1. YOUR REGION // SOUTH EAST
t keeps our food fresh, our
bodies warm, our homes
comfortable and dry;
it’s worn by the rich and
famous; it decarbonizes our atmosphere
and is helping in the fight against Third
World disease… and yet farmers are
happy to get shot of it for cost.
What is it? Wool. One of the most
versatile, sustainable and abundant of our
agricultural products, it’s also one of the
most undervalued, a victim of unregulated
global markets, currency fluctuations,
cheap oil and apathy. As one Nuffield
Scholar and sheep farmer put it last year,
“The UK needs to regain faith in wool”.
It’s a message that resonates with
Kristina and Paul Boulden, whose family
were farming the Kent Marshes in the
early 19th Century when Romney sheep
were leaving in their thousands by the
back door – smuggled to European
weavers prepared to pay a good price for
quality British fibres. By the time Kristina
and Paul were casting around for another
income stream from their mixed farm
at Aldington in 2008, those same fleeces
were barely covering the cost of shearing.
“We have a commercial flock of 1,000
Romneys. The fleeces weren’t worth very
much but we were producing five to six
tonnes of wool a year, so wool seemed
the obvious choice to diversify into,” says
Kristina. “It hasn’t really changed flock
management although we don’t over-use
the sprays because we now know how
difficult it is to get the dye out!”
The one tonne of wool used by the
Bouldens’ Romney Marsh Wools this year
will be worth twice as much to the farm as
each of the remaining tonnes sold through
the British Wool Marketing Board, for
whom Paul acts as a regional representative.
Like the rest of the British clip, they could
end up anywhere on a global market in
which wool, representing less than 4% of
textiles, fights hard to compete against man-
made fibres and cotton.
“As much as we moan about fleece
prices, it’s not all down to the BWMB,”
says Kristina, who uses scourers, spinners,
weavers and spinners across the UK to
produce naturally coloured cloth and yarns.
There is also a flourishing line of lanolin
toiletries, managing all of which is now a
full-time job for Kristina.
She is already considering buying in
other native breed fleeces to extend her
range of knitting wools and if the business
carries on expanding would look to take
Romney fleeces from other producers
operating under a similar sales exemption
with the BWMB.
The last surviving agricultural
marketing board in the UK, the board
is charged with collecting, grading and
marketing every fleece from every flock of
more than five sheep, be they in Scotland,
Northern Ireland, Wales or the Sussex
Weald. According to the BWMB’s
vice-chairman, Kent farmer Trevor
Richards, who runs 400 breeding ewes
near Ashford, that can put the wool board
in a challenging position, constantly
battling between meeting its obligations
while minimizing costs in order to
maximise returns to producers.
“If you go back 20 years, when my
father was a board member, there was a
guaranteed price for wool; today, my wool
cheque would not be more than 5% of
my total income from sheep,” says Trevor.
“So our main job as a board is to run as
efficient a business as possible – bearing in
mind we have no control over how much
the UK produces, no control over price
because we are selling on to a world market
and no influence over exchange rates.”
While wool payments to producers
have at least covered the cost of shearing
in each of the past five years, it’s hard
to say how much of that is down to the
board’s good housekeeping, its support for
global initiatives, such as Prince Charles’
Campaign for Wool, or world economics.
Either way, dairy producers, who have
endured almost 20 years of yo-yo pricing
following the demise of their own
marketing board, might look on enviously
– a point driven home by the former
chairman of First Milk, Roger Evans at a
recent BWMB annual conference.
Like many farmers, Bob White, who
farms a commercial flock of 2,000 North
Country and Suffolk cross mules with
500 ewe lambs, at Turville Park Farm at
Henley on Thames in Oxon, is just glad to
islands, will happily pay thousands for
timeless designs in British wool that’s been
cleaned in spring water of unimpeachable
provenance, the high street is less
discerning. Even tragedies such as the
Rana Plaza clothing factory collapse in
Dhaka, Bangladesh, which prompted
outrage in the media, had little impact on
the average consumer’s buying habits.
Perhaps farmers need to focus more
on both niche but potentially significant
markets and local supply chains if they
truly want wool to cushion their bottom
line. In Sussex, for instance, start-up
company South Downs Yarn is forging
relationships with producers in the National
Park, including Nepcote Estate, to supply it
with fleeces to turn into geo-specific wools,
while in Hampshire, Scotland Farm uses
the same breed to fill luxury duvets.
Further afield, WoolCool, an innovative
packaging company which grew out of a
project developing sustainable wool-lined
cool boxes for National Trust tenants
selling meat off the farm, got through half
a million fleeces last year and is doubling
production year on year. Founder Angela
Morris, who is now taking the company
into the pharmaceutical sector where it
aims to save lives with a cool chain wool
packaging solution that stops up to 50% of
vaccines being spoiled in transport, says:
“We won’t replace all the polystyrene in
the world, but we’ll have a good go at it.”
Another British company has used
more than five million kilos of coarse
upland wool to insulate UK properties
with a natural, hydroscopic Thermafleece
that performs 10% better than fiberglass,
but, despite energy saving campaigns, it’s
hard to find unless you look for it.
And SolidWool has turned a tonne
of Herwick fleeces mixed with bioresin
into functional alternative to fibreglass
furniture. Co-founder Hannah Floyd
says: “We very much want to be able to
work with farmers directly. How this will
work logistically we don’t yet know, but
we would love to be able to ensure that
farmers get a good price for their clip. It’s
important for us to know the provenance
of our wool.”
Kristina Boulden never lost her
faith in British wool, but she’d like
others, including the government, to
rediscover theirs.
“I hope more farmers will look at
other incomes they can generate from
wool and I wish the government would
consider wool more as an area to invest in.
There are few products you can say are
truly natural sustainable and so flexible it
can be used from slug pellets to fashion,
insulation to packaging and even coffins.
But wool is one of them.”
I
AterrificyarnAs sheep producers are urged to support the last remaining
agricultural marketing board, Sue Scott looks at the future of wool
see his pile of wool sacks hauled away.
“We produced 3,500 kilos of wool,
bringing in £3.500 to £4,000 in 2015.
On a pence per kilo basis that hasn’t
changed compared to 15 years ago,” he
says. “But my view of wool is that it’s
totally a welfare issue. I’m just happy we
get enough to pay our shearers because
there was a time when we didn’t.”
“I don’t have a view on the marketing
of the wool because it’s just important
it gets collected – the board’s a service
provider in that respect. Really, I
suppose, we should be going down to the
metaphorical street corner and saying we
want £5/kilo for our wool. But, as
in all things, we are price takers not
price makers.”
Trevor Richards is not convinced
anyone, “is ever going to produce sheep
for wool on a large scale in the UK again”
and while the Campaign for Wool has
rolled out a red carpet for British textile
manufacturers in markets around the
world since 2010, even it admits it’s hard
to quantify any uplift in demand for
homegrown fibre as a result.
“We have seen a change in the way
wool is used,” says Bridget Kelly, the
campaign’s head of interior textiles,
which will be championing British carpet
makers – the biggest consumers of British
wool - at the new Wool Flooring Show at
Stamford Bridge in March.
“As the campaign has grown in profile,
there’s better understanding of wool with
the consumer. It’s not where we would
like it to be yet, but it’s better,” she says.
“We do know there’s real growth in the
knitting and home crafts sector, and in
fabrics, key brands tell us that where they
had one wool range when we started, now
they have 12.”
Sadly, while the clients of Savile
Row tailors, like Huntsman, with direct
access to tweed mills in remote Scottish
‘Three bags full’:the
Bouldens’flock on
RomneyMarsh
courtesyofHuntsmanwww.h-huntsman.com
Courtesyofwww.matildarosephotography.com
Value-added: Kristina and PaulBoulden
ofRomneyMarshwools CourtesyofMatildaRosePhotography
CourtesyifSouthDownsYarns
www.southdownsyarn.co.uk
CourtesyofThermafleece
www.thermafleece.comCourtesyofSolidWoolwww.solidwool.com
Wool: one ofthe mostversatile,
sustainable and abundant of
agriculturalproducts
www.woolcool.com
90 91British Farmer & Grower - February 2016British Farmer & Grower - February 2016