Stuck in the middle with ewes: Sheep farmer baffled by wool’s demise

Fifth generation Marlborough sheep farmer Wayne Boyce says he can’t get his head around Marlborough’s dying wool industry.

“I’ve been farming wool all my life, and we’ve got to the point where we’re getting a bill when the shearers come now – the wool doesn’t cover the cost of shearing them,” he said.

Boyce said with the world trying to move towards using less plastics and synthetics, the drop in demand for wool had baffled him.

“I just can’t quite work it out with everything that’s happening now with clean and green and climate change – this is natural fibre, I just can’t get my head around it,” he said.

Campaign for Wool general manager Tom O’Sullivan blamed a lack of innovation, limited local processing capacity, and poor industry collaboration as reasons why there was low demand for strong wool.

In 2015, the average price for a kilo of crossbreed wool was around $5.80 whereas today the same wool would fetch around $3 per kilo.

Boyce, a registered breeder with the New Zealand Sheep Breeders Association, said the decline in wool prices in recent years had led to an increase in the popularity of hair sheep – breeds that don’t require shearing.

“If wool was worth any money there’d be very few hair and shedding sheep in New Zealand, the wool prices going down have made the hair sheep more popular.

“They don’t need shearing and the animal’s health is a lot better, you don’t get fly strike and dags and that sort of thing, but they’re a good meat breed,” he said.

Boyce said the hair sheep were becoming increasingly popular with life stylers, and those on more remote farms.

“They’re especially popular for hill-country people, and they are quite popular in the Marlborough Sounds because the cost of getting wool out of the Sounds is horrific with the barges and the roads blown out and everything.

“Over the past two to three years, these so-called hair sheep have been bringing in terrific money compared to normal sheep, because there’s not many around and people have just had enough of paying bills for shearing,” he said.

Sheep were first introduced to the region in 1846, and up until a few decades ago, sheep farming dominated the Awatere landscape.

But Boyce said there had also been a sharp decline in sheep farming across Marlborough since the emergence of vineyards and the wine industry.

“Posts and wire [of vineyards] have changed everything – I can remember in my time this was all fat lamb country, it was all for fattening sheep, now I think we are one of a few properties left that’s still got sheep on it,” he said.

“We’re going against the flow now, there aren’t many sheep farms left in Awatere on the flats here.”

Boyce said his Awatere property was surrounded by vineyards, and admitted he had, somewhat reluctantly, started growing grapes himself.

“We were forced into it really because of the land values, our rates got so high that the sheep and cattle just couldn’t pay the bills, so we just had to go for it,” he said.

Boyce said he wondered if there would be any sheep left in Marlborough with the way things were going with grapes, forestry and dairy farming taking up the land where sheep farms once stood.

“We’re in a stage at the moment in the sheep industry where there’s quite a big downturn in sheep numbers everywhere.

”I think what’s going to happen is, all of a sudden people are going to say ‘hell, where’s all the sheep gone?’

”But it’s happening now, and the numbers are definitely going down and no-one seems too concerned about it, but once they’re gone they’ll never come back,” he said.