Reducing Drench Usage in Sheep with Nick Cotter

From direct organic lamb sales to a firewood business and developing algorithms for drench recommendations, the Cotter family pretty much do it all.

This week we have Nick Cotter of Cotter Agritech on the podcast to chat about their farm in County Limerick, Ireland, and the various inventions and innovations they have come up with.


In Ireland, sheep farming is considered the least profitable, behind beef and dairy. This prompted the Cotter family to convert to organic farming in 2014. Nick Cotter discusses the challenges of organic farming and the direct marketing of organic lamb products. "It is bloody hard and there is a lot of work in it. But if you get it right, there is a significant premium to be found," he explains.


As the proverb goes, necessity is the mother of invention and Nick explains that the added challenges of being organic inspired them to create “a lot of good ideas.”


One of their first ideas was their CotterCrate, a manual sheep handling and weighing system. The handling system was thought up after having to handle lambs more often under an organic regime. They developed it over a year, adding and changing things as they went. Then they took it on the road and worked with farmers to finesse the design. So, it is truly built by farmers, for farmers.


Their latest engineering feat is SmartWorm. As an organic producer, Nick is all too aware of the challenge of reducing drench usage, along with minimising drench resistance in sheep and cattle farming, so Cotter Agritech created technology to combat the issue.


Instead of directly counting worms, SmartWorm assesses the real-time impact on lamb performance through a special algorithm. The tool integrates multiple factors to make accurate predictions for drenching, significantly reducing unnecessary dosing without compromising animal health or weight gain. The algorithm considers factors such as recent weather conditions, lamb physiology, recent drenches and pasture availability. With real-time analysis, it accurately determines whether treatment is necessary for each lamb.


Cotter Agritech is currently focused on driving the adoption of SmartWorm technology in Ireland, the UK, New Zealand and Australia, with plans for expansion into cattle farming.


If you are interested in working with Cotter Agritech, contact Nick at info@cottergagritech.com.

You can find out more about their technology here: cotteragritech.com.
And, there is more information about their premium lamb sales here: https://www.cotterorganiclamb.ie/

Head Shepherd is brought to you by neXtgen Agri International Limited, we help livestock farmers get the most out of the genetics they farm with. Get in touch with us if you would like to hear more about how we can help you do what you do best - info@nextgenagri.com

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back to Head Shepherd. This week we are welcoming Nick Cotter to the show. Welcome, nick. Hey, mark, how's it going? Pleasure to be here. Yeah, great mate, it's good to have you on. We've caught up a few times on emails and things, but great to be as in-person as we can at the moment. But having a virtual yarn about all the things that you do over there in Ireland we might start with, I guess, on the farm really, and I know you run a, a few scottish blackface ooze or use, depending on where we are, um and yeah, so it'd be just good to hear about the farming operation there in ireland and and some of the sort of challenges that you face that we might not be aware of in other parts of the globe yeah, um, as you say, farming blackface mountain sheep is what we have here.

Speaker 2: 0:44

I grew up on on the sheep farm. We're sheep farming since 2004. Just before that it was a dairy farm that my granddad ran and then when it passed over to my dad, he ran it as that dairy farm for a while but then his interests moved towards forestry and commercial forestry planting and he ran that business as a managing director and grew that. So the time for dairy farming was limited. Um so saw an opportunity to instead buy some hill ground, so bought um, about four, about 200 acres of a hill and that combined then with the 100 acres of lowland ground that we had at home, so moved sheep in 2004. Blackface mountainy horny sheep needed to be ran because just the hill is hard and it's a hard place to stay alive. So those things are good at doing that and, yeah, so kind of ran it as just kind of a part-time thing up until about 2014, I think, when we got more serious about the sheep farming. I suppose I would have only been a young teenager at the time, about 14 or 15 years of age, and probably I think dad had an interest in using the farm as a means of raising us and making sure we turned out good and that we weren't lazy and getting some work out of us. So I kind of turned to the farm and put more of a focus in it and got us to help out a lot more relative to what we would have done before, so went organic at that point and since then I've kind of been running a flock of about 250 yaws they'll am in the springtime. In terms of, I suppose, challenges that are on the farm, probably the number one would be profitability. Definitely. I suppose you've got very high labor costs as an overall and just quite challenging. In terms of just sheep farmers in Ireland it's the lowest, it's the least profitable sector between beef and dairy farming. So that is a big challenge within it and I think that's what pushed us towards going organic. There's a big push across Europe in general to have about 10% is the target at a European level in terms of the numbers of organic farms and I suppose it's a big effort in terms of trying to move from this focus that we used to have on kind of pure commercial farming to really more environmentally sensitive farming and it's kind of actually being used to address the profitability issue because there's very high incentives being put in front of farmers about 250 to 300 euros per per hectare, sorry, in terms of premium. So if you're talking new zealand money, is that five or six hundred new zealand dollars uh hectare, so very generous on that side. So it's moving from this commercial orientation over to this uh farming for nature type.

Speaker 2: 3:25

Now that brings its own challenges as well in terms of organic. You can't let the land go wild. You've got a lot of sheep on poorer, wetter ground. It's upland type farming. And look, you've got rushes. I don't know if you've got rushes in New Zealand or in Australia, but that's what we have here as a challenge, and a lot of farms that are on that poor ground need to spray them off, and when you're in an organic situation where you don't have chemicals available to you, that's a big challenge. So that's something we have to watch here on the farm. And then, obviously, replacing that artificial nitrogen that we don't have anymore. So by use of clover and using some of the different forms of nitrogen that we are allowed to use under organics.

Speaker 2: 4:05

Now, look, there is a risk.

Speaker 2: 4:07

There is that kind of, as I say, if you're on poor ground, it can end up turning quite bad if you can't manage it properly.

Speaker 2: 4:15

And there probably are some cases where guys are getting in a little bit over their heads, where they're chasing the money without really having a plan to get out the other side, and we also probably look at swings and roundabouts with as the pendulum will swing. We've a high amount of people going organic at this point and probably some people who shouldn't be there, to be honest, because the land won't suit us. That will probably swing back as the problems start to arise. So that'll you know, we can't lose sight of kind of the profitability and the production side of it too. But I think it's attractive where guys are using it as a means to wind down a small bit. They can carry 10% or 15% less stock, maybe because they're getting those premiums. So it is attractive where it's suitable and it's attractive in our scenario. But it nonetheless brings challenges and it actually means good farmers need to be better, as opposed to allowing you wiggle room to get a bit lazy, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 5:07

Yeah, definitely, and from all of us who have never been to Ireland and never seen that sort of country. But Sophie informs me that hill country in Ireland is proper hill. It's a pretty tough country.

Speaker 2: 5:19

Yeah, I think on the hill farm that we have above you're looking at probably about 10% or 15% just being pure rock and nothing else. And even within the blackface breeds the softer ones will perish. You're talking one into Swaledale's kind of ones. We've bred here in Ireland Mayo blackface, where they've been regionally. You know they've been brought in maybe from scotland and then they're brought here and bred for the even harder hills that you'll. You'll find in parts of kerry and uh, certainly where we're farming.

Speaker 1: 5:50

Yeah, right, interesting. So yeah, quite very different land classes. I'm assuming that hill versus the flatland is completely like as foreign as australia is to ireland or west, or yeah, you, ireland or Weston.

Speaker 2: 6:02

Yeah, you have that difference Like there are sheep on plenty lowland farms, but it tends to be places where the dairy farming can't happen because I suppose that's the big profitability sector at the moment. Sheep will be run on, I suppose then it's sheep running on lowland soils that are relatively soft and sheep are on there because they're light and then, with the hills, totally different landscape. Um, the amount of grassland that you've got is quite limited. Nutrition is is limited, so it's different breeds that tend to be run and in terms of trying to improve your productivity, what we do is we cross the blackface mothers onto lowland breeds, so onto texels, uh, charlies, just to try to get that productivity up in terms of carcass weights and try and have them finish a little faster than christmas time. For for us, where otherwise you're looking at lambs being six you know well past six or into eight or nine months of age before they're reaching slaughter weights, you just need to do a bit of cross breeding to improve that situation yeah, excellent.

Speaker 1: 7:06

So if we move on to those, those labs, I'm not sure if you still do, but certainly at some point you marketed your own organic land product direct to customers. It's always I don't know a lot of people that try that. Saying it's always sounds better than it often is in experience. It can be quite a big learning curve. How have you gone with that, with that process? And you're still? You're still marketing direct or or moved away from that yeah, a few things.

Speaker 2: 7:30

It's. Yeah, I would agree with you with this, like everything. If you knew how much work was involved at the start, you'd you'd probably never do it. I think this certainly applies, uh, to direct selling. Uh, it is bloody hard and there is a lot of work in it, but if you get it right, there is a significant premium to be found, and if you can find a way of making it as easy as possible, that it isn't a massive drag on your time and headspace. I suppose how we've done it is as a couple of, I suppose, pillars, and you asked about things that we've learned in terms of I suppose the product ultimately needs to be incredibly good and there needs to be a good justification to buy it over buying what's on the supermarket because we're charging a premium. Well and above that, truly, there's a couple of ways we've figured out how to do that.

Speaker 2: 8:19

I suppose castrating the ram lambs at birth is one of the key ways we've done that. It's something that is probably a bigger challenge in an organic system, because they take longer to finish and, as a consequence, them becoming sexually active, and taint coming into the meat is a big problem for us, because we'll lamb. They'll be born in mid-march. The average killing date for their direct selling business is probably october. It's a slower finishing because we're going with 100% grass-fed as well, so we're not feeding them any concentrates for finishing. That again comes down to the flavor, but just castration is a big thing. We have a lot of customers who ask us day one to make sure we don't sell them a ram lamb because just the taste is not great and it's the smell too, and I think when you actually talk to a lot of people who don't like lamb, it's something they do highlight that they've been in restaurants before and it's that strong gamey kind of tainty smell that they get and it puts them off. So that was one principle we stuck with. Now, look, there's a penalty in that the ram lambs are not going to grow as fast, but that's just something that we decided to stick to and we think it has a significant improvement on the flavor and the eating quality.

Speaker 2: 9:26

Second thing is that 100% grass fed. We did some experiments here and there's probably an experiment going on here all the time. But one of the things we did in the past was we housed some of the lambs later in the season and we fed them just basically concentrate. They had no access to grass and we slaughtered some of them and we compared them against the ones that were finishing totally on grass. And again, improvement in the eating quality and improvement in the flavor. Science behind it seems to say that the lamb stomach has to become more acidic in order to digest the concentrate and, as a consequence, that affects the overall flavor. So there are two things that we've learned, I suppose, in terms of how we are running it on the sheep side, in terms of, I suppose, the business and operations we're not doing on farm killing um, so we use an abattoir that's 15 minutes down the road, um, which is great because it's really low stress transport the lambs are literally transported that 15 minutes and then they are slaughtered, you know, within the next half an hour. So they're not standing there, it's, there's no stress, it's a nice calm journey. And again, more improvement on the eating quality.

Speaker 2: 10:36

Sometimes you'd wonder, you know, would this, does this really all have a lot of impact? But it's only when you really eat a lot of your own lamb, um, we have a freezer full of it most of the time that you get through the good stuff and you get through the bad stuff and you get that sense of the flavor. Probably another thing as well, then, is again, with that later killing date relative to probably more productive flocks, there's more flavor in the lamb as well. It deepens. You know, if you eat hogget, for example, it's going to have a stronger lamb flavor and we personally think that's quite a good thing. There's a balance. Obviously, when they go over that one year of age probably get into that territory where it's just too strong the flavor. But where we're doing them at the minute, where it's kind of that six months of age territory, it seems to work really well.

Speaker 2: 11:22

So, look, there's a lot of labor still involved. It does cost money to do it, but we're earning. We're selling a full lamb now for about 290 euros where the market. When we were selling it conventionally, we were earning roughly about 110 or 120 euros per lamb, so it is a significant premium.

Speaker 2: 11:44

Yeah, so why we started this at all is that in 2014, when we went organic, despite going organic, we were still selling all the lambs conventionally, because there is probably a lack of process. There is a lack of processing infrastructure here in Ireland for organic lamb. There's one processor that is a four and a half hour drive each way with a Jeep and a livestock trailer. So doing that, we did it for a couple of weeks, got sick of it and then just went back to selling them conventionally and, given the premiums involved and we're quite bought in to doing organics like we're getting well paid to do it now. We are committed to the principles, we're doing it in line with the rules, but if we're going to all that hassle and we're being paid to go to that hassle, let's try to do everything we can to make sure that that product is that's being grown as organic actually ends up in the organic supply chain. So um, yeah that's.

Speaker 2: 12:34

That's ultimately why we went this direction. Now, how scalable is it? That's a good question. I'm sure a lot of your listeners are running flock sizes that are far in excess of what we do. Um, ours is a limited product, you know it's. It's 250 o's at a maximum. It's going to be somewhere between 400 and 500 lambs, depending on how they scan. So, on the whole, you know it's, it's. It's going to be somewhere between 400 and 500 lambs, depending on how they scan. So, on the whole, you know it's. It's.

Speaker 2: 12:55

It's not a massive, uh, it's not even a massive money maker for us within the different things that we do, but there's a huge amount of pride and satisfaction from it. You know, we've been lucky to get on national tv and that's been a huge way to promote us with different celebrity chefs. Um, it's just a cool experience overall and it's fun to do and it's it's getting it right, though. That's the, that's the key within it, and a lot of effort goes into butchering it properly. We have, uh, an expert butcher inside in the abattoir. We're down there ourselves when it's happening to monitor it and make sure it's packaged properly and, yeah, there's a bit of work in it yeah, and I think most people would say the same that have gone down that track.

Speaker 1: 13:34

They certainly haven't retired on the money they've made, but they've learned a lot of great things and met a lot of great people, and getting closer to the end of all the people that are enjoying the product is always really good. So I think most people will agree that it's been a great experience, without necessarily turning into lots and lots of dollars, but the um and at the end of the day it's. It's awesome to to produce great products and and see them enjoyed by by people. And, yeah, there's lots of reasons why a slightly older, grass-fed animal would be, would have a different fatty acid profile and and, yeah, there's a range of things that that work better nutrient density and a whole heap of things that would be going on, so you can see why people would like it. How do you handle the seasonality? Is it sort of like here, the bluff oyster equivalent, where you only get them for a certain amount of time and so you only get caught at organic lamb at a certain time of the year?

Speaker 2: 14:26

Yeah, in terms of the seasonality, yeah, it's only available basically from the start of october and we go up to christmas day here and people just just wait and you'd be surprised it's. It's actually fantastic for cash flow. We sell about 20 of the lambs before they're even born and we're fully paid for them. So we we take full payment and then it'll be delivered in october. Probably at this stage of the season now we would have close to half of them sold and again, that's before we've ever slaughtered our first lamb. So I mean it's excellent from a cash flow point of view to be selling lambs that far in advance. But again, limited product and have just tried to build that brand over time. But it was really difficult at the start. We started in 2019 trying to direct sell to restaurants and that went reasonably okay until one of them looks for 40 legs of lamb difficult at the start. We we started in 2019 trying to direct sell to restaurants and that went reasonably okay until one of them looks for 40 legs of lamb. And then you try to figure out well, where do I send the 40 shoulders, the 40 necks, etc. Etc. And it just gets too difficult. Now we still we got similarly sized hotels to and restaurants to kind of agree to take a limited quantity. That worked fine for a while.

Speaker 2: 15:31

Then COVID hit and everything closed down and we were in big trouble where we were going to have to basically sell everything back into the factory. But we were very lucky. There was an advert going out on radio on our biggest late night talk show called the late late show, basically looking for Irish businesses to try to give a boost during COVID that were heavily affected. We applied and were lucky enough to get on and we got our 180 seconds or whatever of fame and everything that we had available that year sold out in about three hours, which is just fantastic and that's great.

Speaker 2: 16:07

We were ready for it with the product package nicely and we kind of learned already in terms of that eating quality and we had all those principles established. So they were getting a good product and a lot of those customers are just repeat buyers at this time. So it's a very stable business now where we don't have to do a whole lot of marketing and effort to keep selling that consistent product, which which is a great place to be we'll move on and get on to agri-tech in a minute, but one more more question on this front Is that a frozen product or is that going fresh to consumer?

Speaker 2: 16:36

Going fresh to consumer. So we'd kill the lambs. We'll say on a Monday They'll dry age for seven days just to allow the meat to harden up, because if you try and butcher any sooner it's just flop. Basically it just doesn't look good. So we wait seven days, come back the following monday. We'll usually carry in another batch to be slaughtered. Do and do them about 15 or 20 at a time we've had busy weeks where we do 40 at a time, but 15 to 20 works well and then we butcher them, they get vacuum packed on site at the abattoir and then they come back in cooler boxes.

Speaker 2: 17:08

All we have in terms of on-farm infrastructure is two commercial fridges and a freezer for ice packs. They'll stay in there overnight. We chill it to about minus four, minus three, as cold as possible, without freezing, basically, and package it the following morning with two ice packs. They go into a box that's actually lined with wool inside and cardboard for transportation during transport. The wool is just as good as an insulator as your polystyrene boxes, uh.

Speaker 2: 17:36

But it's quite nice from the consumer point of view because when they get it they can just throw the wool out in the lawn and it'll decompose. They can wrap pipes in it, stop them from freezing. There's a good use for it, rather than this big, huge looter of a box and trying to stuff it in. Yeah, they'll receive that on your, your couriers. We use ups and it's there within 24 to 48 hours, but the box will keep it cold for up to four days so we can actually send stuff to the continent in europe. Here we've been able to send lambs to irish expats who live in barcelona who'd be out in germany. Um the odd time we tried to low food miles so I wouldn't be encouraging it, but on occasion we'll do it if someone really does want it.

Speaker 1: 18:12

You know what I mean, yeah, yeah, excellent, all right, let's change gears. We'll talk agri-tech and we'll start with the smart crate, which is your own manual sheep handling and weighing crate is that, and we'll put the link to it so people can check it out. But is that your first engineering product? It's quite, I'd say, very well built and lots of consideration going into it. As, yeah, I. Is that your first attempt and what made you decide to get into it?

Speaker 2: 18:35

Yeah, we've done a bit of engineering on the farm before. I think the first thing we did in terms of a big engineering project. We run a firewood business and we need to clean the firewood so that we knock out all the dust and the small parts so that when people buy a bag of firewood from us the bottom 25% of it isn't just dust and small bits of timber and they're wondering I'm not getting great value for money here. So we were looking at buying one and I think we were getting quotes of between 90 to 100,000 euros for one of them. So we said to hell with that. Can we look at trying to basically copy the design of what they have out there? So we had a small track dumper and we have a really good engineer on the farm called Pavel and basically working alongside him, we came up with our own version of a rotary trommel. So that would be a fairly sizable bit of a project that we would have done before, let's say, with shed repairs, roofing our own sheds we would have done that beforehand. So, look, there'd be a little bit of engineering that goes on in the farm, because when you're running a firewood business and you've got teleporters and different things that need to be fixed. You know you need to know a little bit. So I suppose when it came to when it came to the crate, it was really born out of necessity and we're always looking for the best way of doing something.

Speaker 2: 19:52

And when we went organic, that created a whole pile of work with small lambs where we'd be encouraged to reduce antibiotic use as much as possible. So one of the first things we were doing was vaccinating the lambs for clostridial diseases and for pneumonia, which would be a big problem on the farm. So those lambs are getting vaccinated at whatever between four to six weeks of age, and then they'd be vaccinated again four weeks later. And that particular job was just incredibly difficult. You were trying to separate the lambs from the mothers inside in a race, bent over at 90 degrees, trying to pick them up and inject them. They're all jumping on top of each other, trying to mark them so you know which ones are done and which ones aren't, so you don't double vaccinate them. And then it all had to be done again in four weeks after it, and just it proved to be a very, very stressful job on everyone, and one of the days we had vaccinated all the sheep and it was just, I think we were there from about nine or ten o'clock in the morning until nine or ten o'clock at night. It was dark outside at this point and some of the lambs ended up.

Speaker 2: 20:51

Basically, we went back out to the paddock and we found I think one or two of the lambs were dead just because of the sheer stress of not finding mom and probably went hungry. So just a bad outcome, despite trying to go and do the right thing. So we said, right, we need to find a faster and easier way. So the first kind of principle we said is that we need to get out of the race and we need to be working with the lambs at our height. So we got a builder's trestle so there's a builder, a frame and we got some timber links and basically built a box on top of it and we were just manually lifting each lamb into the box and trying to do the treatments. Now they're sheep, they're just going to jump out of the box.

Speaker 2: 21:26

So that didn't last long. So that's where we came up with this idea of the floor dropping out from underneath them. And I suppose it was looking at those conveyor type systems where you've got these two v-shaped walls that are basically holding the sheep under gravity and we were just making a manual version of that. So, again, working with our boy, pevel, myself and my brother and dad as well, was involved in trying to come up with the idea. We built the first one just out of timber and a bit of box iron and say, when you're pushing in and out to catch the animal as you might see with videos of the crate operating, it was just big box iron and smaller box iron and it was just sliding underneath with a bit of wd farty to lube it up and then a little lever to pull the pin on the floor. So, like very, very rudimentary and that was 2016 we kept improving it for our own use. We added a place to put your dose gun so it wouldn't be on your back because we were trying to do four or five different treatments at one time trying to put on anti or trying to put on external parasite treatment, your click on the back, trying to spray mark them, trying to vaccinate them, trying to give them a warmer dose, fit them in the minerals just a huge amount of work. So we kept making it a little bit better.

Speaker 2: 22:31

And then, in 2019, a family friend of ours who provides grass measuring technology to the farm, paddy Halton. He saw the thing standing over just over by the side of the shed and said what in God's name is this yoke? Can you show me how it works? We showed him and he said lads, I think you really have something on your hands. You should take it to the plowing championships, which is the Irish equivalent of field days, I guess, is our big trade show. It's the biggest outdoor show in Europe for agriculture.

Speaker 2: 22:58

And well, we took it there into this innovation tent that's run by Enterprise Ireland to show off new ideas in agriculture, with no real expectations. We spent about a thousand euros on a patent just in case it might turn out to be valuable, and when we got to the ploughing farmers were saying where can I buy this? When can I buy it? It was really good. Interest won the best agri-engineering startup and at that point, it was a case of us really having to admit to ourselves that, yeah, we have something on our hands here and this is going to be worth investigating. Um, and we've taken it on on since then to what it's what it is today, with a lot of testing alongside, alongside, farmers, to make sure it works for them yeah, and that's pretty clear and what it looks like for me from watching the videos.

Speaker 1: 23:40

It's got a lot of features that would only be developed by the farmer, lots of things that kind of someone that has worked around livestock would do to make things simple, and I think it is quite unique the way the floor drops out and the whole process sort of. Yeah, I guess you've just explained that, that prototyping process, but obviously, yeah, it's something like that only ever gets developed through iteration. You obviously weren't really high end with with materials like stainless steel and and so it's yeah, it's certainly gonna look like it'll last a lifetime yeah, and the stainless thing was was kind of forced on us.

Speaker 2: 24:10

We started off, as I say, a wooden box iron, but I don't know how many farmers are going to convince to give you more than a couple of hundred quid for that particular innovation. You need to make it look a little bit sexy, um, but we started down the route of your typical mild steel and galvanization, but the tolerance levels that are associated with this frame, moving in and out to linear rails, which you'd see on cnc machines, just tolerances are too tight. And then by the time you had the whole thing straightened out with galvanizing and put it all back together, stainless steel actually seemed to work quite well and farmers, I think, are quite happy to pay a premium for for stainless because of just a really harsh outdoor environment. So that's, that's where we've gone ultimately. But you know you talk about prototyping process.

Speaker 2: 24:55

It was mad, to be honest, what we did. We started out trying to sell the thing for just for lambs, and we went to a discussion group of farmers and they said lad, we're not buying this, we're not spending a couple of grand for something that's just going to deal with you know, two handlings. When the lambs are small. We need something that's going to cater for all of our sheep. So we then spent two years on the road, probably put up 60,000 kilometers on 50 or 60,000 kilometers on a Jeep, driving around this prototype from farm to farm. We had about 20 farms in Ireland and the UK that we worked with, where we visited their farm every single time they were doing handling with their sheep, which was roughly about once a month, and we'd lend down with the equipment. We'd be there with them for the day, watching what's going wrong, what breaks mind you, not too much broke, thank god and watching you know how are they using it and how can we make it a little bit easier. So stuff like a dagging flap, stuff like a dose holder, stuff like entry and exit gates, how the drafting works.

Speaker 2: 25:51

To be honest, most of those ideas came from farmers themselves. It wasn't even our idea. We just took the input interpreted into the design. So I know it's really really cliche, but it was designed by sheep farmers for sheep farmers. It really was with that, that approach, because we do, we didn't know at all we only have 250 sheep. There's loads of other farmers where it's a young, a younger guy who just wants to go at 1 million miles an hour and we need the machine to do that. But equally, there's a 60 plus year old farmer who just wants to, makes it easier and doesn't care about speed necessarily, and you've got those different ranging demographics that you're trying to cater for, and we wanted to get every mix of a class of a farmer within that group of 20, and I think we've done that quite well.

Speaker 1: 26:31

So we did excellent and I think, like if you read books on design theory, that's exactly how you're meant to do it. In terms of that's how the silicon valley operates. You get a half built something and chuck it in the hands of people, because people are your best innovators people you never know. Yeah, you'll never come up with all the ideas. There's always someone trying to do something different with it and I think probably probably farmers have a great spirit of innovation and hacking stuff to make it fair, to make it work, and so you can learn a lot from where things will end up on those places. Yeah, so SmartCrate's been out there and marketed for a while. But your latest innovation you obviously don't like stealing too much, so at some point in this organic journey I'm assuming that you've worked out you're trying to minimize usage of doses and worm treatments. The idea of smart worm must have popped in your head at some point. Talk us through how that came about.

Speaker 2: 27:25

Yeah, you're bang on. Going organic really did create a lot of good ideas. I think it came out of it and smart worm did too. Look, the same inspector that was telling us that we need to reduce our antibiotic usage would have been saying the same thing that you just talked about in terms of reducing anthelmintic usage. And I suppose where we started is where every farmer has really gone to date, which is looking at fecal egg counts and trying to use that as a means for targeting treatment to when parasite activity is high, I suppose, and trying to time the treatment as good as we can.

Speaker 2: 27:59

Now we played with fecal egg counts and again I say we do a lot of messing on the farm and a lot of experiments. So we started messing about with taking individual fecal egg counts and seeing when we dose some of them and we didn't dose others. How did that affect their fecal egg count? And the correlation kind of didn't really make sense to us. There was lambs who had a fecal egg count of zero and we say we wouldn't drench them but then they would suffer performance loss despite in theory, not having any worms. And equally, there was ones that had a very high egg count on an individual basis and they weren't dosed and they did just fine, and that's that whole resilient and resistant theory around worms and we were seeing that in action. So our level of confidence with the fecal egg counts as a means of targeting specific animals. We weren't 100% on it, so then we started, I suppose, looking online at more research and there was two things I came across. The first thing I came across was this work that was done on what's called the happy factor, which is this algorithm that was going to predict basically who needed drench and who didn't need drench, and it was developed by Andrew Greer in Lincoln University down in your part of the world in New Zealand and by Fiona Kenyon in Mordoon in Scotland and came across that and said right, this is kind of interesting. And I suppose while I was looking at that I came across this other rule that exists. It's a natural rule to do with parasite distribution, and that is that 80% of the parasites are in roughly 20% of the sheep at any given one time. So it's basically concentrated in quite a small proportion of the animals. There's loads of them that likely don't need treatment and because of what we saw with the fecal egg counts before, we kind of had a little bit of belief in this. So I was inspired by what was being done with the happy factor.

Speaker 2: 29:46

We started looking at dosing based on weight gain and trying to basically set cutoffs that anything that wasn't doing 200 grams a day or whatever. We try and drench, but practically it was quite difficult to do the sheep were all different colors from who got drenched and who didn't get drenched and trying to track that. And also it's not 100% reliable, because there still are sheep who've got quite good growth potential, who say, for example, should be growing at 350 grams per day. So you know them doing 250, actually their performance is being impacted. And equally you'd sheep that they don't have the potential to do 200 grams a day because maybe they were stunted at birth or they're just a smaller animal. So then you know 150 grams a day is plenty for them. So just between it all, we decided to go down this route where we've ended up developing our own algorithm that factors in more stuff. So we look at live weight gain. We look at the weather conditions in terms of rainfall and temperature. We look at the pasture that's been offered to the sheep in terms of its availability and also its quality. We look at when did they last receive a treatment and how effective it was. And we're also doing some interpretations that, based on the sheep's weight, what physiological status basically do they have? And by putting all that stuff together we're able to predict to a very high level of accuracy with our own algorithm whether the sheet needs drenching or not.

Speaker 2: 31:06

And this was basically developed alongside the CREIS, that test base of 20-odd farmers. And we worked with two universities, queen's in Belfast and UCD in Dublin. We worked with them over a three-year period basically to keep refining this. It didn't really work so well the first year in terms of we were only getting modest reductions on some farms of maybe 18 to 20%, but, mind you, we weren't losing any performance relative to a blanket treatment group that existed. We were splitting up a group of lambs, half of them receiving treatment on a monthly basis or else according to faecal egg counts, depending on what the farm normally did, and the other half being done on a monthly basis with this algorithm approach. And some farms were doing it every two weeks. And, as I say, on the farms where maybe we weren't running the best algorithm, 18 to 20% is what we saw of a dosing reduction without compromising performance. But then we saw farms where we were running different algorithms and we were up on 40 percent of a reduction.

Speaker 1: 32:04

So we've kept refining this, basically, and we're now at a point where we're consistently able able to deliver dosing reductions of 40 and up to as high as 60, depending on the farm, without any compromise or a loss of performance relative to animals who receive treatment on a blanket basis yeah, awesome, and we'll get into some of that testing that maybe, if we just explain what it does, we've got an app that obviously links to your scale indicator, runs the algorithm and tells you, based on what the scale indicator is saying the way it is today, telling you whether you should be drenching the animal or not, and does it in a pretty well. I haven't seen it live, I've seen it on videos looks.

Speaker 2: 32:40

Looks really neat and simple and fast yeah, and that's, that's what it really needed to be. Um. So it's built into your phone. It doesn't require internet connection. Everything is is running in the background offline, and you just have a bluetooth connection to your way scale and to your stick or your panel reader and it'll go green if they don't need treatment, it'll go red if they do need treatment and it further integrates with drafting equipment. So what you can do is basically run, as happens in a lot of the new zealand flocks anyway, that we're working with at the minute as part of trials with beef and lamb nz, is they're running all of the sheep to the auto drafter. If there's, you know, a thousand lambs, maybe the 400 who need drenching go to the left and the 600 who don't need drenching go to the right. So you're only putting through the 400 that do need drenching through the race. So it saves a lot of drench, obviously, but it is saving a lot of time where you're not having to drench every single sheep.

Speaker 2: 33:35

But chief among this is trying to. You know it's all about reducing that speed at which the drench resistance is developing, and we know from trials conducted that if you're continually dosing all of the sheep on a very regular basis. It's going to speed up how quickly the how quickly it happens. They've done trials where they've done some selective treatment with, say, an ivermectin drug over a four-year period and they just do that every month. And then in an equivalent group they were using ivermectin on a blanket basis and they saw on the ones that were being selectively treated where kind of between that kind of 30 or 40 percent less drench was used. Efficacy went from 95 percent to, I think, the low 80 percent, whereas on the farm where they were blanket treating with ivermectin all of the time for the four years, it went from 95% to, I think, just below 60%. So you can see that this works.

Speaker 2: 34:28

Simple cases like we can't drench our way out of drench resistance, and certainly the way we can slow it is by doing the opposite, using as much as necessary but as little as possible. So slowing that down will really help farmers to be able to hold on to the drenches they have. And I mean as so slowing that down will really help farmers to be able to hold on to the drenches they have. And I mean as much as people might say, well, I don't have that much drench resistance now, or at least that's what they might think.

Speaker 2: 34:58

If you've got the ability to use your low cost drenches, which are the traditional ones, your whites, your yellows, your clears or your double and your triple actives, which are very, very cheap drenches, if you can hold on to them, you avoid having to move on to the way more expensive option of using zolvix and start date in the course of regular worm control, which run about four times the price, so like ignoring using our stuff.

Speaker 2: 35:10

If you continue on the path you're on and we see this with the farms we're working with, where they're now suffering from drench resistance, their drenching program has just got four times more expensive by continually blanket treating all the time. So it's as good as time. Now is the best time really to be trying to do something about this problem. And look, we're one of many tools. It's, you know, it's not a silver bullet. You still need to combine this with good stockmanship. You know quarantine drenching. You know maybe doing a leader follower system after weaning so that those yaws will hoover up the worms. Maybe run some two-toots or some older sheep with the lambs. It's using a combination of tools to really give yourself an advantage in trying to avoid this problem getting really expensive on the farm.

Speaker 1: 35:51

Yeah, 100%, it's integrated. I can get into what everyone talks about IPM, I suppose. But that's the way it is. You have to reduce where you can. And we know, particularly in lambs, obviously often if we're trying to get them to slaughter weights or grow out yote ewes to go to the ram, you don't want them growing slower than once. So your temptation is to keep borrowing drench into them. But we know that that's putting everything under pressure and expensive, time wise. But yeah, mainly that's that pressure on drenches. But it's a whole heap of things going on. So you've now done sort of extensive testing through Beef and Lamb, new Zealand here, and then obviously you've done lots in in ireland and the uk. What's the? Yeah, I guess, what are we? What's the range we see in drench saving now with the current algorithm?

Speaker 2: 36:28

yeah, so we're running between 40 to 60 percent in general of a trench use reduction across farms, uh, without really compromising performance. And that's looking at lambs from weaning in the new zealand case anyway, looking at lambs from weaning in the New Zealand case anyway, looking at lambs from weaning all the way until they're mature animals. And I mean, if they're your lambs going to mating basically, or it's obviously some of the lambs that'd be going for slaughter. So a fairly long period of time to be tracking, you know, lambs that are getting blanket treated versus lambs who are being done selectively and we're not really seeing you know, if there is a difference, it's only a couple of hundred grams, so you know it is working very reliably In terms of.

Speaker 2: 37:08

I suppose other interesting things we're seeing how farmers are practically going to use it from a commercial point of view is there will always actually be a blanket treatment percentage within the mob of lambs. You'll never do TST on an entire flock of sheep and this, to be honest, is nothing to do with accuracy. It's just to do with purely creating confidence for the farmer that they know what's going on, because you know as good as I do. If you left 70% of the lambs untreated last time and you're looking at performance and going, well, bugger, they're only doing 150 grams per day. I was hoping for 250. The first thing you'll blame is damn, we didn't drench enough of them and that hasn't gone to plan now. So what we do now is there's always a handy percentage inside in every mob that does get blanket treatment to basically provide a reference for what performance would be uninhibited totally from worms if you were blanket treating, and that's made a huge difference in terms of farmers being able to continually use it, like here in Ireland we have some very committed farmers who know this works from trials. They've seen it on their own farm.

Speaker 2: 38:09

But last year was just a crap year for growing lambs. The weather was really really bad and just the power was gone out of the grass for a lot of the year. It's just really difficult to get those growth rates and some really high performing flocks that would have no problem normally getting lambs. You know growing lambs at 250 grams a day from birth to weaning. They were back on 170 180.

Speaker 2: 38:29

And the very first thing that would be blamed if tst was done on all the lambs is the drench use. Because farmers are proactive. They want we're all, we all are. We all want to get the sense that if we're going for the drenching gun it's solving a problem when in reality there's plenty of sheep that don't need drench at all and if we do give it to them it has no impact. And that's another thing we've done in the app, where we do give farmers the ability to override it. So if they don't like what's being put in front of them in terms of if they think the lamb's bum is a little too dirty and the app is saying they don't need a drench, you can go in and just record them as being drenched and do it, and we'll provide statistics afterwards that analyze was that treatment beneficial or not and nine times out of ten it's not.

Speaker 1: 39:07

but it allows the farmer to begin building that trust and having a play with it and it's it's great fun to sit alongside farmers on that journey as they kind of increase their belief in this, because it's just really different and just it's a it's a big change in mindset definitely, yeah, yeah, because and I think it's that mindset that we have to get our head around, which is that people think you're out there killing the worms, whereas really you're just keeping the population under into a sort of manageable level, really, like we kind of I don't know I grew up with the thinking that when you drench you're knocking the worms out of the, killing all the worms, but the reality is you're killing some of the population, enough to keep the burden down and enough to let the sheep function. So it's, and you have to get into that mindset. Once you get into drench resistance and stuff, you have to really work out that you're just managing this population of worms and a population of sheep, and they're two separate things that interact pretty closely obviously.

Speaker 2: 40:02

Yeah, obviously yeah, but I think farmers are good to change mindset. Like the advice for a very long time was dose and move, which is just one of the worst things you can do in terms of, you know, having a high risk of really quick drench resistance, um, drench resistance developing. But you know, I think farmers, I think that fundamental basis of that 80 20 rule, like we've seen it in action ourselves, where we spent a whole year individually fecal sampling loads of lambs and when we graph basically the total number of worms and how many sheep they came out of, we got 70% of the worms were in 30% of the lambs. Yeah, it's not 80-20, but it's good enough for me to be able to believe that it really is true. So I think once you hear that and you're going into this knowing that that's the science behind it, it's a very solid basis on which to build your thinking.

Speaker 2: 40:49

But look, it's a big money saver as well. We've done modeling here in Ireland and the UK. If all the sheep farmers adopted this, it would save them about €20 million annually. So it's an even bigger figure in New Zealand, especially because so much more expensive drench is used. As all of this and start it is only beginning to get incorporated really for quarantine drench in here, not that many farmers are using it for regular worm control. So look it's, it's um. It will make a difference economically to farmers as well.

Speaker 1: 41:15

Save them time and save them some drench yeah, excellent, so we're looking forward to getting more widespread use. I think there's probably two things that well. One thing you can't be accused of, and that's being lazy. So your father has succeeded by getting you on the farm and keeping you busy. You're obviously innovative by nature. You're not comfortable with the status quo. What's next for Nick Cotter and Cotter Agritech?

Speaker 2: 41:40

Yeah, that phrase, I suppose, of not being comfortable with the status quo. I don't know if it's that. I think it's more just, we're always trying to. You mentioned about kind of not being allowed to be lazy, but ironically it's from laziness. I think that a lot of these innovations come from just trying to find the easy way of doing it, and it's probably that ethos too that we like to do a good job and if something is worth doing, it is worth doing. Well, we don't want to put crap out there and that's right from the lamb to the crate, to the smart worm software, to anything we do. We just try and do it really well and that's what drives that continuous want to to keep keep moving forward on things and keep finding, keep improving. Basically, I suppose, in terms of what's next, look we, we've got good adoption here in Ireland and the UK and the UK government are looking at grant dating the SmartWarm software for farmers at a 50% rate. So that will be a huge help in terms of encouraging adoption. And again, that's because there is that belief in its utility in terms of helping the industry tackle this really important problem In New, where we're just at the end of validation trials that I think, having looked at the data at this point, is proving that it will work in that environment.

Speaker 2: 42:47

There's two of the farms that suffer from homunculus and it's something that we had very little experience with. It's not something that's really present in Ireland. It's a little bit present in the UK in some of the warmer regions in the Southeast, but it's not widespread yet yet. So not something we've come across before. But we actually are seeing from the trial data that it is feasible to do tst in a humongous. You know a farm that is that has a high level of humongous, which a lot of, a lot of the aussies have. Now it's a little bit different. You just need to be more rigorous with your stockmanship and probably you know having a look at the stock every 10 or 10 or 12 days after you've done the, the tst, to just keep an eye that the worms haven't exploded, possibly take a fecal egg count. That's the advice that we think we'll end up with. So that means we can facilitate quite a high level of adoption in australia too, which has, you know, australia and new zealand both have a lot of drench resistance, as do ireland and the uk, so I think our focus will be on those regions in terms of driving adoption. Look, there is we've also have a version of smart worm in early testing, for cattle as well that we're going to start rolling out this year in ireland. Now it will take much like the sheep, uh, smart worm. It'll take quite a couple of years to refine it and to get it to a commercial stage. But again, again, a huge, the same problem exists now. It's probably not talked about enough, but if you look at the resistance tests that have been done, the issue is actually of the same prevalence as it is in sheep farming. So again, that will be another opportunity that we'll we'll look to take advantage of too, as we keep building this, building this.

Speaker 2: 44:23

But you can't have too many things on the plate either. There's already a lot on. So we'll you know you need to manage these things. Like the lamb is a very seasonal business. The firewood is something that I would have very little day-to-day involvement with Other members of the family would take care of that at this point. So you know we want to be focused on the exciting opportunities that are in front of us, and I think australia is the next big target on the map that we want to start some early trials with, so if there are any farmers listening who are interested in trialing this, please do get in touch yeah, well, I think there should be roughly somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred that are listening to this in australia.

Speaker 1: 44:59

So you should be someone out there will definitely buy, I imagine, and uh, definitely put all the links to your website and gear and uh, and to you personally, and show notes so people can get in touch and put it in practice. I think. I think you'll find that, yeah, there's lots of differences. New zealand and australia quite similar in terms of anything that you've had to tackle. Getting gear into new zealand will be. It'll be quite easy going to Australia from here, so hopefully that transition is maybe a bit simpler.

Speaker 2: 45:25

The time zone will still suck, but maybe my bigger question is how big is the commission bill going to be?

Speaker 1: 45:33

Mark, yeah, I like pints man, we'll work it out. Yeah, yeah, I like pints man, we'll work it out. Yeah, last question, nick, and it's one we've added to the show recently, which is to get people thinking a little bit, and that's what's the last thing you changed your mind about?

Speaker 2: 45:57

I think the first one was whether I do this podcast up at the farm or whether I do it at home, where I was planning, on my final destination, where the girlfriend is, so I chose to do it at home. Where I was planning, on my final destination, where the girlfriend is, so I chose to do it at home. But, um, no, probably the more serious answer is probably in terms of work. It's something when you talk to a lot of farmers, as they do, you know you ask them how well their working hours or whatever, and it's just, yeah, I work all the time and it's something I was kind of reflecting on.

Speaker 2: 46:21

We have a lot on, obviously, and it's very easy to get sucked into just working from dawn to dusk and kind of discovered it's not the most productive way of working because work has that tendency to fill the time that's made available for us.

Speaker 2: 46:33

So if there are farmers out there listening, probably getting on some bit of a schedule and having cutoffs is, you'll actually find you're more productive relative to if you just allow work to be all all day and all night, and it's something that I'm trying to practice more and more. It's proving difficult given the amount of new zealand farmers that we have to support at 2 and 3 am in the morning, but, um, it's something definitely I want to do more of because, um, that you need to allow time for other stuff inside in the mix as well. So it's probably something that I'm trying to incorporate more and more and have changed my mind on from a period where, certainly when we were doing that testing, it was just a horrible schedule of just staying in the two-star hotels for 50 quid a night and on bad diets and just run to burning the candle at every end, really.

Speaker 1: 47:18

So, uh, when I get a bit more balance into the mix, certainly from now on yeah 100, nick, with something that I find myself when, yeah, there's nothing, I guess that I'll add it. If you want something done, you give it to a busy person. But equally, if you've, if you want me to do to find a useless waste a day, have no nothing in the calendar, you can certainly get rid of some time doing very little and yeah. So, yeah, 100. If you've got that schedule to hit you always, always, uh will get it, get the same amount of work done, which is, which is great advice for those people listening. Nick's been awesome to have a chat and yeah, really, really looking forward to seeing what, what adoption of that uh bit of technology. And uh, yeah, and I think it's going to have a big impact on on sheep farming in new zealand, australia, as I'll in Europe. And yeah, looking forward to catching up one day for that pint you owe me now.

Speaker 2: 48:06

That would be an expensive motion. Excellent Thanks, Nick.