Biotech sheepshearing?
Jan. 9th, 2009 10:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mbarkerThis is an odd bit of information. One of the TV shows this evening had a brief piece about what I guess I'd call an experimental method of shearing sheep. Basically, it amounts to putting a net longjohn on each sheep, and giving them a shot. Then, about a month later, the workers simply peel the wool off, very much like taking a sweater off. They estimated 10 seconds or less for each sheep -- getting them lined up seemed to take more work than shearing the wool!
The magic, of course, is in the shot. It's a small dose of something called EPF -- epidermal something-or-other. Apparently in nature, it causes skin to heal -- and for animals like sheep, it causes a natural break in the wool, very much like shedding hair. So essentially the entire load of wool falls off at the skin line. They also showed that the wool is longer, partly because it really is breaking of at the skin. They said the sheep seemed less upset with the process, the wool is better, workers can handle more sheep.
The net, incidentally, apparently is to provide the wool with a little more structure. Without that, it would be too loose.
So what's the drawback? Right now, the EPF -- it costs way too much to produce. But they are working on ways to reduce the production cost. So someday soon, sheep shearing with a machine may be a thing of the past. Just peel it off when loose.
The other interesting thing I noticed was that while a Japanese company is producing the EPF and pioneering the system, they are doing the trial runs on sheep farms in Australia.
Peel-away sheep's wool! Now that's a real advance.
The magic, of course, is in the shot. It's a small dose of something called EPF -- epidermal something-or-other. Apparently in nature, it causes skin to heal -- and for animals like sheep, it causes a natural break in the wool, very much like shedding hair. So essentially the entire load of wool falls off at the skin line. They also showed that the wool is longer, partly because it really is breaking of at the skin. They said the sheep seemed less upset with the process, the wool is better, workers can handle more sheep.
The net, incidentally, apparently is to provide the wool with a little more structure. Without that, it would be too loose.
So what's the drawback? Right now, the EPF -- it costs way too much to produce. But they are working on ways to reduce the production cost. So someday soon, sheep shearing with a machine may be a thing of the past. Just peel it off when loose.
The other interesting thing I noticed was that while a Japanese company is producing the EPF and pioneering the system, they are doing the trial runs on sheep farms in Australia.
Peel-away sheep's wool! Now that's a real advance.
