Jamie Mackay: The Country host on wool prices surging up

It's a good start to the year for wool farmers, as prices leap up to a historic high.

Following a Covid-induced downturn, growth has returned to the sector - allowing farmers to do more than scrape by.

The Country's Jamie Mackay explains further.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Jamie McKay's your host of the country. Good evening, Jamie, Jamie.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
You've got you there, Yes, you've got that. You got me.

Speaker 1 (00:08):
I've got you there, loud and clear. Good to have
you on the show. And we've got some good news
tonight about strong wool and the prices it's getting.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Well, everything's relative, of course, tryan but yeah, look we've
crept up from the lower lasts of all time in
real terms in COVID, when some farmers were only getting
believed or not just over a dollar a kilogram for
their strong cross brint fleece. Well we're up to the
four dollar mark. Now. That is a clean price obviously, Yeah,

(00:41):
that's a clean price, which are quite surely but less crazier.
One get too complicated on that one, but I just
thought i'd put it into some historic perspective. It's all
very well you to have wool at four dollars. Personally myself, Ryan,
I think it needs to be ten dollars or more
for sheep farmers to make a buck out of it.
And I'll just take you back in time to the
core and War in the early fifties when wool was

(01:02):
a pound a pound and using I've heard various extrapolations
and calculations on this one, but that might equate to
something like fifty dollars per kilogram in today's money. So
at four dollars we're well off the pace. Even when
I was a hard up young far for Ryan in
the nineteen eighties, sharing all my own sheep, we used

(01:23):
to get five or six dollars a kilogram for wool,
and that would probably I don't hope, factor out to
something like maybe twenty dollars a kilo in today's money.
So yep, the markets come off absolute lows, but it's
still a long way to go. And one of the
big things in sheep farming at the moment Ryan is
people who are getting rid off sheep that grow wool.

(01:44):
They're getting into self shedding sheep, sheep that shed their
own wool, or even worse, ones that don't grow any
wool to start with. So the wool industry is far
from being out of the woods. The good use for
sheep farmers is Ryan. The lamb has really recovered this year,
up about twenty five or thirty percent on where it
was this time a year ago, and the farmers need

(02:05):
it too.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
Interesting about the sheep that don't have any wall because
that you often hear farmers talk about. You know, it
costs you more to share it off then you get
paid for it, So you can understand I suppose why
they do that now.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
A lot of sorry, a lot of animal health reasons
for doing it as well. If they're not growing any water,
you don't have to dip them, you don't have to dag,
and you don't have to crutch them. You don't even
have to dock them or tail them. So there's just
there's just a lot easier animal to run and you're
just running sheep purely for meat.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
Which and the meat is the thing that's paying right,
So there you go. Now, vegetables, you've got to have
some veggies with your lamb. So there's a problem though
potentially without locally grown vegetable supply. According to an industry leader.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
Yeah, John Murphy from Vegetables New Zealand said the current
system was broken and local growers were being put out
of business. And we all know the story about growing
houses and places like Pucacoe instead of vegetables. Some of
our best soils now have houses on them. And John
Murphy's quite rightly, saying growers are being strangled by regional

(03:14):
decisions that take too long, make no sense, and ultimately
drive them out of business. He said vegetable growing needed
to become a permitted activity in the current round of
resource management reforms and places like Horo Fenua, there's a
real threat of growers being told they can no longer
grow veges. It's madness if you ask me. We should

(03:35):
be growing more and more of them. But the cavalry
is on the horizon in the form of Associate Minister
of Agriculture Nicola Grigg. She's the minister responsible for horticulture
and she says she's relentlessly focused on supporting the sector's success.
Griggs said this included considering policy amendments, including proposals relating

(03:56):
to fresh water, water storage and vegetables growing. And I
say good luck to the vegetable growers, Ryan, because anyone
who's grown a veggie garden at home knows how tough
it is let alone on a commercial scale.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Absolutely, and Timidoo, Jamie. The old Alliance Smithfield plant site
is coming up for sale.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
Yeah. And I don't know how well you know, Timaroo, Ryan,
but it's quite a nice site actually thirty two hectares.
It's an industrial site at the moment, it's zoned industrial.
It's the old Smithfield plant that had been there for
one hundred and thirty nine years. The Alliance Group shut
it down. The wist talk of it becoming a housing development.
Certainly in a good spot with good views. Interestingly, I

(04:38):
found this was interesting. The land also was home to
the Smithfield Coastal Observation Bunker, which was built in nineteen
forty two. I'm assumed that was to check it in
case the Japanese were coming to get us. It's got
a heritage to New Zealand category listing. The closure of
Smithfield is estimated to have cost Timaru up to fifty

(05:00):
million a year in wages alone in the local economy.
And here's another interesting stat for your ion to finish
our chat tonight. The Timarou Council said in November the
closure of the meat works would cause a one point
seven to six million dollar drop in water revenue as
the plant used about ten percent of Timaru's total water supply.

Speaker 1 (05:21):
Goodness me, Jamie, some great numbers in there. Thank you
for that. Jamie McKay hosted the country with US just
gone twenty six minutes after sex. For more from Heather Duplessy,
Allen Drave, Listen live to news talks it'd be from
four pm weekdays, or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio