Confidence puts wool stronger in the farming mix

Wool broker Graeme Moulder, of Dyson Jones Katanning, discusses marketing with Woodanilling grower Graydn Wilcox.

04-02-2010
Wool | Kate Matthews

Fast facts

WHO: Graydn and Trevor Wilcox

WHERE: Woodanilling

WHAT: Mixed farm with 5000 Merinos

Steadily appreciating wool prices are giving growers greater optimism.

Graydn Wilcox is among the hopefuls and is working towards having an equal balance between his cropping program and sheep numbers.

As one who has never been a big cropper, Graydn said the farm mix used to be 70 per cent sheep and 30 per cent cropping but now it was close to 50:50.

"We never used to crop a lot but it's a lot easier to run sheep through the summer on stubble residues and keep the supplementary feed bill down in autumn," he said.

Gradyn said he used to run his sheep at some "extreme stocking rates", including 12.5 DSE per winter grazed hectare last year and 15 DSE the year before.

But to make life in 2010 a bit easier, he's aiming for 10-11 DSE.

The original motivation to decrease the stocking rate was a hefty supplementary feeding bill in 2006 combined with seasonal fluctuations that included industry-wide claims of grain shortage followed by a bumper northern hemisphere harvest.

Graydn farms with his dad, Trevor, who runs cattle in Redmond. He said they had been sticking to autumn shearing for 30 years and July lambing for around 20 years.

The timing of their wool clip has usually seen good prices for the season and the entire clip is sold through Dyson Jones auctioning.

The 18.5 micron average wool clip is the result of hard work and determination.

Seven years ago, Graydn switched bloodlines to focus on using The Grange.

At the time he laser-scanned all the ewes followed by the ewe hoggets every consecutive year which helped to improve their microns.

Since then, he has used Hyfield and has started including a couple of Woolkabin's bare breech rams in his commercial flock.

Despite only have one drop of lambs on the ground, Graydn said his mulesing contractor had already noticed the difference.

The wether lambs are kept for two years so they can grow out to meet export demand.

And for the ewes, Graydn said he tried to ensure they maintained a condition score of 2.5 before joining.

He's also hopeful that AWI will make some great inroads for marketing and believes that, as does his wool broker Graeme Moulder, the saviour for wool will be that it's a natural product with a small carbon footprint.

While he said it was difficult being a commercial wool grower, stud Merino breeders were facing testing times and bearing the brunt of consumer demand.

"There are some studs that are well and truly on the right road as far as making the end users more happy," Graydn said.

"As a commercial grower, I can go to where I think the industry is heading and buy some rams.

"It's an easy decision compared to those faced by stud breeders."