ScotGov have included us in their new Future Farming Investment Scheme, opening in July and closing in August 2025. Mairi Gougeon announced this £14M scheme at the Royal Highland Show with (new) Castration equipment included as a permissible capital expenditure. Farmers will receive 100% of that cost and our cradle will fit into the sheep handling category.
ClipFitter provides incredible rapid lamb recovery from the castration/tail-docking process, and therefore ‘guaranteed’ mothering–up, as an important and tangible benefit for farmers. This then leads to a higher probability of 1) reduced lamb mortality (from abandonment/starvation) in all ages of lamb, and 2) improved health and growth through the reduction of stress in all ages, and, with ClipFitter especially, ensuring uninterrupted intake of colostrum in the young.
All these benefits are effectively financial pay-back for the kindness sheep-keepers will show when they adopt new welfare-first castration and tail docking practices. That payback is from an uplift to business efficiency through improved productivity (getting more lambs to market earlier) and it can provide a reduction in GHG per lamb as a result. Our cradle acts as an efficiency tool allowing single handed working and reduction in labour costs; the whole ClipFitter system contributing to the whole farm business success in the future.
AHDB have updated their guidelines recently and now say this about about ClipFitter. Effectively they confirm, in a secondary page, ClipFitter’s legal status in England and Wales without, oddly, publishing it’s availability and use on their front pages (amongst a random mix of historical and other methods) ? These include the combined method (ring + burdizzo) and short scrotum castration neither of which can ever have been commonly or practically used in England and Wales ? It’s a step forward though and we can’t complain !