Next Show:

Address: Ratheniska, Co Laois

Date: Tues 19th - Thurs 21st Sep 2023

Stand inside the Enterprise Ireland Innovation Arena, showcasing the Cotter Crate with a live sheep demo

The Cotter Crate

- HANDLE, WEIGH & DRAFT SHEEP AND LAMBS EASILY, QUICKLY, AND SAFELY. NO POWER REQUIRED -

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The Cotter Crate system takes the effort out of sheep work while allowing the farmer to quickly and easily carry out several stock management tasks at the same time reducing the time spent handling sheep, giving back time to the farmer to focus on other things in his/her daily life.

Handle ewes and lambs at the same time at 400-500 per hour
Entirely mechanical operation
Quick and easy dosing, vaccinating, checking of mouths, dagging, tagging, body condition scoring, weighing, 3-way drafting etc.

SmartWorm Mobile App

- TACKLE WORMER RESISTANCE -

Reduce wormer use by 40% with no loss of performance with our selective worming algorithm

Select replacements with proven resistance/resilience to worms, leading to further wormer savings

Slow wormer resistance, protect your farms productivity and profitability

WINNER!

ROYAL HIGHLAND SHOW

TECHNICAL INNOVATION AWARD

2022

SmartWeight, enables weight recording, treatment management, and uniquely enables farmers

Partners

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about

THE COTTER BROTHERS

Nick and Jack are the Cotter Brothers. The boys have been entrepreneurs from a young age, setting up their first business Cotter Bros Firewood aged 13 and 11, which is an industry leading firewood producer employing 8 people. In 2019, the brothers set up a 2nd business, Cotter Organic Lamb, which direct sells the award-winning, 100% grass fed, organic lamb produced on the home farm in Abbeyfeale, Co. Limerick to homeowners and local restaurants.

The beginnings of Cotter Agritech originated in 2016 when Jack and Nick were helping their dad Nick Sr vaccinate their young lambs. They found it was back-breaking work, requiring lots of labour and was very time consuming. After this, they needed to find another way so they devised the first Cotter Crate from box iron and wood. Then on the advice of family friend Paddy Halton, the brothers took the invention to the Innovation Arena at the National Ploughing Championships in 2019, and it won the Best Agri-Engineering and The Alfred Cox Award for the Best Overall Startup.

Spurred on by this, the brothers began commercialisation and developed the SmartWorm software. In 2021, the selective worming algorithm was researched and validated with University College Dublin (UCD), Queens University Belfast and with 18 commercial sheep farmers across Ireland and the UK. And now having validated the solution and refined the hardware and software with the help of the test farmers, the products have been made available to farmers in Ireland and the UK, directly from Cotter Agritech.

The product has already won a number of awards to date, and Nick was awarded a 2022 Nuffield Scholarship to study the area of wormer resistance and to investigate new tools to combat wormer resistance. Nick and Jack were named in the Sunday Independents Top 30 Under 30 Entrepreneurs, and Cotter Agritech was named in the 2022 Top 100 Most Ambitious Companies in Ireland by Spark CrowdFunding.