NSW wool growers Carina and Andrew Doran successfully phase out mulesing
Plainer-bodied sheep have helped a wool-growing enterprise to end mulesing, but they are yet to reap the financial rewards.
CONCERNS about animal welfare and the growing pressure on farmers to change their practices prompted NSW wool grower Carina Doran and her family to phase out mulesing two years ago.
Conscious the debate about the contentious sheep-management practice was unlikely to go away, Carina, her husband, Andrew, and parents, Angus and Sally McLean, made the leap to completely remove mulesing from their Merino business at Crookwell, in the NSW Southern Tablelands, in 2018 when on-farm trials revealed little difference between mulesed and unmulesed sheep in their flock.
They say there has been little change in how they manage their sheep, with no extra labour costs or preventive fly-strike treatments needed so far.
But Carina said hopes of any sustained price premiums for stopping the practice have not been realised, and they are not seeing any positive price signals for unmulesed wool in mainstream marketplace.
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While the statistics for wool grower declarations in relation to non-mulesing and ceased-mulesing for Australian wool sold are still comparatively low compared with enterprises still mulesing or mulesing with pain relief, the proportion of unmulesed wool being sold is slowly rising.
The latest Australian Wool Exchange mulesing figures for 2019-20 reveal non-mulesed wool comprised about 14 per cent of all wool sold, while wool from properties which have ceased mulesing total 3.5 per cent. “Mulesed with pain relief” wool comprised almost 39 per cent while “declared mulesed” and wool sold without any declaration totals just under 44 per cent.
COOL WOOL
CARINA and her family run a self-replacing Merino flock of about 6000 sheep on their property at Crookwell, where they join about 2200 ewes each year in conjunction with another family-owned sheep breeding operation at Breadalbane, near Goulburn.
Carina and Andrew took on the property from Carina’s grandparents and uncle in 2009, continuing an established focus to breed big, plain-bodied ewes with fewer wrinkles.
From 2011 they increased that focus by introducing plainer-bodied style rams, most recently using rams from South Australia’s Leahcim Merino stud.
With the retail pressure on mulesing not going away, the family decided to trial non-mulesing in a portion of their sheep in 2017.
The move to non-mulesing began with a trial on 300-400 maiden wether lambs, identified with special tags but run as one mob within their age-group.
Carina said they monitored the lambs for a year within that mob, looking for evidence of any dag or flystrike problems, especially in spring and autumn periods.
She said while 2017 was not a particularly bad year for dag, they found it wasn’t necessarily the unmulesed sheep that presented with any problems.
“We didn’t find any difference between the mulesed and the unmulesed lambs,” Carina said. “There was no differentiation between what was dirty and what wasn’t.”
FULL STOP
BASED on that evidence, the family stopped mulesing completely in 2018.
Carina said so far the change has worked well, with no dramatic changes to the farm program or additional management costs.
She said most of the recent management changes have had more to with the switch to an autumn shearing program to avoid shearing during August and the harsh Crookwell winter.
“We moved shearing to the end of March-early April, which was a change we made before we stopped mulesing.
“August was just too cold for the sheep. They came out of the shed and froze.
“To work around that and manage full-woolled sheep in summer we have brought in an extra preventive fly treatment at crutching in late November, early December.
“But we haven’t had to do anything extra to manage the non-mulesing at this stage.”
Pressure, not premiums, were the driving force behind their decision to phase out mulesing. Carina said there were few cost savings from stopping the practice, and few market incentives.
“There’s not a huge cost- saving in ceasing mulesing. In terms of the lamb marking costs, you’ve still got to do all the other elements,” she said.
“We were just mindful of the animal-welfare concerns. I just can’t see this being an issue that’s going to go away.
“It’s just going to keep going.”
FORWARD THINKER
CARINA said despite the pressure from retailers, market premiums were “not really there”.
“In the future I think we’ll see a situation emerge where it’s not necessarily the unmulesed wool attracting a premium, but the mulesed wool being discounted,” she said,
“But in today’s market, which has been dropping rapidly recently, there’s not a huge premium for unmulesed wool.
“At present we haven’t noticed any price benefit by selling through our usual avenues.”
However Carina said it had been suggested in the industry that some forward-contracts did offer significant premiums, but that many stipulated requirements in addition to mulesing.
She said for now her family had decided some of those external requirements were “unable to be adhered to” although they did not rule out such contracts in future.
Carina said she firmly believed the way the sheep had been bred had made the transition possible.
“There’s no way we would have been in a position to do this 10 years ago when we had a different type of sheep,” she said.
“We’ve definitely been breeding those plainer-bodied sheep, which have made our move away from mulesing possible.”
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