Here in the New Zealand countryside,
25,000 sheep are sheared in just 10 days.
It's a nightmare trying to keep the sheep still.
But a good shearer can shear a sheep in a minute
and the sheep won't even wriggle.
It will just sit there.
This wool normally would be cleaned, dyed,
woven, and sold across the globe as rugs and clothes.
But due to a growing dependence on synthetic fabrics
and a trade war with China,
the value of wool has plummeted.
All of a sudden, a key revenue to the business
has just disappeared overnight.
And not only has the revenue gone,
it's actually turned into a cost.
And it's left farmers like Andrew and Meredith
with bales and bales of wool they can't sell.
Now, farmers are basically giving it away
or throwing it away.
So what happened?
Back in the 1950s,
wool was basically like gold in New Zealand.
Farmers would produce one clip of wool
and be able to pay off a whole piece of land,
like could buy a farm outright.
It was the golden era for farmers in New Zealand.
That's when Andrew's grandparents
bought Ruanui Station here in Taihape, New Zealand.
I'm third-generation.
It's great to carry on what Dad and Granddad
have slaved away at doing.
Andrew was working for his dad
when the industry hit its peak in 1988,
with wool exports valuing $1.9 billion.
That made wool New Zealand's
second biggest export, after meat.
Andrew took over the farm about 15 years ago,
and since, he's grown it to about 7,600 acres,
raising 25,000 sheep.
It's not a bad office
when you get a view like this.
It's blooming awesome.
It's so quiet, especially this time of the day.
It's beautiful.
Andrew raises Romney sheep.
Their coarse wool has to be sheared twice a year
for the sheep to stay healthy.
Without taking the wool off,
they do get dags and sort of dirty bottoms
and stuff like that,
and that can attract flies.
And if they attract flies,
flies can actually land on them and lay their eggs.
That will actually kill a sheep.
Also, think about how hot
a New Zealand summer is.
In 90 degrees Fahrenheit, that wool ...
It's like wearing a great, big, furry jacket
in the middle of the summer.
If they're really, really woolly,
when they lie down, they get stuck on their back,
and they actually can't stand up again, and they die.
Seriously.
In January, Andrew's staff heads out
to round up sheep for the first shearing of the year.
Basically all the mustering's done on horseback,
horse and dogs.
Using 20 horses, four ATVs, and eight dogs,
they gather up 3,600 sheep at a time.
They all have a couple of Heading Dogs
and some Huntaways.
So the Heading Dogs are used
for just heading the sheep and getting them going
in the right direction.
And the Huntaways are the ones that bark
and move the stock along.
It's all done on whistle command.
We have a different whistle for left and right
and stop and go.
Got them heading the right way.
They'll start coming around
and joining up with the other lot.
They're all rounded up into this shed.
The last lot brought in from mustering.
They'll be drafted into their different lines.
The sheep are separated into groups:
lambs, or babies, and adult ewes, or female sheep.
We've got the ewes' wool here, 36 micron.
It's a lot coarser and harder.
So it's best used for flooring,
like carpets and rugs.
And then lamb's wool,
which is 29 micron,
it's a lot softer, finer.
So it's better for blankets and clothes.
The sheep are each weighed and lined up for shearing.
Andrew hired a gang of eight contract shearers
for the job.
We're into the shearing shed right now,
which is pretty hot, noisy, and dusty,
and we're shearing about 2,000 sheep today.
The gang brings its own tools.
What you've got here is pretty much the same
as what your barbers will have.
We call this a cutter at the top
and the comb at the bottom,
which we put on every time.
That's your scissor action that goes across.
One by one, Travis will pull a lamb out.
So you'll start off with the belly.
It's the easiest way to get that out of the way,
and then it's just a rhythm
that you kind of want to do to get around the sheep,
and it's a pattern.
So you're basically just taking off as much wool as you can.
That cutter will last only about 15 minutes
before it gets dull.
Sharpen the gear so you get a clean, clean cut on the sheep.
But don't worry, this doesn't hurt the sheep.
It is actually just a haircut for the sheep.
So you try and do everything the same.
It makes it easy on your body as well.
Makes the sheep comfortable
and making sure that they're in the best state
when they go out, minimizing nicks,
and controlling them properly.
It's a tough job.
Shearing gangs work long hours
in the heat wrestling with livestock.
Are you all right?
Did you get a kick in the nose.
It's a nightmare
trying to keep the sheep still.
They kick and wriggle and stuff like that.
A good shearer could shear a sheep in like, one minute.
And to watch them do it is amazing.
They are so fast.
The more you do it, the more experienced you are,
but at the start, it's never easy.
It takes a big toll on your body and mind.
These guys are so good at taming sheep,
they can shear over 300 in a day.
Rouseys gather up the fleece
and pressers squish it into huge bales.
Two hundred kilos a bale.
In 2015, Andrew would have sold
his stock quickly for $7 a kilo. But today ...
I was talking to the wool broker last night.
He sort of came back with us $1.20.
I'm thinking, oh God, this is not great.
When you add in the increasing cost
of shearer contracts,
it's now more expensive to shear the sheep
than the wool is actually worth.
My farm, five years ago,
we might have been making net cost $50,000 or $60,000 revenue.
So it's gone from making 50 to costing 30,
so it's an $80,000-a-year change.
It's soul-destroying to see the wool prices so low
when it's the most amazing natural product.
So why is the wool worth so little?
Well, demand is way down
because a few decades ago,
cheaper synthetic fabrics began replacing coarse wool
in flooring products.
Wool is biodegradable,
sustainable, and fire-resistant, but it's expensive.
To be honest, the average person
can't afford 100% wool carpets.
Synthetic rugs are made of plastic fiber,
so they're harmful for the environment
and are highly flammable --
but they're a third of the price.
And their growing popularity took a huge swing
at wool's demand.
Then things got rocky with New Zealand's biggest customer.
Sixty percent of New Zealand's wool goes to China.
Andrew and Meredith sold all of their lamb's wool
to clothing factories there.
We do have a h--- of a lot of our eggs
in the Chinese basket.
That proved to be a bad bet for New Zealand.
They come in and they buy and they buy and they stop.
So our wool prices dive.
In 2016, China first pulled back its demand
for coarse wool, and the price tumbled.
In 2019, the Trump administration slapped China
with fresh tariffs on textiles sold in the US.
Struggling to sell its manufactured wool clothes
in the US, China slowed its orders for New Zealand wool.
That can cause all sorts of problems
in supply chains and markets.
Because all of a sudden,
you've got your major customer not wanting it.
Then in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic
closed down clothing factories in China.
Andrew and Meredith were stuck with bales of wool.
So like many farmers in New Zealand, they stockpiled it,
waiting for prices to go back up.
But it can only be kept for about a year
before it starts to deteriorate.
But a year into this pandemic
and prices still haven't rebounded.
Stockpiling didn't work.
Some farmers were forced to throw away part
of their wool stock.
Others had to get creative.
Meredith found Tracy.
Tracy takes the lamb's wool Meredith couldn't sell
and converts it into throw blankets.
These are the throws that we're manufacturing for her.
To try and give them some added value to their fiber
by getting it processed into yarn
and then processing it into throws,
which then they can sell for a high margin.
Workers in Wellington clean and dye the wool
and then send it to Tracy.
When the wool arrives,
we then warp it, we then weave it.
You'd probably need to allocate a kilo per throw.
Workers inspect and mend each throw by hand.
The blankets are then cleaned, raised -- meaning fluffed up --
and then packaged.
Even though there's growing interest
for these throws online,
it's barely made a dent in Andrew and Meredith's losses.
Tracy only buys their lamb's wool,
but the majority of Andrew and Meredith's output
is coarse wool,
which is still caught up in trade wars.
To weather the storm,
some farmers are turning to breeds
that shed their own wool
to avoid those rising shearing costs.
Others are pivoting to meat production
or selling their farms to forestry
and getting out of sheep farming all together.
It would be a huge economic negative
for our country
if we saw the wool industry disappear.
What's left is a once-booming wool industry
on the brink.
We've seen that sheep flock go from 70 million
to today we're about 20, 22 million.
We're the last wool weaver in New Zealand.
There used to be a scouring plant almost
in every town.
Farmers are hoping to expand exports outside
of volatile China and convince consumers
of the benefits of wool over synthetic.
A lot of consumers are now really starting
to think about what's in the products they're buying
and prepare to pay more for natural,
environmentally friendly products.
And Tom says the industry needs to diversify.
You're not just dependent on the floor.
You can put wool through the whole house.
You can put wool through the whole office, as well.
Wool can be used in sofas, beds,
drapes, upholstery, and even insulation.
We're pretty nervous really, to be honest, yeah.
And I think if we had a crystal ball,
that would be fantastic.
But nobody knows where things are headed.
For now, Andrew and Meredith
aren't abandoning the industry just yet.
At the end of the day,
you've still got to shear the wool off them,
and that might as well be worth something.
So we'll hang in there
and see whether we can --
Ride the roller coaster.
No, they're not pets.
Haven't named any of them.