Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
End of an era for wool marketers
“It’s been a privilege and a pleasure,” says Bob Butt, rounding off 55 years of marketing wool in Marlborough.
Yesterday, Butt and business partner Steve Murray closed the doors of Wool Marketing Marlborough Nelson for the last time. With no local depot, people wanting to sell via private wool merchants must freight clips to Nelson or Timaru.
“I’ve bought and sold wool for three generations of farmers,” Butt said. He bought what was the Wool Marketing Co-op in 1969, and 21 years later Murray became co-owner.
Last week the final 1000 bales of wool sold were stacked along the walls of the Blenheim woolstore, awaiting pick-up. Earlier, staff dismantled a machine that core-sampled about 75 million bales to show potential buyers what was inside.
A wide range of wool was sold through the business, from strong clips from coastal farms through to fine merino from high country stations, Butt said. It offered 80-odd bins of different wool types compared with about six in Southland, where the terrain was more similar and therefore so was the sheep run.
Butt and Murray enjoyed making friends along with doing business. But it hurt watching a top quality natural fibre on a downward slide on value and market share, Butt said.
“Apart from a couple of fine wool booms, trends have been generally downwards,” Butt said. And Marlborough sheep numbers had fallen by two thirds since he bought his first bales, as pasture made way for vineyards.
In the early years of the business, the Marlborough clip was a mix of fine merino used in high quality garments and crossbred for yarns and carpets, he said. But as the cost of shearing started to exceed returns, crossbred farmers increasingly switched to meat breeds with coarse or hairy fleeces. There was growing momentum for sheep that shed their wool like wiltshires, “nudies” and “bikinis”.
Now, only about 5% of wool that came in was mid micron, 25% fine merino and the rest from composites bred for meat, not wool, Butt said. Traditional romney wool was getting hard to find with good colour, the right length, not too coarse and little “vegetable matter” of leaves and twigs.
Butt and Murray prided themselves on marketing about 16,000 bales of wool a year, based on a reputation for quality. To boost the value of small consignments including from lifestyle farms, similar wools were amalgamated into bales.
The company did not sell wool at auction nor contract clips, Butt said. It brokered individual deals, sometimes selling forward, with internet-based sales increasingly popular: “The main aim is to keep selling costs down, selling direct based on the best market on the day.”
A highlight was developing a sporting range that used soft merino to line a stronger Romney wool exterior for comfort, warmth and quality. Made in Auckland and sold internationally, the Echo Ridge brand about doubled the value of selected local clips, they said.
So what was next for the retiring wool marketers? Murray had a couple of vineyards to look after, while Butt looked forward to “doing nothing for a while”, then enjoying being a great-grandfather and travelling the North Island.