Mosgiel tech company uses AI to help farmers figure out when - and how - to drench sheep

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.

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.

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 like 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.

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 and based on them, a farmer can decide whether to drench or not.

"There are basically six different actives which can be used by themselves or they might create formulations and 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 checking FECs and only drenching when parasites are detected 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.

"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."