This week on the podcast we have Robin Smith, a Product Design Engineer and creator of Numnuts. Numnuts is a device that simultaneously castrates or tails a lamb whilst also administering pain relief. Robin is originally from a family of sheep vets: "You end up back in the flock as you get older," and the Numnuts story began when Robin's father developed a vaccine for barber's pole. 

Robin's company, 4c Design, developed the machine that produced the vaccine. That brought Robin over to Australia, where he had a chance meeting with Meat & Livestock Australia. Here he came across the need for a pain relief administering device during lamb marking.

Research had suggested that local anaesthetics were the best option to provide relief during the castration and tailing process but there hadn't been a way to make that process repeatable, reliable and accessible to farmers. And so, Numnuts was born.

Robin says the interesting thing about this challenge, was that the drug, the anaesthetic, was already readily available but the method of administrating it in a time-effective method wasn't.
 
The initial concept was born 12 years ago and the device has gone through many different stages. The first prototype involved a form of a lasso and a chainsaw priming bulb. Numnuts was an international collaboration between welfare scientists at CSRIO and Moredun in combination with product design engineers at 4c Design.

Numnuts has been refined over the years to castrate and give local anaesthetic to the exact, correct point, down to a millimetre, meaning the most effective pain relief possible. You can watch it in use here. There are currently around 1,500 farms across the world using the Numnuts device which is "not bad going".

Robin hopes there will be more wool and meat schemes that reward the producer for higher welfare practices in the future, meaning more uptake of Numnuts. Robin says their market driver is first and foremost welfare, secondly increasing profitability for the farmer via the high-welfare wool schemes, but there is also increased survivability in the paddock post tailing and castrating.

As always with anything at neXtgen Agri, Mark briefly touches on genetics. Robin discusses "high/low responders" when it comes to pain. There is a gene related to pain response so, in the future, could we select animals that are resilient to the necessary procedures?

If you would like to find out more about Numnuts, you can visit their website: https://numnuts.store/. 

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: [email protected].

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