Having converted to organic in 2014, our certifying body 'Organic Trust' instructed us to make efforts to reduce drug use to 'as much as necessary but as little as possible'.

We took up vaccination to reduce Antibiotic use. We did some desk research and found the targeted selective treatment (TST) approach for reducing Anthelmintic use pioneered by Dr. Andrew Greer and Dr. Fiona Kenyon. It is based on the 80/20 rule - that 80% of parasites are in only ~20% of the sheep, so many sheep do not need worming at all.

We began testing this by initially using individual faecal egg counts to determine treatment need. This proved expensive and labour intensive. We moved to using a visual assessment combined with a weight gain target for lambs, and any who didn't meet the criteria were wormed. This also proved troublesome as weight gain potential is different for each individual and for every year; managing withdrawal dates was complicated and drenching became a time consuming task.

The team wanted to add a low-cost weighing offering to the Cotter Crate, whereby your phone would be used as the weight display.

It was during ideation of this app's features that SmartWorm was born, where we decided to add a worm treatment decision support function. It was intended to be quick, simple, cost-effective, easily learned and allow the worming decision to be made sheep-side. A simple green (no dose) and red (dose) indication was put forward, and a set of algorithms were incorporated and developed that used easily obtainable farm information to do the calculations and give an accurate treatment recommendation in real time.

After initial validation at our R&D farm, trials were commissioned on 18 commercial farms and at 2 universities across Ireland and the UK (UCD/QUB).

On each farm, a group of spring-born lambs who were grazed together were managed identically, only one variable was different - their anthelmintic treatment protocol. The control group was treated according to the farms usual protocol (once a month or at a epg threshold from a faecal egg count), and the other group assessed monthly using the SmartWorm app and either dosed/not dosed, with different algorithms used on different farms.

The results were encouraging. There was a negligible final weight difference on all farms between the two treatment groups. Dosing reductions ranged from 0% - 42%. More research and trials were needed to refine the algorithms and achieving higher treatment reductions consistently.

A 2nd year of trials ran on properties from May - September 2022 with a new set of algorithms. Excellent drench reductions of 45-58% were achieved.

Negligible performance loss was observed. Note this is by design as the team have been conservative in selecting animals to be left undrenched to avoid any risk of loss of performance and subsequent unwillingness of farmers to use the tool.

From a practical point of view, the app also worked much better as it was now integrated with TruTest equipment and auto drafters. This meant groups could be sorted by setting up a draft on the SmartWorm app that would instruct the auto drafter to send 'dose' animals to the left and 'no dose' animals to the right, and 'Control' animals straight on.

The SmartWorm app was made available to ~100 farmers across Ireland and the UK for final beta testing and debugging, ahead of it being made available to all Irish/UK based sheep farmers in 2024.

After an email from NZ sheep vet Dave Warburton, trials began in New Zealand's North Island in 2023 on winter trade lambs in collaboration with Beef+LambNZ. 3 farms were enrolled from May - August 2023. The trial design mirrored the work previously carried out in Ireland and the UK. Half of the group on each farm were blanket treated monthly, the other half were treated using SmartWorm's recommendations monthly. An average dose reduction of 49% was achieved, again, with negligible performance differences.

A 2nd year of NZ trials started in Feb 2024 and is following lambs from weaning onwards, comprising 6 commercial farms and 1 University across the North and South Islands.