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rural farming
7:26 pm today


MOSGIEL TECH COMPANY USES AI TO HELP FARMERS FIGURE OUT WHEN - AND HOW - TO
DRENCH SHEEP

From Country Life, 7:26 pm today
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Cosmo Kentish-Barnes, Producer
cosmo.kentishbarnes@rnz.co.nz

Lisa Growden looks at images of samples generated by a Techion microscope Photo:
Cosmo Kentish-Barnes

Whether to drench livestock or not is a question a Mosgiel-based tech company is
helping farmers to answer - with the help of AI.

Sheep and beef farmers have traditionally drenched their animals to control
parasites, but the parasites are increasingly developing resistance to the
various formulae - with climate change thought to be partly to blame.

Now, a system using artificial intelligence has been developed by Techion, aimed
at helping farmers to make the right decisions and save time as well.

A farmer prepares a faecal sample for the Micro-I microscope (on left) Photo:
Supplied

Techion already processes more than 30,000 faecal egg counts (FEC) a year.

To ensure farmers get results back quickly, the company has developed a portable
digital microscope to count parasite eggs.

The Micro-I and its supporting AI software enables farmers to do FEC testing
on-farm, instead of sending bagged faecal samples to Techion's testing lab.

Lab technician Terina Geddes holds a fresh faecal sample Photo: Cosmo
Kentish-Barnes

The samples, mostly from sheep and beef farms around the motu, establish an
animal's parasite burden.

So how do livestock make contact with parasites in the first place?

"The parasites likes warm weather and rain, so when it's a dewy morning they'll
come up blades of grass and wait for the animal to eat the top, and them! That's
pretty much how they ingest the larvae," Techion's lab manager and processing
whizz Lisa Growden says.

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Via the microscope, farmers upload images of faecal samples to the cloud to be
expertly analysed by AI and Techion's technicians.

A few hours later, they get the FEC results.

Based on the results, a farmer can increase or decrease the dose drench actives
(chemicals in a drench responsible for killing worms), as a mob of sheep are
still penned up in a yard.

A cassette is loaded into the Micro-I. In it is a faecal sample Photo: Cosmo
Kentish-Barnes

"There are basically nine different formulations and they can be used just by
themselves, or they might use two of them together, or the strongest one is
where they put three of those formulations together for a triple drench," sales
manager Nicola McConnell says.

Techion staff have seen a spike in drench resistance over the last two or three
years and there are hopes closer attention to the amount of chemical delivered
will help alleviate the problem.

"It's been really sad this year that with the Drench Smart tests we do, we've
had some farmers who cannot use any of the nine drench actives.

Techion's Terina Geddes, Nicola McConnell and Lisa Bowden Photo: Cosmo
Kentish-Barnes

"Drench resistance is an increasing problem now that we're really starting to
see the impact of climate change," McConnell says.

Lab technician Terina Geddes agrees. As a farmer, she is also witnessing the
change first-hand.

"There was the old myth that cold, hard winters killed all the bad bugs in the
ground. But we're finding that they're becoming resistant to that. So as it
warms up, the parasites have a longer life period, which I guess, increases
their ability to multiply."

A big data screen looms over staff in the processing lab Photo: Cosmo
Kentish-Barnes

A farmer holds a drench gun Photo: Supplied

Tags:
 * farming
 * rural
 * Otago
 * FEC
 * FekPac
 * Micro-I
 * Techion
 * cattle
 * digital microscope
 * drench
 * faecal egg counts
 * parasites
 * sheep
 * worms

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