What does AWTA think about breeding for bolder crimping fine wools?

AWTA Ltd provides Fleece Measurement results on rams to assist objective ram selection. We do not offer advice on the ram selection, or particular breeding strategies.

The Departments of Agriculture in all states employ specialists who can provide this advice, as does CSIRO. There are also quite a number of commercial consultants who also offer this service, as do some wool selling brokers.

There is some technical data available that indicates that all else being equal (i.e. for consignments where all other objective and subjective characteristics are the same but only the crimp is different) then the bolder crimping wools will produce a marginally longer hauteur (mean fibre length) in the top.

However, at the present time there is little if any commercial demand for curvature information, despite its being freely available. Wool processors still believe that Mean Fibre Diameter, Vegetable Matter Base, Staple Length & Strength and Position of Break are far more important.