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New Zealand falls out of love with sheep farming as lucrative pine forests spread
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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The problem is simply that the price of wool is so low, most farms cannot break even keeping sheep for wool. They are shifting away from wool in general, not just because of pine forestry.
Sheep farmers burn fleeces as wool prices slump
Tuesday June 27 2023, 12.01am BST, The Times
Sheep farmers are burning fleeces because it is too expensive to bring them to market, it has emerged, with Scottish ministers urged to live up to their green agenda and help reinvent the market.
Wool prices have been low since the 1990s, when the product traded at about £3 per kg, but during the past four years returns have reached crisis point for many producers.
An average price of £0.89 per kg at auction in 2019 fell to a total average return to producers of only £0.33 per kg, a drop exacerbated by the pandemic, which closed UK and international markets.
But campaigners say fleeces are versatile and could be repurposed, for example for house insulation, helping to play a role in Scottish ministers’ net-zero ambitions.
This is a real shame. Wool is a fantastic material.
Aside from all the obvious uses for wool, I love the wool-based masks Lanaco makes. If you need or want a P2/N95 mask for whatever reason I would highly recommend their Waire masks. Nothing comes close in terms of breathability. I've had a good experience with everything I've got from Lanaco.
Then why are wool products so expensive to the consumer?
My uneducated guess is that the raw material is only a fraction of the processing, manufacturing and distribution costs.
I guess its more a question of what that fraction is versus cotton or synthetics, and then what the cost of processing is for wool vs cotton & synthetic.
Harvesting wool is done by hand, and takes probably 1.5-2.5 people per sheep (depending on how many shearers the rousey can work at once, how big the shed is, whether sorting & pressing is done by another person as well as someone in the yards) and that's excluding the farmer. I would guess that automatically makes it more expensive as a raw product than alternatives.
I don't know how total emissions stack up for wool vs synthetic production, but the article suggests that sustainability be used as a rationale for subsidies.
I guess you have to start weighing up impacts of higher stock numbers vs impacts of non-degradable plastic. What do carbon emissions of sheep farming look like compared to say cattle? Because subsidising wool would surely lead to an oversupply of sheep meat.
That's probably a bit to do with where the wool spinning (for garments) ends up happening, then the dying, then the garment making.
The problem for farmers is its good for the sheep in different parts of the year to have the wool taken off, but some years the margins can be so tight you're almost paying to have the sheep shorn, the whole process barely breaks even.
There's been a bunch of genetics research into self-shedding sheep for that reason, the flip from the 80s is that sheep in NZ is about meat now (for the most part) not wool.
Tragic. Why aren't making low-cost wool clothing etc.?
The only thing I can think of is that the labor costs must be so much higher for processing and manufacturing woolen products vs synthetic, i.e. wool price must be a relatively factor of the total cost - otherwise there's no explanation, although I don't know the ecological equation between wool and synthetics. You'd think wool would be better for the environment to produce and consume though.