No dogs, no bikes, no tractors: The 24/7 rise of the autonomous farm

Last Christmas Tom Coggan was on a ski holiday in Japan with his partner and some old mates from uni when he remembered he needed to move a mob of cattle onto fresh pasture. So, he pulled his phone from his ski jacket.

Coggan wasn’t calling someone back on the farm in Queensland to let the kelpies off the chain. On his phone he has the Halter app, one of several dozen agricultural apps that, for him, have become essential farm management tools. The app linked him to the Halter collars attached to his breeding cows, ruminating in a paddock 400 kilometres west of Brisbane, and some 7000 kilometres south of Japan. “We were skiing at Happo-One [at Hakuba] and we stopped for lunch up on the slopes and I did the movements,” he says.

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