SmartGraze – Grazing Decisions Made Simple
Our Mission
Our mission is to see hill country farm productivity lift by 50% for every client we support. Making sheep and beef farming more competitive and resilient.
SmartGraze is New Zealand’s leading team of beef virtual fencing specialists. We pioneered the use of virtual fencing on challenging hill‑country terrain, giving us unmatched real‑world experience that farmers can trust.
Virtual fencing presents a major opportunity for beef farming—but there are common mistakes that limit results. SmartGraze provides practical, proven advice to help you avoid those traps and unlock the full productivity potential of this transformative technology.
We work exclusively for the client. No referral fees from technology providers. Our priority is delivering trusted, independent, profit‑focused advice that works on your farm, in your conditions and meets your objectives.
Here are the common mistakes farmers make:
Don’t plan their virtual fencing journey properly, assuming collars and towers are the main cost.
Poor water trough placement or reliance on natural water resulting in poorly drawn virtual breaks and poor animal production and a stressful summer.
Don’t increase stocking rate to eat the extra grass grown, so pasture is wasted.
Grazing rotations too short, with insufficient feed planning and not adjusting rotation lengths for the season.
Don’t have a smart pre-planned grazing system designed around strategically located troughs.
Collar the wrong animals, getting a lower return on your collar investment.
Worse grazing management through not allocating the correct the pasture in each break. Resulting in overfeeding or underfeeding animals.
The SmartGraze team take a tested real world approach to walk clients through the key decisions and actions necessary to unlock the gains from virtual fencing. Sharing our expertise we address the above mistakes head on specific to each clients situation.
The return on investment from Virtual Fencing can be phenomenal if done right. But done wrong it will result in higher farm costs, more complicated grazing decisions without the desired financial and work life benefits that prompted the investment.
Virtual Fencing Pitfalls
Why Farmers Choose SmartGraze
Practical real-world hands-on experience - In 2023 our SmartGraze lead James Parsons was the first farmer globally to use Halter Base™ for beef on his 600 ha Northland farm. Just to make it more challenging he did it on steep hill country and continues to pioneer the use of virtual fencing. The team has since grown, and our experience has shown after working with various clients:
Up to 33% increase in pasture growth
Significant increase in pasture utilised over traditional systems
Improved feed quality and animal performance
Return on Investment in excess of 100%
The performance gains are real, however all this doesn’t just happen. Many farmers ordering collars are expecting a massive productivity lift. After the initial excitement of the new technology wears off, they find themselves grappling with a significant system change and very complex grazing decisions.
They end up with marginal improvements in productivity but not enough to justify the significant cost in collars and towers (approximately $100 per animal per year). What they lack is a smart grazing system. We know this through being right at the leading edge of beef virtual fencing globally, we pioneered the use of virtual fencing on steep hill country in 2023 and have made most of the mistakes.
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