An industry levy was not part of the work being done, federation national meat and fibre group chairman Rick Powdrell said.
Getting detailed information on what happened to New Zealand wool overseas and where it went were key parts of the project.
The farmer organisation was targeting $6/kg greasy for crossbred wool – double today’s price – because that was the net return to farmers, after the wool was sold clean at auction and in other transactions.
Powdrell thought it a realistic target, set after a survey of farmers on what was a sustainable value for them.
“Most views were a dollar either side of $6 so that was about the average.
“We discarded two numbers we received, $10 and $11. They were off the planet.”
Andrew Gibbs from Deloittes has presented a report to the federation’s national council and it now had to go to the Ministry for Primary Industries and Minister Nathan Guy for direction on the merits of taking that work forward into a new strategy.
The report wasn’t being made public yet but indicated there appeared to be up to 11 different stages in the supply chain in NZ and around the world between the farmer and the end-consumer, where many participants were clipping the ticket rather than adding value.
“Our question is, can we get closer to the end-user?” Powdrell said.
Two factors were very clear for the industry.
“Wool’s not doing well and no-one is overseeing the whole wool picture even though various bodies are involved in it.”
Frustration is evident in recent newsletters to farmers from provincial meat and fibre chairmen, also quoting from the report, and highlighting the lack of leadership, fragmentation, funding and the lack of farmer representation on industry organisations.
NZ produced about 800,000 bales of crossbred wool a year, with about 400,000 bales going to China.
“And we don’t know where it goes from there,” Bay of Plenty meat and fibre chairman Brent Mountford said in his note to members.
“We actually don’t know what our wool is used for. We need to understand where it goes.”
There were high-end wool products selling for high prices in the United States.
“A decent plan is required. We require one voice.”
Otago chairman Simon McAtamney took a similar line.
“Some NZ wool companies are working hard to sell crossbred wool and follow it from farmgate through processing and manufacturing channels but volumes remain very small and for most wool we have absolutely no idea what is becoming of it.”
Manawatu/Rangitikei chairman Richard Morrison said China was probably not the final destination for most of the wool and the industry had little understanding of the supply chain.
“Until the situation changes we are always vulnerable and can’t expect to attract a premium in the market.”
Powdrell said a lot of money had been spent on research but it appeared a lot of it had “ended up in the bottom drawer”.
“There’s also a lot of work on extracting compounds from wool to develop into powders but how much wool will that use? It doesn’t use a lot and we need to get big volumes at higher value.”
Farmers voted several years ago to remove wool from the levy-funded work of Meat and Wool NZ, leading to a change of name for the industry-good agency to Beef + Lamb NZ.
In 2014, they also voted down a proposal for a levy-funded standalone wool organisation.
Powdrell said it was quite clear farmers didn’t want another body set up but he believed there was support to “bring things together” more within the existing groups.
“The Commodity Levies Act is a whole new discussion and there’s no sense of that at this stage.”
Powdrell has just returned from a month in Europe. He was surprised to see very few wool products in Switzerland and in some markets products were being promoted as wool but the actual content was only 10% to 15%. The rest was synthetics.
