Cudal wool producer, Floyd Legge, was pleasantly shocked when he walked into a Chinese woollen mill and the first thing he saw was a bale of wool from his family’s farm.
Mr Legge, 33, has just returned from an Australian Wool Innovation organised trip to China and Hong Kong with 11 other young woolgrowers from around the country.
He said they returned to Australia with a new understanding of the global work being done by The Woolmark Company, a subsidiary of AWI, in research, development and marketing along the whole wool supply chain.
They also came home full of confidence in China’s long-term appetite for the bulk of the Australian wool clip.
The group visited The Woolmark Company’s Shanghai office for a briefing on its collaborative work with international processors, designers and retailers in developing new wool fabrics, garments and products for consumers.
They also visited three mills which Mr Legge said underlined China’s ongoing heavy investment in wool processing.
He said they were told the mills weren’t concerned about current greasy wool prices because of strong downstream demand but were worried about price volatility given prices had jumped 40 per cent in the past two years.
The group also visited The Woolmark Company’s Wool Resource Centre in Hong Kong which houses the Wool Lab, a collection of samples of all commercially available quality wool fabrics and yarns as a tool for garment makers and designers.
Mr Legge said a key focus of The Woolmark Company was getting more Merino wool into fast growing global markets for activewear, including running shoes, by developing unique garments and products.
He said more and more people wanted to be active, they wanted natural fibres and they wanted traceability so they knew the story about where and how the fibre was produced, he said.
Information pointing to the wool’s origin could be put on Woolmark swing tags in shops so consumers could tap into the stories of the farm or region where the wool in their garment or product was grown.
Mr Legge and his family - mother, Jessie, sisters, Isabele Roberts and Ruth Klingner and their families - operate a mixed farm business across 2000ha at Cudal and Forbes which includes Roseville Park blood Merinos, the Ridgehaven Poll Dorset stud and Poll Hereford cattle.
They run 450 Merino ewes and 500 to 600 wethers with a micron of 18 to 18.5 microns - the fibre diameter preferred by Chinese mills, Mr Legge said, because these wools could be easily blended with broader or finer fleece.
Mr Legge said the family had been on Roseville Park blood for about 40 years and were willing to pay $4000 to $4500 to get the right rams.
Their adult sheep were producing six to seven kilograms of wool each year.
They were looking to breed big-framed Merinos with not a lot of wrinkle producing heavy fleeces of well-nourished, white waxy wool.
“There are three pillars on which our breeding decisions are made,” Mr Legge said.
“First there is the subjective assessment of the animal’s structure and functionality, second we look at pedigree breeding information to see what the breeding is behind the animal, and the breeding performance of the individual.
“Once it is passes those two, then we look at objective breeding information as a final decision to round it out but that never gets used in isolation, the three get used together to make our decision,” Mr Legge said.