British wool is booming, but where are all the sheep?

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Farmers are being encouraged by British Wool to cash in on this year’s sheep clip by selling through the organisation, which is the UK’s last agricultural commodity board.

British Wool collects farmers’ wool to auction across the year and promotes it at home and abroad. It says that international interest in British wool is at its strongest for years, and it needs at least another 1,000 tons this shearing.

‘The price we can pay to farmers is at a 10-year high and it has increased 70% since last year,’ Gareth Jones of British Wool told Country Life. ‘However, our biggest challenge is volume. The national flock [the number of sheep] has been shrinking and there has been a trend for farmers to use their wool on farm as the price we could offer them didn’t cover the price of shearing. Now, however, there is strong demand and we want to encourage farmers to let us sell their wool for them again.’

Sheep numbers aren’t only falling in Britain, but globally, not least in New Zealand, another factor that has fuelled demand for British wool. A further element is the rise of shedding breeds — such as Dorpers, Easy Cares and Dorset and Wiltshire Horns — as the National Sheep Association estimates that there are at least 500,000 of these hair-coated sheep in the UK that produce no wool for the market.

Although some farmers were driven to burn fleeces during the years of rock-bottom prices, others became entrepreneurial and are unlikely to return to British Wool. Katy Allanby falls into this category. She keeps a small mixed flock near Pickering, North Yorkshire, selling the bulk of her wool privately to crafters by advertising online. ‘I get a better return,’ she explains.

Julie Robertson, who farms 160 ewes near Stonehaven, Aberdeen, produces about 500 kilograms of wool each year, getting the best spun at a local mill to sell and making more than she could hope to from British Wool. ‘[British Wool] is going to struggle to get people back on board,’ she believes. ‘The price for my best wool would now be about 97p a kilo, which is much better than it was. We used to get about 7p.’ However, now, she says, she ‘can sell a raw fleece, weighing about 3½ kilograms, to a spinner for about £10’.

Interest in wool as a ‘green’ alternative to petroleum-derived materials keeps increasing. It is used as housing insulation, packaging for parcels and in high-end upholstery. Small businesses such as Fliss Lewis’s Woolshred are using it in products for gardeners, with Lewis buying several tons of black Hebridean fleeces from British Wool over the past five years to clean up and sell as garden mulch, wool twine and garden felt. ‘Wool is good as a natural slug and snail deterrent, for keeping moisture in pots and as a weed suppressant,’ she says.

Wool bedding has also increased in popularity. Research from Bangor University earlier this year showed that wool outperforms feather, synthetic and down-filled bedding, being warmer in winter and cooler in summer. Bangor’s product design faculty is currently exploring the effectiveness of wool’s lanolin as an industrial lubricant.

‘The demand for wool keeps increasing — it is an incredibly versatile product,’ says Jones.

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