Dairy Australia: Novel techniques for administering local anaesthetic for disbudding

Opportunity for

• Promising market-ready solutions for needleless administration of local anaesthetic during disbudding, enabling effective pain relief without requiring veterinarians on farm.
• Engagement from companies, technology providers, researchers, and solution developers with viable delivery approaches. Partners will bring technical capability, evidence of efficacy, and regulatory awareness. Our objective is to identify, trial, and validate solutions.

Opportunity Description

Industry challenge

Disbudding is a routine management practice in dairy systems to prevent horn growth and reduce injury risk to animals and people. Best-practice animal welfare requires the use of effective pain relief, typically through the administration of local anaesthetic. In Australia, this is most commonly delivered by injection and generally requires a veterinarian to be present or directly involved. This creates practical challenges for farms, particularly during peak calving periods or in regions with limited veterinary availability.

Current opportunity 

In Australia, there are approximately 1.4–1.5 million dairy cows, with hundreds of thousands of calves disbudded each year as a standard management practice. This creates a large, recurring annual need for effective disbudding pain-relief solutions across the dairy sector. Because disbudding is widely practiced and repeated every season, even low per-calf solutions represent a substantial addressable market. 

The core problem is the lack of anaesthetic delivery options that are simple, fast, low-labour, and scalable, enabling welfare best practice to be integrated seamlessly into everyday operations. A needleless local anaesthetic solution offers a clear opportunity to improve calf welfare at scale, reduce reliance on scarce veterinary resources, lower per-animal compliance costs, and accelerate adoption of best-practice pain relief across the dairy sector, aligning welfare outcomes with practical farm realities. We are open to pursuing commercially aligned partnerships (where applicable) and contributing to trial/pilot costs to accelerate practical access and on-farm adoption.

To submit your interest, 'enquire now' on growAG by 31st December 2026. 

Industry background

Improving animal welfare outcomes in livestock production is a growing priority for the Australian dairy industry. Pain mitigation during routine husbandry procedures such as disbudding is increasingly recognised as an essential component of best practice, with strong alignment to national animal welfare frameworks and sustainability commitments across the sector.

This initiative therefore seeks to catalyse collaboration between industry, technology developers, and research partners to identify viable, evidence-based delivery systems. Through structured trials and validation in commercial dairy settings, the aim is to de-risk adoption pathways, clarify regulatory considerations, and accelerate the translation of promising technologies into scalable, farm-ready solutions that enhance both animal welfare and production system efficiency.

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