Thousands of large logs are drying in a long pile towering over the country lane that leads to the Cotter family farm near Abbeyfeale, Co Limerick. This is where I meet 21-year-old Nick Cotter, who offers me tea and biscuits at the kitchen table with a view of the farm’s lambs out the window. 

Trees and sheep are the foundations of the business from which five family members over two generations, three full-time employees and additional part-time workers now make a living. The land on the Cotter family farm is typical of many others in quantity and quality, yet it supports many more people than usual.

The reason for this is the entrepreneurial spirit displayed by Nick, and our interview leaves me with a clear sense that there is more to come. The latest sign of this was his win at the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards, an international competition with more than 1,000 entrants where Cotter Agritech went on to represent Ireland and Europe before claiming the $40,000 top prize on June 30. He says this is “like the Eurovision for student entrepreneurship”.

The company’s technology has the potential to reduce drastically the amount of drugs administered to livestock. Nick is the chief executive of Cotter Agritech, while his 24-year-old brother Jack is its chief technical officer. They are also full-time college students and, while Jack is finishing his studies next month, Nick is entering the final year of his law and business degree at University College Cork.

This is the first time they have adopted formal titles for their roles, but they have been well defined for a long time. “We’re totally different personalities. I’m more extroverted. Jack’s more introverted. Jack’s very technical, I’m more on the commercial side in terms of doing the talking,” Cotter says.

They know this because they have been in business together since their school-going days.

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Cotter says a farm is the perfect environment to foster entrepreneurship. “That’s what farmers are: They’re inventors, they’re creators, whether it’s fixing a gate, or it’s coming up with something simple to make feeding bales or God knows what easier, they’re inventors every day,” he says. As a child, he was never bored – instead, farm kids are given jobs as simple as picking stones, instilling a hard-working ethic from a young age, he says – but his parents also listened to them and welcomed their ideas to improve the farm. “Those things breed the confidence to go on and follow through with entrepreneurship.”

Cotter credits his father Nick Snr with taking the entrepreneurial lead in the family when he planted a portion of the land with trees and launched his own forestry business. Nick Jnr’s first memory of going into business was making a few bird boxes with his brother to sell to forestry owners. Soon, however, they stumbled upon a bigger idea.

After hearing at a forestry demonstration that sawmills dried and cut poor quality timber to sell it as firewood, they saw an opportunity. “Jack at the age of 13, said: ’Jesus, sure, how hard can it be? Why can’t we do that?’ We’d done a thinning of some of the forestry on our own farm here and there were some logs laying around, nothing being done with them particularly.” 

Having secured the wood from their father, they went down to business. “The first move, before we ever cut anything was we actually made up a bit of a survey, so did our bit of market research, and handed around into my primary school,” Cotter says. He was 10.

Nick Cotter in one of the firewood stores: “We sell out every year.” Photo: Thomas Hubert

Selling door to door after school, they grew the business but also picked up customers’ dissatisfaction about their and their competitors’ firewood when it was too wet or dirty. “People don’t complain for no reason, I think most people in business should know that,” Cotter says. They saw this as an opportunity to differentiate.

“We actually went on our travels over to Austria, where we learned all about these biomass trading centres, which really focused on quality, consistency, and selling at a consistent price throughout the year. So trying to be almost like McDonald’s for firewood,” he says. The two brothers came home and improved their drying techniques, including the giant piles I had seen at the gate of the farm.

They also converted an old track machine into a kind of industrial tumble drier that shakes the dirt and dust off logs. Cotter takes me on a tour of the sheds now holding piles of cut-up drying wood the size of a house and I see the machine in action. The employee who is loading the firewood cleaner with a tractor is also controlling it without getting out of his cab, making it a one-man job. Cotter tells me the driver had the idea of the remote controls and installed it himself. The whole farm is littered with similar thrifty, inventive hacks.

Lobbying for quality

Cotter Bros Firewood has been one of the businesses pushing the establishment of Ireland’s Woodfuel Quality Assurance Scheme, which Cotter compares to the Bord Bia mark on certified Irish food. As solid fuel regulations becomes increasingly tight, with a ban on smoky coal, turf and wet wood coming into force at the end of October, I ask him about the lobbying aspect of his business.

“I wouldn’t be involved in any business that could objectively be said is causing damage in any way, shape, or form, certainly environmentally, but even socially,” he says. He is fully up to speed on the bad health effects of particulate matter pollution – in other words, soot. While he says there is a need for firewood as a “pay as you go” fuel, especially for lower-income households, it should be of a healthy quality. “I’m doing law and business in college and the test in negligence is the reasonable person test, which is: ‘Are you doing everything that is reasonable in the circumstances?’ Across all the businesses were involved, in agriculture and the biomass industry, that’s something I ask myself all the time.”

Cotter sees only positives in tightening standards for firewood. His business already dries wood beyond the new 25 per cent moisture obligation, up to the 20 per cent legal limit planned for 2025. He says the new rules will remove competition from lower-priced, lower-quality products. And he is happy to show firewood businesses elsewhere in Ireland how he improves quality, because this is essentially a local business – with transport the highest cost in firewood, Cotter Bros Firewood supplies Limerick and the north of counties Kerry and Cork. “We don’t go any further, because we don’t need to, he says. “We well out every year.”

Cotter won’t disclose figures, but the mountains of logs around us generate a healthy income. The traditional autumn bulk-selling season has been extending further into the winter, with people now buying more than once in the face of high heating oil prices. This summer, Cotter says the business had to organise workers in shifts to be able to cut enough firewood with the equipment on site. 

As we walk out of the farmyard, the rolling hills offer a wider view of the business. In the distance, conifers grow in the Cotters’ own plantation (though they also buy in wood from other growers), while sheep graze just in front of us. Their pasture is organic, with no artificial fertilisers or herbicides, and Cotter says this had been the case for many years on the family farm but they could not command the price premium associated with the organic label.

Like many organic farms in Ireland, this one struggled to find a route to market. “There isn’t an organic outlet anywhere close to us. The nearest place is about a four-and-a-half-hour drive each way. We entertained doing that for about a month or two,” Cotter said. The time spent and diesel bills made it unsustainable and the family sold lambs at the lower, non-organic price to the local factory instead.

From hotel food sales to pandemic plan B

During the summer holidays after his Leaving Cert in 2019, he decided to tackle the problem: “What if we actually sold it under our own brand, communicate the effort we’re going to in terms of how and why the farmer is organic and what benefit that delivers in terms of reduced fertiliser use in terms of responsible use of antimicrobials, antibiotics, etc, and use that as a marketing boon?”

With help from the local food business group operating under the EU-funded Leader rural development scheme, the Cotter Organic Lamb brand first targeted local hotels and restaurants. Cotter names the Leens Hotel in nearby Abbeyfeale as well as also high-end establishments such as Adare Manor and the Woodlands House Hotel.

He says the existing local food distribution group helped educate chefs on the need to provide a market for entire animals – if one hotel needs 80 lets of lamb for a wedding, “what do I do with 80 shanks at 80 racks of lamb?” Cotter says the sales model successfully shared out the various cuts across five hotels for the first year – until they all closed down because of Covid-19.

Nick Cotter: “To see that repeat custom come in, it’s a huge indication to us that we are doing a good job.” Photo: Thomas Hubert

“We had to figure out a plan B,” he says. This came in the form of a slot on RTÉ’s Late Late Show that was promoting Irish businesses looking to overcome the pandemic. Cotter went on the air to promote the farm’s organic lamb to household shoppers directly. “Out of the 300 lambs that we had available that year to sell, we sold all of them within four hours of the show airing,” he says.

The brand had found its way to a new direct-to-consumer market and sales through the farm’s website have remained a steady revenue stream since, even though hospitality sales have since resumed. Lambs are butchered by a local abattoir every two weeks and sold in just two options – a half lamb or a full lamb. “The amount of repeat orders that we see now where people will actually buy the lamb before a lamb was even born on the farm, where we’ve pre-orders coming in – to see that repeat custom come in, it’s a huge indication to us that we are doing a good job,” says Cotter.

The two brothers’ involvement in sheep farming has directly led to their latest venture, Cotter Agritech. They first developed a piece of hardware they call the Cotter Crate, which funnels sheep to a waist-level platform and gently contains each animal while the farmer gives them any required veterinary treatments. Cotter says the crate has turned the back-breaking work of treating hundreds of sheep into a faster, easier one-man job.

Parasites and the Pareto principle

Then they turned their attention to the drugs they were dispensing in the process. “A key principle of organic farming is the responsible use of antimicrobials and antibiotics,” says Cotter “And every single year, we sit down at this exact table with our organic inspector and he or she asks us, what are you doing to improve the situation in terms of reducing drug use?”

Looking at the results of existing testing methods, the brothers realised that 80 per cent of parasites were in just 20 per cent of sheep – a common ratio known across various areas of quality control as the Pareto principle. If they could identify that one-in-five animal in actual need of drugs, they would not need to treat the others. 

To achieve this, they added connected sensors to the crate. Now every animal walking into it is identified individually through its electronic ear tag and weighed. The farmer combines this information with details from their farm, such as pasture quality and weather data. Cotter Agritech’s SmartWorm software processes it and displays results on the farmer’s phone – if an animal is not thriving as expected, parasites are expected to be involved. “It’s about 90 per cent accurate in terms of predicting who will need treatment and who won’t,” Cotter says. “It’s green if they don’t need to be treated, it’s red if they do need to be treated.”

Nick Cotter demonstrates the connected Cotter Crate. Photo: Thomas Hubert

For the past two years, two research farms and 18 commercial farms across Ireland and the UK have been testing the technology under the supervision of UCD and Queen’s University Belfast, Cotter says. “The results are showing a 40 to 50 per cent reduction in the use of these drugs without any compromise to animal performance.”

Beyond the immediate cost saving and organic credentials, there is a longer-term benefit to reducing drug use in livestock. Excessive blanket use of treatments has helped pathogens build up resistance, making more and more drugs inefficient. This problem is a major policy concern at the national, EU and international levels, with more and more treatments becoming subject to mandatory prescription by a vet. “The last thing we need is the drugs that we very much rely on to ensure that we can carry out our day-to-day tasks of raising these animals – we can’t really have them failing,” says Cotter.

He adds that the potential benefit of individual livestock dosing and monitoring will extend beyond the current generation of animals. “Ultimately, the vision with all of this data is: We give it to the farmer and we’re able to inform them how they can selectively breed their animals. So they get natural parasite resilience,” Cotter says. “The initial 40 to 50 per cent reduction we get on the drug use increases over time because you start breeding out the animals who need loads of drugs, and we breed a flock that basically has a very low drug input requirement.”

Unlike the Cotter brothers’ firewood and organic lamb local markets, their technology business has the potential to go global – and they know it. This means a very different trajectory when it comes to the development and financing of their start-up. So far, Cotter says they have invested €650,000 in Cotter Agritech from the proceeds of their other farm businesses, awards’ prize money and support from the Local Enterprise Office and Enterprise Ireland. He adds that he and Jack have done most of the development work with one of their employees, outsourcing software coding only.

“Growing sustainably is something that we’re very focused on.”

“We launched back in May at the Lamb Agri Show over in Birmingham and we’re currently onboarding users from that, but we very much have a vision again, like the organic lamb, like the firewood, of going slow to go fast later,” Cotter says. He is very much aware of the expectation of fast growth surrounding tech start-ups, but he insists that he and his brother want to start with a small customer base to fix any early issues and perfect their product before going bigger.

“We can go running and racing over to Australia, New Zealand, over continental Europe in due course. But growing sustainably is something that we’re very focused on,” he says, adding that they also want to keep the right balance with their existing businesses, completing their education and social life. This is by no means out of lack of ambition – quoting the recently retired Kilkenny hurling manager Brian Cody, Cotter adds: “Just place absolutely no limits on yourself”.

The next step for him is a Nuffield scholarship offered to young farming leaders to travel the world and research areas of agricultural improvement. Cotter has been chosen to research reduced antiparasitic drug use in Australia and New Zealand, two leading sheep farming nations where resistance to treatments is already a major problem.

Then it might be time to raise funds. “We know the potential is there. We’ve already had lots of very positive conversations with various different venture capital firms, both in Ireland and Europe and further beyond,” Cotter says. “What we’re doing in the short term is very much swimming as competently as we can to make as much progress as possible. But yeah, I would anticipate within the next 18 to 24 months, we will be moving down the path of external investment.”


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