For the first time in my 22 years of growing wool, I have shorn sheep wandering around in the middle of winter. I didn’t intend to. A perfect storm of less-than-perfect decision-making on my part combined with a shortage of shearers turned my planned autumn shearing into a two-month-long exercise. Happily, all have survived the shock of losing their lovely wooly coats, and in fact are thriving on the abundant forage from the last couple years of enhanced rainfall.
Still, those two months were pretty nerve-wracking, a feeling common to many woolgrowers given the industry-wide shortage of shearers. I made my situation worse by buying a stand-up shearing platform last year. When I planned my shift from spring to autumn shearing, there were only two shearers in the state who were familiar enough with the platform to shear on it.
Unfortunately, despite my best efforts to plan ahead, one shearer decided he simply couldn’t come at all, and the other one was only available occasionally, as he worked around other commitments. Eventually, we found a third shearer who liked using the machine, but had to arrange his commitments to find a stretch of time to really get stuck into shearing, which ended up being nine straight days in late June!
Because shearing on the platform is slow compared to conventional shearing, I pay my shearers by the run rather than by the sheep. Because it’s slow, though, only one other person is needed to do everything the shearer doesn’t: penning up, roustabout, wool classing, pressing, cooking etc. Mostly, that other person was me, with occasional help from Karen Fish. My Apple watch clocked up about 16 km the days I was on duty—most of them walking in small circles around the shed!
Shearer Dave Acheson’s smithfields Roger (left) and Alva (right) resting up during a hard day in the shed.
Shearing in winter is not uncommon in Australia. Many woolgrowers shear a few weeks before lambing, to encourage the ewes to seek shelter and thereby increase lamb survival rates. For a spring lambing, that means shearing in July, August or September.
However, while winter weather is cold, it is generally more settled than our roaring forties springtime. Hypothermia in sheep is a function of rainfall (wet sheep lose heat more readily), wind (particularly if the sheep are wet) and temperature. Cold temperature alone, without rainfall or wind, will not kill shorn sheep. After a couple of weeks, sheep will have grown enough wool—about a centimetre—to protect them from hypothermia altogether.
Shorn sheep on Eagle Ridge. The native cutting sags (lomandra longifolia) provide additional shelter from the wind.
The art of keeping shorn sheep alive in those first days after shearing is to provide them with shelter that they are familiar with and know to seek out. I’ve found the most effective is ‘land-form’ shelter—areas just over the brow of a hill, where the wind is blocked. My best paddock for shelter after shearing has a ridge in the middle, so that no matter what direction the wind is coming from, the sheep can get out of it.
There were a couple of nights early in May where the weather approached ‘sheep-killing’ intensity, and all my shorn sheep spent those nights in the holding shed, where they were dry and out of the wind. For the rest of the time, though, we had relatively little rainfall, and never enough to trigger a sheep grazier’s alert from the Bureau of Met.
Next year, we’ll get the shearing done in May, still technically autumn. But I’m not at all worried about keeping my sheep safe from hypothermia after my experiences this winter.