Kevin Bain - engineering sparky by day, innovative rat catcher by night - has won two innovation awards.
Kevin and Karen Bain with the automatically resetting rat trap. Photo: RNZ / Alexa Cook
His Pest Trap Reset Mechanism has taken out two innovation awards at the National Agricultural Fieldays in Hamilton: the Locus Research Innovation Award and the Tru-Test Prototype Grassroots Award.
Mr Bain said the idea came to him while he was tramping.
"I was walking through the bush and I remembered a report on DoC trialling some other traps, and they [the reports] weren't glowing, so I thought - I can do better than that I think."
He said most other traps used different technologies - but he wanted to use a more traditional spring-loaded trap and make it automatically reset because he believed the old design was effective, but needed to be reusable.
"What I've done is I've got a standard DoC trap, which is used everywhere in the bush, I've put some creativity on the side which will reset - it's a single shot, one shot, one pest."
He said the next rat would then climb over the dead one, or if the trap was in a piggery or a barn with a higher catch rate it could be set up so the dead rodent dropped below, clearing the trap for the next pest.
Photo: RNZ / Alexa Cook