South Australian researchers develop new, innovative way to remove wool from sheep

ABC NEWS (Australia)

For decades Australia's wool industry has been searching for a cost-effective way of removing wool from sheep without shearing them. Now in a breakthrough South Australian researchers think they'll soon be able to offer producers an alternative.

Transcript

00:00 At this field day in southern NSW, Professor Phil Hind knows he has his work cut out for

00:07 him.

00:10 I work with the two most sceptical groups of people on the planet, farmers and scientists.

00:15 No one believes anything is going to work, but I think this will.

00:19 We've been working on an alternative to shearing for about 20 years now and people would be

00:24 aware of BioClip and robot shearing and so on. We took a different approach to those.

00:30 They were basically trying to replicate shearing, you know, getting the wool off by cutting

00:35 it. One of them cut it, BioClip cut it with a chemical and robot shearing was using the

00:41 same sort of equipment to cut wool.

00:44 This is a completely different system. The idea is we create the weak point with an injection,

00:49 which is done the same as farmers do for vaccinating sheep, subcutaneous, under the skin, and we

00:55 wait two or three weeks, maybe four weeks, for the wool to grow under that weak point

01:01 and then we break it with a simple machine that just takes it off with no combs and cutters.

01:07 In fact we hope it will be done without any people involved, it will just be done with

01:12 an automatic machine and that's a game changer.

01:16 Bill Hind is confident farmers could take care of injecting their flock.

01:20 So line the sheep up in a race, under the skin, simple, quick, configured for body weight

01:25 so you have to take into account body weight, but that can be done now. Put the sheep out

01:30 again two or three weeks, at your convenience four weeks, and bring them back in and the

01:36 machine takes it off.

01:38 A visible advantage from biologically harvesting wool is the clean skin left on the sheep.

01:44 I reckon if you lined up a mob of sheep over here that have been shorn traditionally and

01:48 you lined up ones that we've done with our system, you'd automatically say these just

01:54 look better. Each follicle is hit with the agent at exactly the same time so every follicle

02:00 on the sheep is affected at the same time.

02:03 So what's happening here is Rodney's machine is going across the sheep at about the same

02:08 speed as the shearing handpiece, it's just peeling the wool off.

02:13 While Phil and his team of researchers have worked out how to weaken the fibre via an

02:18 injector ball, they now need help with an engineering solution to remove the wool.

02:23 We've also tried reciprocating comb devices, they seem to be the best at the moment.

02:31 [silence]

02:36 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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