BEAR and Torie Martin, also pictured on our cover with children Holly, 7, Tom, 5, and Oscar, 4, are currently in the midst of shearing 5500 hoggetts and lambs on "Turee Vale", about 20 kilometres north east of Coolah.
Their aggregation of four properties also includes "Sherwood", "Benwering" and "Top Norfolk" and adds up to about 8100 hectares, all of which is looking pretty bare.
"Yep, we have had about an inch (25 millimetres) of rain for the year, some places around here got a lot more, but we didn't unfortunately," said Mr Martin.
Consequently they've dropped their sheep and cattle numbers back significantly in a bid to properly manage the place and not run it bare.
"We'll have to spell it for six to 12 months even when we get rain," said Mr Martin.
"Usually we'd like to have 20,000 to 24,000 sheep running, but we're at about 14,000 at the moment."
So too the cattle herd has been pared back from 1050 cows - 200 went to market on Tuesday and 500 are off on agistment.
The Martins run about 50/50 Dalkeith Herefords and Trio-blood Angus.
The Martin family goes back three generations growing wool, so the current state of the market is welcomed.
"It's pretty impressive at the moment, people are getting what they need," said Mr Martin. "We're selling off surplus stock for really good money."
That said, the last 24 months have been tough, but good wool prices have covered the millions of dollars the Martins have paid out in feed costs.
But even the feed bill has not dampened enthusiasm at "Turee Vale".
"It's the right industry to be in, if it was back to '90s prices then that would break us now."
The Martins had for years been running Cooma's Severn Park-blood Merinos, but in the last eight have introduced Wellington-based Mumblebone bloodlines.
"We've got very clean-bodied Merinos that the shearers like and we're getting 5 kilograms to 6kg off full-grown sheep," Mr Matin said.
They're shearing in two 10-month, followed by a six-month then a 10-month cycle, giving them four shearings every three years.
"We found eight months was too short, we weren't getting the length we needed.
"And the six-month shearing comes at the back end of the year when the ewes don't have lambs on them," Mr Martin said.
The Martins have been sending non-muelsed wool to market since 2002 and introduced it initially "just to see if it was possible".
But a premium for forward contracts kicked in about four years ago and just recently muelsed wool that immediately followed the Martins at auction with virtually the same specifications fetched 150 cents a kilogram less.
