alt Hacker NewsIt's all processing. Wool is a free by-product, sheep have to be sheared. More than 20 years ago, it was a pretty lump sum for someone who would shear 10K sheep a year. Still not much compared to the shearing price, but that helps sheep get more meat, reduce disease problems, and also reduce their size to the feeding stations. So a win for everybody.
Then, everything closed and the only thing left was to send it to China. Priced dropped entirely, to the point where it would mostly be considered a net negative. You have to store it before you can send a batch, and that takes a lot space. Not only that, but it has to stay dry. Then, consider you want to have a basic sort already done, because you don't want the whole batch to be paid little because it would be considered the lowest grade. So Bags should be consistent; they also have to be dense enough to avoid taking too much space (typical bags are around 1 cubic meter / 100kg). Most of these operation require quite a lot of very tiring human labor, which also require some skills, a problem pervasive with the sheep industry.
So yes, in the end it's too cheap to produce but too expensive to buy.
> Wool is a free by-product, sheep have to be sheared
One of the problem here is that while yes, you have to shear sheep raised for meat, the wool is going to be of an exceptionally low quality, because (a) you generally aren't raising a wool breed for meat, and (b) you aren't keeping your sheep in a manner that minimised damage to the wool.
We receive a fair bit of free by-product wool from meat herds, the processing cost is roughly double that of wool from a proper wool herd, and the end result is inferior.
The best use of by-product wool is often quality-insensitive bulk applications, like wool pellets for roof insulation, at which point there is very little money in the whole value chain