect or diagnose every health issue. As such, Halter is not a substitute for a farmer’s duty of ongoing care and observation of cows.

Benefits of animal guidance

Halter’s animal guidance can reduce non-environmental lameness in a way not possible with most conventional methods of stock handling. Anecdotally, many of our customers have reported that Halter's animal guidance technology reduced non-environmental lameness after they adopted Halter.

The conventional method of shifting animals involves pressuring mobs from behind, typically with people, dogs or motorbikes, to move a mob forward. Excess pressure may be required for cows at the back of the mob to move them into the middle of the mob in order to trigger movement at the front of the mob. This pressure disrupts their natural hierarchy and can cause bunching. Factors associated with movement of cows to the dairy shed account for 40% of the variation in lameness prevalence (Chesterton et al., 1989), and every 1 km/h increase in the average speed of movement increases the risk of lameness by 5% (Bran et al., 2018).

With Halter, cows move at their own pace, in their natural hierarchy for every shift. Each cow gets unique guidance cues based on their behaviour and location. By walking slowly, cows can put their heads down to observe where they are placing their feet. Larger mobs are slower moving than smaller mobs, so Halter’s cue system adapts according to mob size and location. For example, the larger the mob, the more time the system allows the mob to shift through a gate to a new location.

This phenomenon of reduced non-environmental lameness amongst Halter mobs will be the subject of independent research in the coming year.

Enhancing animal husbandry

Cows are the heart of a cattle farm. The farmer will always be primarily responsible for managing their cows. Halter helps farmers to carry out their duties as responsible stock handlers. Halter equips farmers with deeper insights about their animals, more tools and more time to carry out their responsibilities in a superior way. Halter doesn't replace human oversight, instead, it enhances it. The Halter system enhances animal husbandry through transforming the ways in which animals and humans interact to allow animals to behave more naturally and independently, with less of the disruption to social hierarchies and preferred behaviours that result from traditional farming techniques.