Sheep station's plea - take our free wool

Thursday, 27 July 2023

New Zealand is no longer a country on the sheep’s back - with one sheep station reduced to giving away the wool that costs more to shear than they can make from it.

Once a trademark product of the New Zealand story, For Blue Duck Station owner Dan Steel, the wool industry was simply no longer “a sustainable operation”.

Nestled within the rural Ruapehu District, on the banks of the Whanganui and Retaruke Rivers, Blue Duck Station farms sheep, cattle and deer while being a multi-purpose site for conservation efforts and recreational activities.

But with shearing costs reaching around $65,000 on average, the wool cheque was $9600 - making the offer of a wool giveaway on social media make more sense.

‘Who wants wool’ read Steel’s offer on social media, which has spread around the Waikato and central North Island. As yet there’s been few takers at scale and he’s likely to end up mulching his product into the earth.

Having owned the station for the past 20 years Steel said the “wool woes” hindering the industry for decades had reached a new low.

“In my lifetime, it’s always been a bit of a struggle…we’ve always had dual purpose sheep for meat and wool, but for most of our farming life, we’ve found the meat side of the business has had to subsidize the wool side.

“The costs have gone up so fast in some instances we’ve had in some instances 500% increases in costs over the last 20-30 years.”

Wool was and always had been “a great product” Steele said but now it simply wasn’t viable and if he couldn’t get rid of it, the alternative was to dump the excess product or mulch it for gardens.

Post world wars, was when the industry was thriving.

With synthetic products not yet on the scene, wool was sought after as a leading product, becoming an icon of “The New Zealand Story”.

But in the decades on, synthetic products along with a rise in the meat industry left the wool industry in the dust.

A final cruel irony was a decision by the Ministry of Education in recent weeks to forego a New Zealand made wool flooring option for imported US synthetic carpet tiles in hundreds of schools.

“We’ve been left behind and now we’re playing catch-up, Federated Farmers Meat & Wool Industry Group Chairperson, Toby Williams said.

The industry was on “the verge of sinking”.

With a lack of “strong leadership” while the wool market was at its peak, Williams said the synthetic industry simply “sold a better story”.

“The reason we shear our sheep now is more for an animal welfare reason.

“We’ve missed the story…the attributes of wool is everything that the world is asking for in a product in terms of fibres, we want to reduce the plastics in our oceans, we want to reduce chemicals, well wool is that, it grows naturally.”

New Zealand certainly “missed the boat” when it came to preserving and growing the wool industry, NZ First leader Winston Peters said.

Peters had been vocal in the past about successive governments’ lack of action to capitalise on the wool market and preserve it for the future.

This was particularly around the shift towards synthetic products where government buildings and housing utilized synthetic carpet over wool, which he said was a huge mistake.

“The problem is we have not been out there advertising [wool] internationally, selling internationally, promoting internationally as we should have.

“They lost the economic plot. Economic plans should be about added value in our country, getting the maximum value out of product and exporting it harder overseas.”

“During Covid we started to respect the export industry,” Peters said, and he wanted to see that approach return.

“It is still a magnificent product…it’s a renewable product that we should be promoting to the maximum and we haven’t done it properly.”

But while Williams said the bottom may have been a year to six months ago, there was some light ahead.

“The building blocks” were there, he said, to rebuild the industry and he hadn’t lost optimism that the wool market could recover with the right financial backing and resources.

It would take a united effort of fresh faces with Federated farmers, industry groups and more importantly central government coming to the table to revitalize the industry.

“Looking forward, the sky is the limit for wool, we’ve just got to get it right.

“We need everybody working together and also taking the farmers along for the journey.”

in a statement Minister of Agriculture, Damien O'Connor said, since the wool levy was voted down by farmers there had been a major lack of coordination and investment in fibre.

the government had invested over $16 million into the sector with further contribution from the industry to build momentum in new products and technology, coordinated through Wool Impact.

“I continue to work with the industry to get that message out there and drive new uses for wool.

“It is vital that the wool cheque for sheep farmers grows and that traders, manufacturers and product developers work together on this.”