Value-adding sheepskins not without its many pitfalls

Summary

The lure of higher and sustainable prices through retained ownership and value-adding has resulted in many valuable lessons learned by woolgrowers in their Producer Research Support project. Woolgrowers in the Traprock region of south-east Queensland have been in the forefront of exploring alternative marketing options in a bid to better understand the needs of their customers and lift profitability. They investigated group marketing in a previous project and learned this was not always the answer to low prices for surplus sheep. In this project they investigated the value adding and marketing of sheepskins with mixed success. The aims of this new Producer Research Support project were to:

trial a large number of tanned sheepskins to sell to Wyco for paint rollers;
develop markets for those skins unsuitable for the Wyco trade; and
identify other possible sheepskin markets and evaluate Merino sheepskins from the Traprock area for these markets.