Numnuts® – The benefits of pain relief for Lamb Marking.

This week on the podcast we have Robin Smith of Numnuts.

Numnuts is a device that simultaneously  castrates or tails a lamb whilst also administering pain relief.

Mark chats with Robin, a Product Design Engineer and creator of Numnuts, but is originally from a family of sheep vets.

"You end up back in the flock as you get older"

The Numnuts story began when Robins father developed a vaccine for barbers pole. Robins company, 4C design, developed the machine that produced the vaccine. That bought Robin over to Australia, where he had a chance meeting with Meat and 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 wasn't 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 4c Design.

Numnuts has been refined over the years to castrate and  give local anaesthetic to the exact correct point, down to a millimeter, meaning the most effective pain relief possible. You can watch it in use here.

Launched officially in 2019, what Robin explains wasn't ideal timing. "I've experienced drought, plague and a global pandemic, so it's not been the best three or four years to launch a product in the welfare space".

There's 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.

Numnuts is the best solution to the problem. Robin says their market driver is first and formost welfare, secondly increasing production for the farmer via the high welfare wool schemes, but there is also a driver in the form of increased survivability in the paddock post tailing and castrating.

As always with anything neXtgen Agri, Mark briefly touched 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 c

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