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Peter Thiel's big bet on solar-powered cow collars
- jagged-chisel 6mo agoCollars for monitoring and herding. As long as they don’t require The Cloud, they’ll be quite helpful.
- bigyabai 6mo ago> 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.
- shermantanktop 6mo agoGiven the trends elsewhere that seems inevitable. Or are farmers/ranchers particularly averse to those features?
- nabbed 6mo ago>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.
- randycupertino 6mo agoThey're using euphemisms, the "virtual fence" is just shock collars.
- akerl_ 6mo agoIs 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.
- defrost 6mo agoIt's staged shocking also - cows first hear beeping / buzzing, followed by mild shocking - less than a regular electric fence, then a greater shock. It also reduces physical fencing costs and adds the ability to herd by "moving" the virtual boundaries so that cows can be moved from pasture to pasture. There's more on this on Landline * https://www.thetvdb.com/series/landline/episodes/11325308 https://www.thetvdb.com/series/landline/episodes/11325308 * https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/programs/landline/2025-09-26/fenceless-farming:-managing-cattle-with-virtual/105827982 https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/programs/landline/2025-09-... The RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Australia) is still reserving judgement on this, so far in seems that in "normal operation" animals recieve less shocking than with trad roll out electric fence lines (which are mostly a visual bright white tape cue that often are unpowered once animals "learn") .. BUT there's also a question of "how bad can this get in fail conditions".
- akerl_ 6mo ago> It's staged shocking also - cows first hear beeping / buzzing, followed by mild shocking - less than a regular electric fence, then a greater shock Yea, that’s basically exactly how the electric fences people have used for dogs for decades work.
- defrost 6mo agoSure - save for the "live updates of boundaries" part - the worst case fail situation here is likely a boundary being broadcast that was on the opposite side of the planet ("a simple error of plus/minus sign") and the entire herd is constantly(?) being buzzed and shocked.
- nine_k 6mo agoThey explicitly say that the signals are audio and vibration, not electric shock.
- defrost 6mo agoThe signals are audio and vibration Backed UP by an 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. ~ Landline S2025 E33 September 28, 2025
- aunty_helen 6mo agoAs opposed to the actual fence, which is an electrified wire at 10k volts.
- yalogin 6mo agoThis is a brilliant idea actually. However if I am right, they are probably building this as a subscription service. Wonder how expensive it will be
- nine_k 6mo agoIf 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.
- inventor7777 6mo agoThat's relatively straightforward for more technical people, but I _really_ can't picture farmers going through all that trouble unless someone gets the foundation ready to go.
- nine_k 6mo agoThis is exactly why a startup plans to sell all that to farmers in a neat package, maybe along with a subscription to cover the towers maintenance costs.
- giantg2 6mo agoWhy not use use the cow's body heat?
- actionfromafar 6mo agoWhat is the Matrix?
- geor9e 6mo agoAnimals 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.
- giantg2 6mo agoThis doesn't seem right. Anyone who has been in a cattle barn knows the kind of heat that cows give off. The energy demand for the sensors should be very small. 20% efficiency for the solar cells might be true on paper, but not in practice - diet, orientation, even needing 4x the solar cells because you cant guarantee the cells will always face up (collar rotates).
- Cheyana 6mo agoCall me paranoid, but a tech bro backing a shock collar company? In today’s political climate?
- jamiek88 6mo agoTesting for humans when he’s enslaved all us normies.
- hgoel 6mo agoThiel's involvement only makes think that this'll turn out to be yet another attempt at evil.
- deedree 6mo agoWe don't need Bio-Industry. So yes, this is typically killing the earth evil.
- hgoel 6mo agoThat's perhaps a fair angle, but not the direction I was leaning in.
- nothinkjustai 6mo agoBeef is yummy, not evil.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- t-3 6mo agoOk I totally misread the title as "... cow dollars" and thought this was going to be some commodity trading blockchain with a proof-of-livestock scheme. That might actually be able to work using these collars. It would be really cool if the farms of the future were doing something like automated silviculture using robotic judas goats and electronically-controlled gates to herd the animals from one area to another. A roomba-type robot could follow along and collect fecal samples to monitor for parasites and diseases.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- rectang 6mo agoOh, IOT shock collars. Hope this company takes security more seriously than most IOT players, or some sick people are going to take hacking into these devices as an opportunity for animal cruelty. :(
- lokar 6mo agoUsing on animals is only phase 1 of his plan.
- PierceJoy 6mo agoReminds me of https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/23/tech-industry-wealth-futurism-transhumanism-singularity https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/23/tech-indu...
- red-iron-pine 6mo agoi wish this was a joke, but i'd bet all the money i own that it is not
- cmos 6mo ago<private prison owners enter the chat>
- cogman10 6mo agoI'm someone that has actually worked with cows. Fences work, really really well. And cows are quite easy animals to herd. They have a natural tendency to just follow along with the group. You can literally move hundreds of head of cattle with about 4 people (I've done it). There is some value in collecting biometrics and location information. But the entire "move the cow with a vibrator" thing isn't an innovation I think any rancher really wants or needs. I just have a hard time seeing this as being something that actually solves a need. The "20% savings" seems really fishy. The majority of the labor for a herd is feeding them.
- jasonwatkinspdx 6mo agoYeah, 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...
- Fricken 6mo agoPossibly 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.
- DonHopkins 6mo agoMaybe Bryon Noem is one of his test subjects, and he was testing out Thiel's human milking machine.
- actionfromafar 6mo agoWas that a joke or does this machine exist? It's impossible to guess these days.
- trueno 6mo agothese 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 are obsessed with futurism & getting people to follow them into their lame visions of the future 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
- Mond_ 6mo agoSo, where can I buy a handful for personal use?
- VladVladikoff 6mo agoPretty soon they will release something similar to track humans en mass. They could strap it on your wrist instead of you neck, perhaps call it a “Smart Watch” (because big brother is watching you).
- stephc_int13 6mo agoMaybe I am slightly paranoid or reading too much dystopian fiction, but the collar thing does not seem to really be about cows, if Thiel is involved. More like a portable prison, fully decentralised and highly technological.
- DaedalusII 6mo agothere is mild irony founder is wearing a Casio F-91W while installing solar powered smart collar on cow
- jhassell 6mo ago[dead]
- iridjfndi38dd 6mo agoPeople, we’re the cattle When currency generation and societal control is moved from the cloud into space, there needs to be a way to herd folks digitally… Wild to watch dystopia playing out in real time