Fashion
Australia’s reputation as a world-leading producer of wool is on the decline, with the industry struggling to address concerns about animal cruelty and environmental damage. By Lucianne Tonti.
How Woolmark lost its lustre
Di Haggerty’s farm, Prospect Pastoral, is in the middle of the eastern Wheatbelt in Western Australia. She explains that recent rainfall has left the famously dry landscape looking lush: “The wildflowers are in really good stead.” The team has just finished shearing the farm’s flock of merino sheep, marking the end of what Haggerty describes as a “very good” season.
Her positivity is an anomaly in a year of wretched headlines about Australian wool. In March, 100 local and international fashion brands came out against the Australian wool industry’s persistent mulesing – a cruel practice, which has been stopped in other countries, of removing skin from a sheep’s backside to prevent flystrike. In May, wool production volume dipped to its lowest point in a century. In August, Victoria’s last wool scour closed, merging with one in Adelaide. Rising costs and falling wool prices – down by more than a third since 2018 – have seen wool farmers exit the industry and switch to alternative crops. Meanwhile, floods and drought and other extreme weather events are putting further pressure on farmers.
“A lot of people have got out of the wool industry,” says Haggerty. “It is hard work and consistent work. For some farmers, it’s not an attractive option or even barely a profitable option.”
What sets Prospect Pastoral apart in tough times is a range of farming practices that reduce their reliance on expensive products, such as chemical fertilisers, while improving the health of the landscape and producing a high-quality fibre that fetches a premium on the luxury market because of its environmental credentials.
“We’ve been working on building the resilience of our property for a long period of time, and that’s stabilised things for us a lot,” says Haggerty. The farming she has pioneered, along with her husband, Ian, is called natural intelligence farming. It is a holistic and regenerative way of farming sheep and grain that restores biodiversity, soil health and water cycles. Its environmental and commercial success saw them named the 2025 Australians of the Year for WA and be nominated for the national Australian of the Year award. Allowing the sheep to feed on the plants grown in the nutrient-rich soil improves the microbiome in their gut, which lowers their methane emissions. The Haggertys have not mulesed since 2001.
Reflecting on the challenges facing other Australian wool farmers, Di Haggerty says, “Well, it looks a little bit like things have been not moving with the times.”
Haggerty is among farmers championing a fundamental shift in the way wool is produced in this country, which has long been a world-leading supplier. Many blame the industry’s challenges on a failure to address the ethical and environmental concerns that are reshaping global demand.
Australia still produces about 80 per cent of the global apparel market’s fine merino wool. Much of this is covered by the well-known Woolmark certification. That imprimatur is owned by a subsidiary of Australian Wool Innovation (AWI) – a non-profit that conducts research, development and marketing and is funded by wool growers. Its website says the Woolmark logo “represents an unwavering commitment to quality”, but it seems to the global fashion industry, Woolmark no longer represents best practice and hasn’t for a while.
“It’s not only being best practice when it comes to mulesing. Woolmark hasn’t been fast enough to jump on to things like regenerative farming,” says Lisa Bergstrand, a supply chain expert and sustainability consultant to global brands including Acne, Marimekko, Toteme and Our Legacy. “Not only is climate change the biggest issue for the farmers on the ground, but we also have to find a way to get the emissions from wool down.
“Since most of the merino wool comes from Australia, they’ve definitely lost the branding exercise that they should be winning.”
International certifications such as the Responsible Wool Standard, Nativa and New Zealand Merino’s ZQRX that have been around since 2016, 2017 and 2021, respectively, have been gaining traction in the industry. They are all widely recognised programs that ensure traceability, improved biodiversity, healthy soils, carbon sequestration and a decreased reliance on chemicals.
They prohibit mulesing and, according to Bergstrand, they help “farmers get a premium”.
Last year, Woolmark released a road map to help growers transition to “nature positive” farming. AWI’s chief executive, John Roberts – who will exit the organisation in November – says the depressed wool price reflects cost-of-living pressures and the prevalence of cheap synthetics that make up more than half of the global fibre basket.
“The problem we’ve got at the moment is fast fashion has become so commonplace and that’s also hurting us quite a lot,” Roberts says.
Since wool is a specialised fibre, its market is typically premium to high-end. Increasingly, the luxury brands that buy it are looking to tell the sustainability story of their products back to farm level. Environmental regulations in the European Union are also obliging them to reduce their carbon emissions. “The brands want a lower emission factor of the wool at the farm gate,” says Bergstrand. “And they want unmulesed wool.”
The mulesing debate remains live in Australia, with growers arguing it is a necessity because of blowflies, which are not a problem in many other countries. The flies lay eggs between the sheep’s skin folds, and when their larvae hatch they burrow in and cause painful infections.
In early September, the Australian Council of Wool Exporters and Processors, Wool Producers Australia and the National Council of Wool Selling Brokers of Australia called for a national strategy to address mulesing.
“They don’t mules because they want to or they like it,” says Robert Herrmann, the executive director of the brokers’ council. “They’re making animal husbandry decisions in the best way they can, but we have this unique situation in Australia in order to control the flystrike risk.”
AWI declined to comment on questions about mulesing posed by The Saturday Paper, citing an agreement to wait until the strategy was finalised.
For many wool farmers this excuse rings hollow. Charles Massy, who farms sheep regeneratively on the Monaro in New South Wales, says his business hasn’t used the practice in 25 years. “If your genetics are spot on and you breed good fibres with good structure and all that sort of stuff, the fly just isn’t an issue.” In the 1990s, alongside Dr Jim Watts, Massy pioneered a breed of sheep called the Soft Rolling Skin merino, which doesn’t need to be mulesed.
“You need to listen to your customer. The leading brands are very aware of reputation and animal welfare,” says Massy, who travels to Europe at least once a year to foster direct relationships with mill owners.
Like the Haggertys, Massy negotiates the price for his wool separately to the rest of the wool clip (annual “crop”) that goes to auction. “We’ve put a lot of work into ecological landscape management and that gives you the toolkit to approach some of the leading thinkers and leading processors who do want a point of difference, and that opens up new markets and higher premiums.
“That’s the path we’re going, but it’s not open to everyone.”
Given the high quality of the wool clip and the otherwise high standards of local agriculture, many producers are exasperated that Australian wool has lost its trusted status.
“The frustration for me is that we have got this fantastic product, a fantastic fibre that should be really fit for its time, but we haven’t been able to sell the message correctly,” says Herrmann. “I think the wool producers we have now are environmentally conscious, they’re efficient... Our farmers just aren’t getting paid enough for the wool right now.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 20, 2025 as "Sheep trials".
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