HANDLING WOOL CLIP BETTER

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31125, 30 July 1966, Page 9

HANDLING WOOL CLIP BETTER

There is a need for better wool handling, better wool classing and a better selling system in the view of Mr E. P. Barker, of Christchurch, who has had more than 40 years of experience of wool handling and wool classing in Australia and New Zealand and a full season in a wool store.

With this length of experience behind him Mr Barker feels that he may be in a position to make some comments. Since he was a boy, he says, he has always wondered at the excitement and anxiety that shearing brings even to a small holding. His first plea was for less panic and more planning.

A plentiful supply of shed labour was essential for smooth and efficient shed operation. By comparison with Australians, he said it was his view that most shed hands in New Zealand were slow and inefficient, but then the New Zealanders did not get such constant work. In Queensland it was one fleede for 800 to 1000 heavy Merino fleeces a day. Every fleece was beautifully picked up and thrown on the tables. The board was always tidy and bellies were stacked for frequent removal. There were usually three wool rollers on two tables side by side. Skirtings were per-

feet and almost excessive. Necks were kept separate and all necks and pieces were removed to the piece pickers' table in skips. There were two piece pickers and one man to frib and roll all bellies. And there was one classer.

He did not think that this sort of pace would often be required in New Zealand. Many good style clips were spoilt by poor or faulty skirting. One golden rule was to remove any patches of hard yellow, usually between the shoulder blades, as well as the usual fribs. That also applied to weak patches on the back often containing hay residues or gorse or thistles. Sandy patches often ran down the back and they should be removed if the rest of the fleece was A grade. Often the removal of only 11b was required to make a decent A grade fleece weighing 71b to 91b.

Cots and seedy fleeces and all the rest of the off-sorts,

including wool with a definite break, should not be skirted. In Australia tender wool and wool with a broken staple was classed as rubbish but this was not the case in New Zealand where winter conditions resulted in there being more of it.

Poor or hurried skirting, he said, caused many good style wools tn be down graded in the wool store, and it brought a lower price if sold under the grower’s own brand. To compete with synthetics growers needed to put their wool up in better style every year. The answer was to put on an extra shed hand at £4 or £5 a day. It would pay the grower and the industry. Where fleeces were to be classed in the wool store they should be well rolled and neatly stacked. They should not be belted in and the bale then bumped down. Much of the second-shear and lambs’ wool came into the store after having been pelted off the board into the bale. In the case of secondshear wools, ewes should be drafted before shearing unless they were as even as the proverbial peas in staple length and quality. Wools of Ijin and 3in in length should not be put in the same bale. Nor should growers offer for reclassing a jumbled mess of halfbred, threequarterbred and strong crossbred together with all the -‘ains, socks and yellowed shirtings which wool store classers had had to battle with last season. •

It was a similar story with lambs’ wool. Quite a lot of growers had shorn all lambs on the place this year—halfbred hill lambs, often short and seedy, and good style Romney paddock lambs had all gone in together and sometimes they were all uncrutched. These second-shear and lambs’ fleeces should all be picked and classed in the shed if possible. “Get your wool selling firm to send up a good lad or an efficient classer, according to the number of your sheep and output a day,” he said. The excuse so often heard in the wool store for faulty skirting is “the shearers are so damned fast these days.” This was so. The fleeces were also bigger and the boss was older.

The answer was another shed hand. In Australia all woolclassers had a number which was shown on the specifications sent to the selling firm. This meant that faulty or slovenly or downright incompetent classing resulted in the elimination of inefficient classers where there were complaints. This was a sound sort of scheme that New Zealand could well adopt, preferably with the backing of both Federated Farmers and the wool selling firms.

What would be done with the owner classer under these circumstances? He would be either approved or condemned by his selling firm. Mr Barker said that he had only seen one example of false packing last season, but quite a lot of poor classing which had been subject of comment in the newspaper reports of the April sale.

It was his view, said Mr Barker, that the well skirted, well classed shed or station clip had the edge over reclassed and binned clips in that buyers were able to assess the yield more accurately. This remark about yield led him to express an opinion he had held for some years, that the time was not far away for a most important change in the system of displaying wool for sales. What he envisaged was that, say 201 b of wool in the grease from each line should be displayed with a 21b sample of scoured wool from the same line beside it showing the yield. The scouring would be done by an independent testing station. This would eliminate all guesswork and also the stacking and bale opening and bale closing and unstacking—in fact all the out-of-date work that was associated with an out-of-date system. Under such a system as he envisaged all wool could be examined by buyers in the one building, and would, in his view, result in the removal of all wool stores from expensive city sites to the outskirts of the cities. It was necessary to modernise the wool Industry to fight synthetic fibres successfully. This involved better wool handling, better classing, and a better selling system.