WoolProducers Aust.

Peak national advocacy & policy body for wool growers in Australia. Governed directly by growers including 3 Independent Directors

[Agvocate_Au @agvocate_au]

Vic sheep growers can assist a research project studying causes of abortion, stillbirth, & newborn lamb deaths in Victorian flocks.

Investigating Campylobacter, 
Listeria & Toxoplasmosis to build a rapid PCR test to help producers ID & resolve faster.

[AWI Extension WA @AWIExtensionWA]

Are you setting up your lambs for the best possible lifetime welfare and production outcomes? This guide provides practical, step-by-step guidance to help woolgrowers and contractors carry out lamb marking and mulesing procedures using current best-practice welfare standards.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A sheep that is not sheared, dies.

Slowly. Wetly. With flies in the fleece and a temperature it cannot regulate.

The modern sheep, descended from twelve thousand years of selective breeding, no longer sheds its fleece naturally. It cannot. If left unshorn, the fleece keeps growing, traps moisture against the skin, attracts flies, develops fly strike, and kills the sheep slowly and unpleasantly over the course of a wet summer.

Shearing is not done to the sheep. Shearing is done for the sheep.

The shearer arrives in May. The sheep is held still for ninety seconds. The fleece comes off in one piece. The sheep stands up, shakes itself, and walks back into the field roughly four kilograms lighter and visibly relieved. The fleece becomes a jumper that will outlive three of your phones.

The alternative, the one being marketed as compassionate, is acrylic. Polyester. A petroleum-derived plastic spun into fibres that shed microplastics into every wash, every wear, every breath of wind, for as long as that garment exists. Which is forever. Acrylic does not biodegrade. It only breaks down into smaller pieces of acrylic.

The sheep needed shearing. The oil rig did not need drilling.

Have a think about which one is actually cruel.

[Agvocate_Au @agvocate_au]

Increase your fox control efficiency by making fox scent mark-up sites with a strong food smell.
Dripping, molasses (used here), egg.
Monitor.
Renew frequently.
They add their marks & that brings other foxes to it all year round.

@WoolProducers

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Myth: "I only wear vegan fabrics. Better for the animals, better for the planet."

Let's check in on Doris's annual contribution.

Once a year, in late spring, Doris is sheared. The procedure takes approximately three minutes. Doris does not enjoy it. Doris does not, by any visible measure, suffer from it. Doris is, immediately afterwards, a noticeably more comfortable animal in the British summer.

The fleece weighs approximately 3 kilograms. It is sold to the British Wool Marketing Board for, depending on the year, between £0.40 and £2.50 per kilogram. The shearing costs more than the wool fetches. Brian is shearing Doris at a loss.

The wool is then:
- Naturally flame-retardant
- Naturally antibacterial
- Moisture-wicking
- Biodegradable
- Renewable, annually
- Carbon-storing while in use

The replacement, in performance fabrics:
- Polyester
- Polyamide
- Acrylic
- Polypropylene
- All petroleum-derived
- All shedding microplastics on every wash
- All requiring fossil fuel inputs to produce
- All non-biodegradable, with a typical landfill lifespan of 200-500 years

A single wash of a polyester fleece can release up to 700,000 microplastic fibres into the water system. These fibres are now in: every tested water source on earth, every tested human placenta, every tested rainfall sample, the deep ocean, the Arctic ice, and the lungs of marine mammals.

A single wash of a wool jumper releases: nothing. The wool, when eventually disposed of, returns to soil within a few years.

The fabric being marketed as the "ethical" alternative to wool is plastic.

The plastic is "ethical" because nobody has been asked to slaughter the polymer.

The polymer also has not been asked.

Doris, by being a sheep on a fell, is producing the most thoroughly sustainable performance fabric humans have ever made.

Brian is selling it at a loss.

The fashion industry, meanwhile, is selling petroleum at a profit and calling it ethical.

Reject plastic. Wear wool.

Doris is, this morning, growing next year's batch.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Activist: "Those sheep are being exploited for wool."
Farmer: "They need shearing. Without it: heatstroke, fleece so heavy they can't stand, and fly strike. Flies lay eggs in wet wool. Maggots eat the sheep alive."
Activist: "In nature they wouldn't need it."
Farmer: "In nature they'd be dead. Domestic sheep aren't wild animals."
Activist: "You bred them to be dependent on you."
Farmer: "Yes. That's what domestication is. Ten thousand years of it."
Activist: "It's still exploitation."
Farmer: "They get relieved of ten pounds of wool that's killing them. We get wool. No petroleum. No microplastics in the waterways."
Activist: "They can't consent."
Farmer: "They also can't shear themselves."
Activist: "You should let them be natural."
Farmer: "You're wearing a North Face."
Activist: "What?"
Farmer: "Petroleum. Sheds microplastics every wash. Five hundred years in landfill."
Activist: "That's different."
Farmer: "There's a renewable, biodegradable fibre growing on that sheep right now. Needs removing or the animal suffers horribly."
Activist: "Just let them keep their wool."
Farmer: "I'll let you explain that to the sheep in August."

[neXtgen Agri Ltd @neXtgenAgri]

This project is funded by @WoolInnovation, @AnimalHealthAUS (supported by @WoolProducers and @SheepProducers) and collaborating Merino breeders. The project is being conducted by @MurdochUni and neXtgen Agri in collaboration with AGBU.

[neXtgen Agri Ltd @neXtgenAgri]

Australian Merino ram breeders, are you ready to benchmark your genetics for foot structure + resistance to ovine interdigital dermatitis (aka scald) & footrot? The 2026 cull ram challenge is your chance. To enter, you need a team of at least eight cull rams from a single sire.

[Agvocate_Au @agvocate_au]

Think only bottle-fed pet lambs have mischief in them? Think again.

This is just a glimpse, a teeny fraction of the nonsense paddock sheep do to my survey equipment.

Snot on the lens, chew the straps, rub their bits on the stakes, and....

@WoolProducers @woolinnovation

[Agvocate_Au @agvocate_au]

Want great photos of sheep being marvelous and curious ?

Put a blue peg in the paddock with a camera on it.
😊🐑

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Doris is suffering.

Doris does not know she is suffering. The suffering has been inferred from a photograph posted on social media by someone who visited the fell in August, stood at the gate for four minutes, and looked at Doris looking back at them.

"She looked so sad," the caption read. "Standing there alone in the rain. No shelter. Just staring."

Let's assess the evidence.

The rain: Doris has grazed through eleven consecutive days of horizontal Lake District rain without reducing her hours. The rain does not constitute suffering for an animal wrapped in eight centimetres of lanolin-coated fleece that actively repels moisture. The fleece is not a fashion choice. The fleece is a biological weather system.

The aloneness: Doris is in a fell with other sheep. She grazes at distance from them because fell sheep are not herding animals in the lowland sense. They distribute across the landscape. Doris is not isolated. Doris is optimally positioned.

The stare: Doris can recognise up to fifty individual sheep faces and ten human faces and remembers them for two years. She was not staring sadly. She was filing you.

The shelter: the spot behind the east wall where Doris sleeps on cold nights is four degrees warmer than the exposed fell and has been her chosen location on every comparable night since her first winter. She did not look sad in August. She looked at the gate visitor in the specific way a prey animal looks at an unknown presence: assessing, not emoting.

This is the anthropomorphism problem.

We look at an animal experiencing its natural environment in the way it evolved to experience it, doing the things it is built to do, in conditions it is designed for, and we project onto it the emotional state we would have if we were standing in that field in those conditions.

We would be cold.

We would be lonely.

We would look sad.

Doris is not us.

Doris is a fell sheep on a fell. The fell is what she is. The rain is her element. The aloneness is her preference. The stare is cognition, not grief.

Doris's cortisol: normal, per the vet's annual check.

Doris's welfare domains: no concerns across all five, per the farmer's records.

Doris's opinion of the caption: she has filed the photographer's face.

Doris will remember that face for two years.

Doris is grazing.

Doris has always been fine.

We are the ones who needed the shelter.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Activist: "I only buy wool-free clothing."
Farmer: "What's it made of?"
Activist: "Synthetic fibres."
Farmer: "Which are made from oil."
Activist: "Recycled synthetics, mostly."
Farmer: "Which shed microplastics into waterways with every wash."
Activist: "That's an industry problem."
Farmer: "The wool I produce is biodegradable, regrows every year, and requires no petrochemicals."
Activist: "But an animal is involved."
Farmer: "An animal that needs shearing anyway."
Activist: "I still don't want to wear it."
Farmer: "You're choosing microplastics in rivers over a haircut."
Activist: "I'm choosing not to exploit animals."
Farmer: "You're choosing to exploit the ocean instead."

[Agvocate_Au @agvocate_au]

Sick of acquiring thistles & other blow-ins from the neighbourhood ?

24/7 biosecurity asset.
Especially if a dense, to the ground shrub layer, is planted on windward side facing where invaders come from.

@VicGovAg @WeedSmartAU @meatlivestock @WoolProducers

[AgWatchers Podcast @AgWatchers]

Get along to the @MerinoLink conference, one of the best (and most affordable) sheep, lamb and wool conferences next week in Armidale.

[Agvocate_Au @agvocate_au]

Today I made a portable, extendable 4g camera signal booster for Feral01.
Signal has gone from 1 bar to 4/5.

Even though the low signal still works sending pics 70km away, it's good to field test it with sheep.

#BiodiversityInnovationAu

[Agvocate_Au @agvocate_au]

Blade shearing with Tina.

Told me she does it to help out at these events & to show visitors that women do harvest wool.

@WoolProducers

[Agvocate_Au @agvocate_au]

Help get farmers back up Faster after Disaster.

Can Aus farmers claim insulating water tanks & shed electrics from a fire?
YES !

Reduce tax on profit, reduce future fire damage risk.

Many farmers don't know. Help them. Tell them.

https://t.co/X4MdJiUZUR

[Agvocate_Au @agvocate_au]

Want some of your own?

When it is hot is when vintage wool blankets turn up in the thrift shops & because most lack any storage room, they are put out & priced to sell quickly.

Warrnambool Travelmate Anderson tartan 1980s.
$20

[Agvocate_Au @agvocate_au]

1963 Defence issue Warrnambool made 100% Australian Wool.

Around a campfire & in a bushfire wool is the least flammable textile.