Mecardo Analysis - Non-mulesed Merino regional ladder
- By: "Farm Tender" News
- Ag Tech News
- Nov 22, 2018
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By Andrew Woods | Source: AWEX, ICS.
The supply of non-mulesed Merino wool is not evenly distributed across the Australian clip. This article takes a look at the regional sources of non-mulesed Merino wool during the past year and provides a ranked regional ladder from the highest to lowest proportion of sales.
Figure 1 shows the proportion of Merino wool sold during the past year that was declared as ceased or non-mulesed by region. There are 20 regions used to break up the wool growing geographic area in Australia, starting in Queensland on the left hand side and running to Western Australia on the right hand side. The regions are grouped into states.
The first point of note from Figure 1 is that some regions have a much larger proportion of non-mulesed wool. These include Queensland, northern NSW and Tasmania.
Figure 2 repeats the exercise for Merino wool from flocks which used pain relief. The levels are much higher generally, especially for eastern regions which do not have high non-mulesed levels of wool. The leading regions for using pain relief are south-eastern NSW, the Monaro and south-west Victoria. Western Australia notably ranks lowly on pain relief as it does for non-mulesed wool supply.
Figure 3 shows the proportion of Merino non-mulesed wool supplied by Western Australia, the eastern pastoral regions and eastern non-pastoral regions from 2008 to the current season to date. The proportions vary greatly between these three regional groupings, with the higher rainfall eastern regions having the highest proportion. The proportion in all three regional groupings has been trending higher in recent years.
Finally, the league ladder for non-mulesed Merino wool is shown in Table 1. Northern (eastern) NSW and southern Queensland are the league leaders. At the other end of the ladder South Australia, the western Riverina and Western Australian regions form the tail of the ladder with 6% or less Merino wool non-mulesed during the past year.
The quite varied levels of non-mulesed wool from the different regions mean that there are quite different levels of non-mulesed wool by fibre diameter. Mecardo showed in mid-October (Regional sources of Merino wool) the variation in Merino micron between Western Australia, eastern pastoral and eastern non-pastoral regions.
Key points
* The supply of non-mulesed Merino wool varies widely between regions.
* This variation between regions means there is quite a variation in non-mulesed Merino wool between micron categories – more non-mulesed fine Merino wool.
* The supply of wool declared pain relief is more evenly spread across the geographic regions.
* Western Australia has low levels of both non-mulesed and pain relief Merino wool.
What does this mean?
The varied supply of non-mulesed wool between regions is quite marked (ranging from a high of 29% to a low of 2%), and is leading to a quite marked variation in the level of non-mulesed wool between micron categories. If the industry is to progress the supply of non-mulesed wool it will need to work out how to increase levels in the regions with very low rates of non-mulesed Merino wool.
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