WOOLGROWERS need to take ownership of their industry and stop waiting for someone else to fix it.
That was the message from WA sheep and grains farmer Robert Egerton-Warburton who delivered the Mac Troup Oration at the 2015 Grasslands Society of Southern Australia in Naracoorte last week.
He said the industry had been in "self protection mode" for the past 20 years and producers needed to show leadership before it reached a "tipping point".
Mr Egerton-Warburton said the wool and meat industries needed to unite their research and marketing efforts and ensure they were heading in the same direction.
In his 20-year farming career, the family farm at Kojunup had grown from 1000 hectares to 4000ha but moved from a sole focus on sheep to largely grains where it was possible to lock in nearly all inputs and outputs for three years.
Mr Egerton-Warburton said sheep and wool industries needed to find a way to replicate this as market volatility cut confidence.
The industry, he said, had no hope of prospering while it was treating wool as a commodity.
Woolgrowers needed to recognise "money was in the middle" and find a way to participate in a "value chain".
Mr Egerton-Warburton used the example of wild flower seed business Lucinda's Everlastings, which he runs with wife Jen, and said they were able to increase the value of their everlasting seed ten-fold, from $100 a kilogram to $1000/kg, just by putting it in a 11-cent packet.
"We make absolutely no money growing them and absolutely no money retailing them – the margins are so small it is ridiculous. We make all the money in the middle and that is what you as growers need to understand," he said.
"If you don't own part of that you are not going to continue to prosper."
Cooperatives were an option but he said Australian agriculture had a history of failures in this business model, with producers chasing 10c/kg more rather than remaining committed to a long-term vision.
A radical change of thinking was needed, from breeding a wool or meat animal to producing the best animal for each environment.
"There is no such thing as a meat animal and no such thing as a wool animal – they are the same animal," Mr Egerton-Warburton said.
"Wool needs meat and meat needs wool and they need each other more than ever.
"The lamb industry needs wool because, believe it or not, the best eating animal in Australia is the Merino.
"Seven years of data from the Sheep Information Nucleus flock showed the top 100 sires for meat eating quality were all Merinos because they have not been endlessly bred for lean meat yield and muscle at the expense of intramuscular fat."
Through single-trait selection for wool, he said the industry had lost sight of a core profit driver – getting a live lamb on the ground.
Mr Egerton-Warburton, who spent seven years on the board of the Sheep CRC, was frustrated by the slow adoption rates of the technology delivered from the $140-million investment.
He said Australian Sheep Breeding Values were "absolutely critical" but had not been widely adopted by Merino breeders.
