Let’s utilise this wonderful natural fibre

I HAVE some good news for the country. I have chanced on a material which offers an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional materials normally used in buildings insulation.

It’s cheap. Available, in fact, at almost giveaway prices. It’s sustainably produced. There are huge supplies of it. It has other uses, such as in the fashion and footwear sectors. And as a part of its production cycle it also yields a highly nutritious and tasty foodstuff.

It’s called wool. And the fact that the farming industry is amassing such huge, unsaleable stockpiles of the stuff is one of the greatest scandals in our industry.

Wool is currently fetching 30 pence a kilo in the market, which is not even enough to cover the cost of removing it from the sheep’s back. There are mountains of the stuff lying around unwanted. A shearer I spoke to last week told me he still had last year’s clip in the shed because he had been unable to shift it. And the size of his flock runs into the low thousands, to give you an idea of how much he may be talking about.

The picture will be repeated at countless locations all across the country. But why? What have all the self-proclaimed experts at the British Wool Board and the AHDB been doing to let us get into this state?

Why have they let an industry which was once so great that entire towns were built on the profits it generated wither to such a point?

I don’t want to hear a single bleat from them about wool being usurped by manmade fabrics in clothing because – as they might not have noticed – there has been a fundamental swing back to the use of natural fibres in recent years.

Others have been quick to spot this trend – considerably quicker than the so-called leaders of our wool sector. The Australians (the people who are now being demonised for wanting to send us their beef) have picked up the ball and run with it, using wool in new ranges of footwear which are pressing all the right buttons with younger consumers.

But here? I see no evidence of wool being promoted as the new, must-wear fibre. I do, on the other hand hear a lot of anti-wool propaganda coming from the vegan lobby along with the rest of the lies and half-truths they normally peddle.

If we had a wool board whose members actually had some get-upand-go instead of sitting around all day telling us how bad things are they would be launching initiatives to promote the greater use of wool in clothing and footwear.

If we had a Government that was seriously interested in helping farmers it would be looking at ways of encouraging the use of a wonderful natural fibre – initially, as I have hinted, in the construction industry.

Wool has proven qualities as an insulator and a subsidy for building projects that used it (or maybe just a Government-subsidised free supply of the stuff ) and levies for those continuing to use environmentally unfriendly polyurethane and glass fibre would go some way at least to kickstarting the take-up of the wool mountain which heaps more shame on the British Wool Board the more it grows.

I see no evidence of wool being promoted as the new, mustwear fibre