SUPERFINE wool growers from Kentucky have been given a timely boost by an Italian company, but the windfall may have come too late.
Luxury weaver Reda has purchased 150 bales of the best superfine wool Australia has to offer, paying up to five times the market value.
But the coup for superfine wool growers is several years too late.
Kentucky Station owner Annie Hutchison, who was able to sell wool to Red for more than 4000 cents a kilo, said the New England operation had been running at a loss for some time.
“I can totally understand people selling up or moving into fat lambs. There’s a huge amount of work in this sort of wool and it hasn’t paid for itself for up to four or five years,” she told ABC Rural.
“You can’t keep producing stuff at a loss.
“The only reason I’m still here is because I can’t think of anything else to do
Ms Hutchison said it was hard work producing superfine wool. One chore included rugging sheep to keep the fleece clean.
“When we started we thought you just put a rug on them and then took it off before shearing. But the rugs have to be let out because the sheep grow and the wool grows as well,” she said.
“You have to keep checking them every six weeks or so, and then they have to be un-rugged before shearing. It’s all quite hard work.”
Andrew Blanch, managing director of New England Wool, which is Reda’s wool buying company, said the Italian firm was worried about losing superfine growers.
“We’ve got a contract at a price which is more than double the price of the raw wool market at the moment.
“It’s the on-going effect that we’re thinking of. Hopefully it’s giving people an incentive to produce superfine wool.
“This is a prominent project that we have going here but we realise that we need more of this.
“We need more people to walk into shops and to ask for a quality wool product, which will flow through into the auction room.”
Last week Reda visited New England Wool’s Sydney office and made a trip to Kentucky Station, near Uralla, to view the process of producing the premium natural fibre.
