Nantwich Farm Vets partnering in calf health innovation.

Nantwich Farm vets are about to start round 2 of an innovative project in conjunction with Agri-TechE member’s Roboscientific, and SRUC (Scotland’s Rural College), and global animal health company Zoetis, and Ritchie Engineering Services Ltd, based in Aberdeen.

Roboscientific, winner of the 2019 Tesco Agri-TechE T-Jam award, specialise in detecting & analysing volatile organic compounds (produced by organisms such as bacteria) enabling early identification of disease. Building on their previous success with barn monitoring of pigs and chickens the current project, funded by Innovate UK, involves installing their VOC analysers on automatic calf feeders on 3 farms looked after by Nantwich Farm Vets. These analysers capture a sample of breath from individual calves as they feed and analyse the VOC ‘fingerprint’. Electronic ID tags enable the VOC pattern to be assigned to the individual calves and stored as a digital record on the farm.

Two of the Nantwich Farm Vet team visit the farms every day for 28 days where, using a published respiratory scoring system (the Wisconsin score), they will ‘score’ each calf. These scores will be added to lung scanning data and laboratory test results to then allow the Roboscientific and SRUC teams to correlate the VOC pattern with the clinical picture from the examination of the calves. The aim of the project will be to identify the difference between a ‘healthy’ VOC pattern, and the VOC pattern of a calf starting to develop respiratory disease.

“Our novel technology means that farmers will have a system of monitoring their calves for respiratory disease at this critical early stage of their lives automatically and non-invasively. By identifying calves with respiratory disease sooner, the vet and farm team will be able to implement treatment protocols sooner, leading to improved responses and enhanced calf welfare” says Angie Curtis, Sales Director for Roboscientific.

Round 1 of the project was completed in Spring 2025; in October/November 2025, the project team will return to the farms for round 2 of the trial, at which point Roboscientific hope to have a working prototype that will alert the farms to any calves that are starting to develop respiratory disease.

Business Development Manager Phil Cullinan has worked closely with the Roboscientific, SRUC and Zoetis teams to coordinate the practice’s role in the trial. “We’re ideally placed to support this type of project at the practice. Two of our vets are Personal Licence holders and our large, progressive customer base of dairy farms means we can support a wide variety of trial work”.

If anyone wants to discuss planned trial work contact Phil on philcullinan@nantwichfarmvets.co.uk

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