Wool Desk Report - September 2005

Summary

A survey of 1700 Australian sheep producers with 500 or more sheep was carried out during March 2005 to collect demographic data on the national sheep flock as well as information on the time of lambing and shearing and the size of the wool stockpile.

While flock and clip size varied considerably between producers, 60 per cent of producers surveyed had 1000-4000 sheep and nationally each bale was produced from an average of 46 adult sheep. Twenty-one percent of producers indicated an intension to increase their Merino flock. Adult Merino ewes dominated flocks in all States while, nationally, wether sales were higher than ewe sales. Eighty per cent of producers joined ewes up to five years old while less than 30 per cent of producers joined ewes that were more than seven years old. Nearly three-quarters of Merino ewes were joined to Merino rams with the majority of the remainder joined to traditional terminal sires for prime lamb production. The use of new terminal or dual-purpose breeds and shedding or fat-tail ram breeds was limited, with Western Australia reporting the highest use of these ram breeds.

Nationally, there was a wide spread of lambing times with Tasmanian producers lambing within the shortest time frame. Late winter or spring was the most common time of shearing, xcept in Western Australia where shearing was more evenly distributed between late utumn and spring. Depending on the State, producers had 3-16 per cent of their annual ool production stored on-farm while nationally about 20 per cent of wool produced emained in-store at the time of the 2005 survey.

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