North Island wool has sold for its highest price in more than 30 years, a turnaround that would have seemed far-fetched only a couple of seasons ago when plenty of sheep farmers were paying more to shear their flocks than the fleece was worth at the shed door.
At the last wool sale of the season in Napier this week, a line of Romney fleece grown on a farm at Tikokino in Central Hawke’s Bay sold for $6.07 a kilogram through Kells Wool, the only wool broker left in the region. Two lots pushed past the $6 mark, a level that strong wool has not troubled in a generation.
“This was as good as I had hoped,” Kells Wool owner Richard Kells told RNZ after the sale. “It could carry on going up for a while yet.”
Auctioneer Kim Alquist described a saleroom that had not felt this lively in years. “It’s really, really pleasing, five to 10 cents dearer and lots of animated bidding,” he said. The strong wool indicator lifted 32 cents at the final sale, capping a season in which the numbers on the board have steadily climbed back into territory that older growers can barely remember.
For the farmers behind the fleece, the change has been personal as much as financial. Kells Wool representative Jess Williams told Farmers Weekly that being able to ring a client and tell him his wool was now worth $5.36 a kilogram was a moment worth savouring, after years of having to break the opposite kind of news.
The North Island result follows a similar surge in the South Island. Earlier this month crossbred fleece sold for between $6.47 and $6.80 a kilogram at the PGG Wrightson auction in Christchurch, with the best presented lots breaking through $7 a kilogram for the first time in what the trade called almost a generation. Those prices were the strongest since about 2011, a 15 year high for the wool that clothes carpets, insulation and upholstery rather than fine knitwear.
To understand why this matters, it helps to remember how bleak things had become. For much of the past decade strong wool changed hands for around a dollar or two a kilogram, often below the cost of taking it off the sheep’s back. Shearing became a bill to be paid rather than a cheque to be banked, and many farmers came to treat the annual clip as a nuisance by-product of raising sheep for meat. Some sheds baled their wool and simply stored it, waiting for a market that never seemed to arrive.
Two forces have flipped that story. The first is a global shortage of the fibre itself. Rachel Shearer, PGG Wrightson’s general manager of wool, said flock numbers have fallen so far that supply is now genuinely tight. “Everyone’s at the lowest sheep wool producing volumes that we’ve had since well before the First World War,” she said, pointing to New Zealand, Australia and other big producers all cutting back at once.
The second force is what is happening to wool’s synthetic rivals. Much of the carpet, clothing and insulation that competes with wool is made from petrochemicals, and the price of those inputs has climbed as conflict in the Middle East has pushed up oil. As synthetic fibre gets dearer and less predictable to source, buyers have taken a fresh look at the natural alternative. “The world, ironically, is cottoning on to the wonderful properties of wool,” Shearer said.
Wool is fire resistant, breathable, biodegradable and renewable, qualities that have long been talked up by the industry but which struggled to command a premium when oil was cheap and plastic carpet was everywhere. A run of environmental rules that discourage single use plastics, along with corporate buyers wanting natural materials in their buildings and product lines, has given those selling points real commercial weight for the first time in years.
The immediate effect on farm is that shearing costs are once again covered for most growers, and the wool cheque has swung from a small loss to a genuine contribution. Alongside strong prices for sheepmeat, that has made sheep farming look like a viable business again rather than a slow managed decline, a shift with consequences for rural towns and the shearing gangs, wool handlers and brokers who depend on the clip.
Nobody in the trade is calling the job done. Richard Kells has been quick to point out that even at these levels wool has a long way to travel before it earns its keep the way it once did. He puts the figure needed for real parity with dairy and meat proteins at closer to $10 a kilogram clean, well above where the market sits today. The recovery, in other words, has taken prices from dire to decent rather than from decent to golden.
There is also the question of how durable the rally is. Both of the forces lifting wool, tight global supply and expensive oil, could ease. Sheep numbers can rebuild over time if returns stay high, and the oil price that has made synthetics costly could fall if tensions in the Middle East settle. For now, though, the mood in the Napier saleroom was the kind that has been in short supply for a long time. After a decade in which the annual clip felt like a cost to be endured, growers walked away this week with something closer to hope.
“We can expect years of good prices ahead of us after surviving this decade of depression,” Kells said.
What do you make of wool’s comeback and whether it can last? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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