Shearing
Monday 18th June was Shearing Day at MyFarm. It was busy.
Preparations for shearing day started weeks ago with Stockman Mark and the team getting more than 400 ewes and fattening lambs (lambs literally being fattened up for meat) ready for shearing. This means foot trim and dagging them ready to shear and, importantly, getting them all undercover to keep them dry the night before. Dry sheep are much, much easier to sheer.
The shearers arrived at around 7am to set-up for the day. A little over eight hours later they had left with around 430 sheared sheep in their wake:
We worked out they shear about one sheep a minute (0.8 of a sheep to be precise). They’re that fast. The official World Record is a shade over 45 seconds per sheep.
Traditional methods
Obviously electric shears are a, comparatively, new invention in farming. Back in the 18th century, when Home Farm was first built, no such technology existed.
MyFarm’s multi-talented Forester, Simon, showed us how sheep would have been sheared traditionally:
As you’ll see, Simon doesn’t hang around but even with his skill it takes him around 18 minutes to shear one animal. With electric shears the Kiwi shearers would be well on the way to finishing their 15th sheep in the same time-frame.
It’s worth noting though that hand shearing isn’t just consigned to the history books, lots of sheep are still sheared this way on smaller farms and smallholdings.
So that’s almost all the farm’s sheep sheared in that one day. Almost all as this year’s lambs aren’t sheared. Mark has also left 12 rams with their fleeces on too for a hand shearing demonstration at the weekend 23/24th June.
As Mark explained in the video (above) most of the wool goes to the Wool Board but it’s far from lucrative. The money made from the wool will, hopefully, just about cover the cost of the shearing.
MyFarmerAndrew
MyFarmerMorris
MyFarmerRob
MyFarmTeam
MyFarmerWendy
Great production guys and fantastic information from Mark as usual. Strange that people used to get very wealthy from wool when it is almost classed as waste now!
Thanks Farmer Bullshot, glad you enjoyed watching it as much as we did making it. Mark’s a knowledgeable chap — as I always say he’s forgotten more about farming than I’ll ever know.
I was pretty shocked by the value of wool too. I guess man-made fibres have just undermined it’s value compared to some decades ago. The price of “progress”.
If you try and share this blog to Facebook it comes up with a picture of something decidedly more Bovine than Ovine!
Now that is something I would like to see the shearers have a go at!
Yes, it’s frustrating that, isn’t it? I think it’s because Facebook pulls through images from the blog and, as there aren’t any in this post (just videos) it opts for the MyFarm ‘gravatar’ which is (from memory) a Shetland cow!
I think there is a way of linking a post to an image (or the other way around). Maybe you can upload an image so it’s linked but then not include it in the blog, or hide it by changing it’s size? I’ll have a play and see if I can work out how it all links together.
… and it allowed me to use a “should have gone to specsavers” comment.
Okay worked it out. Add an image as a thumbnail and then hide it by changing the width and height to zero in the HTML tab. http://wp.me/p2qZXo-67
KIWI’S?????????????? You let Kiwi’s touch the sheep….. Well that’s just wrong… Everyone knows that Kiwi’s can’t even get close to and Aussie for shearing, it’s a well known scientific fact!..
And I will refrain from all the jokes about Kiwi’s and sheep!
Farmer Foow — our Kiwi shearers were very capable… although it’s worth noting the official World Record I refer to is held by… an Australian.
Australia; New Zealand and China are the three largest producers of wool in the world.