A fistful of whiter than white wool

JON MORGAN

Alan Johanson stretches down the side of the romney ram his heading dog Ozzie has baled up for him and clutches a fistful of fleece.

"Feel that," he offers. "You can squeeze it as hard as you can but you can't move it. It won't compress any further. It stays one big thick handful."

He's right. A grab of the greasy wool confirms this. It is a solid, unmoving mass.

It is what he calls his "crunch test", a sign of wool density and weight, and the reason why he shears almost twice as much wool from his sheep in a year than most other farmers.

He is justly proud of his wool. It earns a premium payment for its whiteness, fineness and yield.

His latest clip in June, six months after the previous shear, left a protective covering of winter wool on the sheep but still amounted to 3.2kg a head. For that, he received $14.94 a head - "not bad pocket money", he says with a grin.

Compared with past years it is better than "not bad". It is not long since prices were so low they would not cover the $3-a-head cost of shearing.

But all through he has kept selecting his romneys for their wool-growing abilities, even though it was unfashionable to do so. "We even had leading wool merchants telling farmers not to worry about improving their wool - it was a tragedy," he says.

"At times I wondered if I was doing the right thing, putting so much effort into my wool. But I kept a stern face. I was committed and there was no turning back."

And he found that as time went on and the standard of the national wool clip deteriorated, his wool began to stand out and earn a premium.

Now, as wool prices have improved in the past year, his high-quality wool is in demand.

His agent, Scott McLeod, wool manager for Masurel Direct, says Mr Johanson's wool is some of the best his firm sells.

"His colour reading is spot on, he shears at an optimum length and there's very few faults in the fibre - he's certainly got a knack for producing good wool."

Most of Mr Johanson's wool goes to China. The fine lamb and hogget wool is knitted into clothing and the coarser wool from older sheep is destined for carpet mills.

The whitest wools are most sought-after because they need less dye and as whiteness is a heritable trait Mr Johanson takes care in choosing his rams.

Farming in the summer-dry Hawke's Bay hills at Weber, east of Dannevirke, he recognises that 130 per cent lambing is as much as the country can handle. Recent droughts, followed by last September's wild storm that killed 900 of his lambs, have lowered stock numbers by a quarter.

Running through the flock of 2100 ewes are the bloodlines of 30 years of buying from one breeder - Ian Grant, of the Murinui Stud, Woodlands, Invercargill.

Mr Johanson describes Mr Grant, who died in 2001, as New Zealand's best romney breeder. "He was an unassuming man, but very influential. His lambing percentage was in the 167-190 per cent range and all he needed to do was go around and tag them."

Mr Grant selected for white, high yielding fleeces and produced big, strong-boned sheep. "They were stacked with wool," Mr Johanson says, recalling one ram producing 14.8kg of wool in a year.

Since the dispersal of Mr Grant's stud, he has bought romney rams from Ike Williams' Waidale Stud at Totara Valley, South Canterbury.

Conformation is most important to Mr Johanson in his selection of which lambs to keep for breeding. They must have big chests so they have the lung capacity needed to walk the hills and a spring of rib and depth of hindquarter to grow meat on.

He also looks closely at the heads. They must have a broad muzzle for efficient grass eating and it and their feet must be dark - pink muzzles and feet are a sign of soft feet prone to footrot. The ears must be soft and white, an indication that the skin is not black-speckled and likely to grow black wool fibres.

A thick jacket of wool is essential from shoulder to hip, with no sign of hair or kemp, a short, brittle coarse fibre. Many of his sheep have wool down to their feet but he does not want "boufheads", woolblind sheep.

He expects to average close to 7kg a head of wool from all sheep classes this year, a return to normal after the previous drought-affected years, and well above the national average of 4kg.

He pulls out a file of sales records, showing the diameter of the wool fibre at 28 microns for lambs, 32 for hoggets and under 38 for ewes - all highly desirable results.

The yields, which measure dirt and vegetable contamination, are close to 80 per cent and the colour is around 1.6 - the closer to zero the whiter the wool. A couple of recent batches were in minus figures - "Look, whiter than white," Mr Johanson says proudly.

Now 65, he and wife Diane started with 200ha in 1972, next door to his parents' farm. The two farms were put together in 1983 and now they have 531ha, of which 88ha is in pines and natives.

A crucial point in their farming career came on a trip to the 1984 World Sheep and Beef Cattle Congress in Pretoria, South Africa. There, Mr Johanson saw farms that were not killing lambs till they grew to 16-18kg carcassweight.

"It was a real eye-opener," he says. "In New Zealand, we were cramming sheep onto our farms and getting rid of their lambs at 12-13kg. When we struck a drought we were trapped with thousands of these rabbits."

He returned home determined to concentrate on producing heavier lambs.

However, although he had some good, rolling country, the dry Hawke's Bay summers meant it was not suited to finishing. He found a 54ha block of flat terraced land near Dannevirke that would do the job.

Lambs of around 17-18kg are now the norm and in the past year have got even heavier. He has a deal with a farmer near Palmerston North to take 500 romney lambs at 32-38kg liveweight and add 5-6kg to them before selling them and sharing the profits. The carcassweight of most of them is more than 20kg.

The lambs leave his farm in autumn, making more feed available for his capital stock going into winter, and the deal means cash flow over winter and spring when previously there was none.

He expects the demand for heavier lambs to keep rising to 22-25kg, although by then they won't be lambs but hoggets. "That's good," he says. "They'll have more flavour - there's no taste in a lamb, anyway."

He also expects wool to stay in demand. While other farmers are being encouraged by the rising prices to take more care over their wool, it won't mean any change to him.

"I've always bought top sheep - paying $2500 for a ram is not a problem - and I've spent a lifetime building up good genetics. The premium I get shows that it has been worth it."

- © Fairfax NZ News