Beef Pro is designed to give ranchers a clearer picture of both their cattle and their land, helping them make more informed grazing decisions through real-time data and analytics. According to Toby Hurley, Director of Product at Halter, who spoke with associate farm reporter Carli Davenport, the platform builds on the company’s virtual fencing technology by becoming a central hub for performance information that supports day-to-day ranch management.
“Beef Pro is a new product release to the Halter product for U.S. ranches,” Hurley said. “To date, our product’s been very much focused on the virtual fencing and shifting component of the system, and Beef Pro represents Halter becoming more of a performance platform, or a central location for a lot more of the data and analytics and reporting that goes into making grazing decisions and running grazing operations on a ranch.”
Bringing animal and land data together
Hurley said Beef Pro combines detailed information about livestock behavior with information about pasture conditions, giving producers a more complete understanding of how their operation is performing. “On the animal side we’re now collecting and representing real-time data about the behavior of a herd of animals, but also individual animals,” Hurley explained. “We can see how much time they’re spending grazing versus resting or walking around ruminating, which is obviously very important to digesting pasture and turning it into product.”
The platform also gathers information about the land itself. “On the land side, we’re bringing in information, for example, satellite imagery to provide some insights into forage and where pasture might be available,” he said.
Those two streams of information work together alongside Halter’s GPS collars. “We have the collar on the animals, so we’re surfacing a lot of information back to ranches about exactly how much time and feed is being grazed out of one area versus another,” Hurley said. “That gives insight around where there might be overgrazing or undergrazing, as well as providing automated reports about how the land’s being utilized and whether they’re getting that balance between animal and pasture right.” “It’s very much a layer of information around that core virtual fencing capability,” he added.
Helping producers make daily grazing decisions
Hurley said Beef Pro is intended to fit naturally into a rancher’s daily management routine by turning data into practical grazing decisions. “If you’re running a herd of cows and you’re trying to come up with a grazing plan over the next week, you’re looking at the information about your animals and what they’re trying to do in terms of their performance,” he said. “You know their weight, where they are in their stage of lactation and what their feed demands are.”
At the same time, producers can evaluate pasture conditions through satellite imagery, carrying capacity information and existing grazing plans. “Those two things are feeding together into the Halter system,” Hurley said. “If you’re then trying to decide how and where you’re going to graze these animals next over the next week, you’re constantly seeing within the product whether the feed you’re allocating or the pasture grazing lines up with the needs of the animals.”
As cattle move through the pasture, producers continue receiving updated information. “You can see how the animals are responding and their behavior, but also how the land is being utilized—a grazing heat map, so to speak—that shows any areas that are being grazed very heavily versus not at all,” Hurley said.
That information helps ranchers continually refine their management. “It’s very much an end-to-end cycle of looking at the data, making a decision, seeing the outcome and then using that to inform the next decision that they make.”
A tool for drought management
With drought remaining a concern across many parts of the Southern Plains, Hurley believes Beef Pro can help ranchers get more grazing days from the forage they already have. “Most ranches that we work with certainly have a big opportunity when it comes to pasture utilization,” he said. “That’s kind of the most immediate benefit for ranchers using Beef Pro.”
Hurley noted that even modest improvements in forage utilization can have meaningful economic impacts. “Even a percent or two increase in utilization of the feed that you have available can really extend the amount of grazing that you get out of a given pasture,” he said. “Over time that translates into performance of the animals, but it also can mean that you are more resilient or less reliant on needing to support those extra grazing days with supplementary feed that you’re bringing in—hay, for example.”
He pointed to the savings that can accumulate over time. “If you can get an extra week of grazing in the shoulders, you’re paying $2.50 per head per day in hay costs, that’s a really substantial compounding dollar value if you can do that consistently.”
Surprising insights from grazing heat maps
One of the biggest discoveries for producers has been seeing exactly how cattle are using individual areas of a pasture. “Ranchers obviously have a very good sense through their experience and observation of how their land is utilized,” Hurley said. “But it’s one thing to have that experience, and it’s another thing to have eyes on that 24/7.”
Beef Pro’s grazing heat maps provide a highly detailed view of pasture use. “These grazing heat maps give them a very visual view of exactly what parts of the ranch, down to a six-meter-squared resolution, have had a certain amount of minutes of grazing versus another area that has only had half of that or a quarter of that,” he said.
Hurley said that visibility often changes how producers think about pasture management. “My land isn’t actually being grazed or utilized exactly how I thought it was,” he said, describing a common realization among users. “That’s a big driver of adjusting how they graze and how they set up these virtual fences.”
Behavioral data has also provided unexpected insights. “Having a collar on an animal that is collecting thousands and thousands of data points a minute on what that animal is doing gives a rancher insight into grazing patterns and resting patterns,” Hurley said. “Maybe these animals are spending a lot more time walking to and from a water source than they expected, and that might be negatively impacting their production.”
He added, “Those two things have been massive eye-openers, and they give ranchers two more really important pieces of information in their toolkit to make better decisions.”
Encouraging adoption of new technology
Hurley acknowledged that adopting technology like Beef Pro represents a significant change for many operations, but he believes the early results are encouraging. “We’re very transparent and open and work really closely with ranchers who understand that this is a massive shift for both them personally and their business, but also for their animals,” he said.
He pointed to the experience of early adopters across the United States. “We’ve had a lot of really early adopters of this technology in the United States, and some of the results that we’re starting to see in terms of the carrying capacity of their land and the productivity of their business have been pretty significant and pretty rapid,” Hurley said. See user testimonials here.
He noted those improvements have been seen across a wide variety of ranching operations. “The reassurance comes from seeing other producers adopting this technology and making these changes and seeing really positive results,” he said.
Hurley believes the technology aligns with the broader direction of the livestock industry. “I think there’s a lot of desire from the wider industry and from government to find better ways to do these things and be more efficient and more sustainable,” he said. “We’re very much aligned with that direction and hope that Halter becomes a really important tool for ranches to achieve that going forward.”
