Founder and CEO of Halter
Welcome to the future of farming
Having grown up on a farm, Craig Piggott understood intimately the hard graft required to make a farming operation successful and that numerous inefficiencies could be tackled if only the farmers had time to tackle them.
Whilst working at Rocket Lab and being at the forefront of engineering and innovation, Craig would often return and see his parents working 100+ hour weeks and he began thinking about he might be able to apply some of the same problem-solving rigour to the day-to-day issues his parent were encountering on the farm.
The farming industry has had very little innovation and 1500 years, and a lot of the innovation is done completely separate to farmers themselves, so it doesn't really fulfil the right purpose and isn't reliable.
Craig began to think about ways that smart technology could be used to reduce the inefficiencies of the manual work farmers could not avoid, like managing and monitoring their herds.
Fast forward to today and the team at Halter have developed a farming system that enables farmers to move and manage their cows via software, decreasing the manual workload required to do so, enabling better pasture management and greater insight into their animals from afar. As they develop a closer connection between humans and animals, the sky is the limit as to where they can take the technology.
About the Speaker
Craig Piggott
Craig grew up working on his family’s New Zealand dairy farm. In 2016, while he was completing his Mechanical Engineering degree, he took a role at the satellite launch company, Rocket Lab USA Inc. In that role he saw technology being used to completely revolutionise an industry. He reflected on this, and that dairy – the industry he knew best – had seen little change since the advent of the milking machine.
In 2016, Craig founded Halter – a company set on modernising the dairy industry and bringing the best of technology back to the farm. Halter has grown a team of 45 employees, whose work has received widespread recognition, investment from both New Zealand and American venture capitalists, and took home awards at the 2017 New Zealand Innovation Awards.
Craig was a finalist for the 2018 & 2019 New Zealand Hi-Tech Young Achiever Award, EY Entrepreneur of the year award and winner of the 2020 New Zealand Hi-Tech Young Achiever Award.