Back to Top

FIBRE INDUSTRIES

wool industry

WOOL
INDUSTRY

FIND OUT MORE

cotton industry

COTTON
INDUSTRY

FIND OUT MORE

WOOL INDUSTRY

AUSTRALIAN WOOL INDUSTRY SNAPSHOT

PRODUCTION FACTS

  • Sheep are big business in Australia. We are the leading producer of wool in the world, accounting for around 25 per cent of world production.
  • The gross value of Australian wool is $2.9 billion.
  • There are 3.1 sheep for every person in Australia.
  • Australia produces eighty per cent of the world’s fine Merino wool and the major export market for our wool is China.
  • The first Merinos in Australia produced about 1.5 kilograms of wool per fleece. Today’s Merinos can grow a fleece of more than 8kg. This is as a result from better breeding and more sustainable grazing methods i.e. producing more from the same animals and land.

ABOUT MERINO WOOL

  • Merino wool is a natural fibre that is soft to touch and comfortable to wear. It keeps you warm in winter and cool in summer. Wool is stain resistant, odour resistant and has natural anti-static properties. Woollen products are easy to care for.
  • Wool is used to make clothing and textiles, furnishings and insulation.
  • Wool is a renewable natural resource — it’s not only soft against the skin, but gentle on the planet.
  • Roughly, 70% of the sheep in Australia are pure-bred Merinos. The Merino is the most common breed found in Australia because it suits the environment and is a dual-purpose breed. This means it can produce both wool and meat.
  • A professional modern shearer can shear about 140 to 180 sheep a day (a shearer using the old hand shears might have shorn about 80 to 120 sheep a day).
  • To manage diseases and pests in their flocks, wool producers vaccinate, drench, control lice and flies, rotate their animals through paddocks and use selective breeding techniques.
  • The Woolmark brand was created in 1964 and is the world’s best known textile fibre brand. The value of the brand is well established the world over in the apparel, interior textiles and home laundry sectors.
  • In 2014, the Woolmark is celebrating 50 years in existence!
  • The Woolmark brand provides consumers with guaranteed fibre content and an assurance of quality. Since its creation, the Woolmark brand has been applied to over 2 billion garments.

INTERESTING FACTS

  • An average Merino wether can produce up to five kilograms of wool each year.
  • You can estimate the age of a sheep by its teeth.
  • Sheep only have front teeth in their lower jaw, but have molars at the back on both their top and bottom jaw.
  • It’s not uncommon for ewes (female sheep) to give birth to twins, and even triplets.
  • The first mechanical handpiece in Australia was used during 1887 — before that shearers used large hand shears (like big scissors). Human hair grows about 10mm per month and wool grows about 6mm per month.
  • The natural oil in wool (lanolin) coats each fibre and helps give the fleece its unique insulation properties.
  • It wasn’t until 3500 BC that man learned to spin wool and the earliest sheep growers used their fleeces as a kind of tunic.

resources

FURTHER INFORMATION

Australian Wool Innovation

Australian Merino Wool

Resources on the web

Wool Industry Fast Facts

Learn About Wool

Meet our Australian wool farmers

Some Woolly questions for you to reflect on

  1. Properties Of Wool
  2. Different Sheep Breeds And The Uses For Their Wool
    • Not all sheep are created equal! Some sheep are bred for their wool, some for meat, and some for both. Did you know some are even kept to be milked?
    • Which sheep produce which types of wool, and what is it best suited to?
  3. Where Do Sheep Live In Australia And Why Does This Environment Suit Them?
    Are Different Breeds Better Suited To Different Areas?
  4. Environmental Sustainability – How Do Woolgrowers Look After The Environment?
  5. Caring For Wool Garments
  6. Careers In The Wool Industry
    • You don’t have to be a woolgrower to have an awesome career in the wool industry – speak to some people with other jobs across the wool industry to find out why they love their work so much and how you can be involved!
    • Check out the AWI Learn About Wool Kit for some ideas
    • Speak to your Young Farming Champion
  7. Where Does Australia Sit In The World’s Wool Market?
    • We know Australia exports a lot of wool, but how much is it really?
    • What percentage of the world’s apparel wool does Australia produce?
  8. A Year In The Life Of A Sheep…
    • What does a sheep do the whole year? When does shearing take place? What about lambing?
    • Speak to local woolgrowers or your Young Farming Champion
    • Making More From Sheep www.makingmorefromsheep.com.au
  9. Wool 2050 – What Can be Done in the Future? What Other Uses are There for Wool?
    • Be creative! We want you to dream up some innovative ways you can see wool being used in the future…

COTTON INDUSTRY

HOW MUCH COTTON DOES SYDNEY CONSUME IN ONE DAY?

LETS FIND OUT TOGETHER - HOVER YOUR MOUSE OVER THE BANNER BELOW TO REVEAL THE STATISTICS!

420,858 kgs of

or 1,854 bales, which takes
170 hectares of land to produce.

AUSTRALIAN COTTON INDUSTRY SNAPSHOT

ABOUT COTTON

  • There are up to 1,250 cotton farms in Australia, roughly half in NSW and half in Queensland.
  • The major production area in NSW stretches south from the Macintyre River on the Queensland border and covers the Gwydir, Namoi and Macquarie valleys. In NSW cotton is also grown along the Barwon and Darling rivers in the west and the Lachlan and Murrumbidgee rivers in the south.
  • In Queensland, cotton is grown mostly in the south in the Darling Downs, St George, Dirranbandi and Macintyre Valley regions. The remainder is grown near Emerald, Theodore and Biloela in Central Queensland.
  • Cotton is mostly grown in the 400-800mm summer rainfall zone in Queensland and NSW, which means cotton crops can receive significant amounts of their water needs from rain during the growing season.
  • The industry directly employs 10,000 Australians in a non-drought year (source: Australian Grown Cotton Sustainability Report, 2014).
  • The cotton industry employs 15 times as many people as grazing and five times as many people as dryland cropping. (source: Stubbs Report, 2012).

THE AVERAGE AUSTRALIAN COTTON FARM

  • is family owned and operated.
  • directly creates jobs for 6-7 people.
  • is run by growers with an average age of 39.
  • grows 495 hectares of cotton, comprising 17% of the total farm area.
  • supplements cotton with other crops including wheat, chickpeas and sorghum, and many Australian cotton farmers also graze sheep and cattle.
  • dedicates 42% of farm area to native vegetation.

PRODUCTION FACTS

  • In an average year, Australia’s cotton growers produce enough cotton to clothe 500 million people.
  • Australia produces around 3% of the world’s cotton but is the third largest exporter. The major buyers of Australian cotton are currently China (68 percent), Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, Bangladesh and Japan (source: Australian Grown Cotton Sustainability Report, 2014).
  • The Australian cotton industry produced a record crop in 2011/2012, with more than 583,000 hectares planted. This area produced more than 5 million bales, with a total forecast value of close to $3 billion.
  • Australian irrigated lint yields are now the highest of any major cotton producing country in the world, being about three times the world average. This means Australia cotton growers produce more crop per drop.
  • The top 20% of Australian growers achieved yields of 12 bales/hectare in 2013 (source: Boyce Report, 2014). Average irrigated crop yields exceeded 10 bales/ha for the first time in 2008-09 and reached record levels in 2012-13 at 10.73 bales/ha - growing more cotton with the same amount of land (source: Australian Grown Cotton Sustainability Report, 2014). In the 2014-2015 season, some regions reported yields as high as 15 to 16 bales a hectare- well above of the 2013-14 average (ABC Rural, May 2015).
  • Most of this yield gain is attributed to seed technology.
  • For the past 10 years, the average annual amount of cotton lint produced in Australia was 641,806 metric tonnes (2,827,338 bales). Production reached a record high in 2011-12 at 1,215,870 metric tonnes (5.3 million bales) and a low in 2007-08 at 136,831 metric tonnes (600,000 bales). The five year average production quantity from 2009-2014 is 3.9 million bales.
  • Cotton is a major commodity, representing from 30 to 60 percent of the gross value of the total agricultural production in Australian regions where it is grown (source: Australian Grown Cotton Sustainability Report, 2014).
  • Cotton is one of Australia’s largest rural export earners and helps underpin the viability of more than 152 rural communities.
  • Australia uses 100% local seed. (source, ICAC, 2011).
  • Australia has an enviable reputation on the world market as a reliable supplier of very high quality cotton, and can command a premium price for this reason. Varieties from CSIRO’s cotton plant breeding program has improved yield, High Volume Instrument (HVI) classing quality and are showing superior textile performance attributes. (source: Cotton Conference Paper, Michael Bange and Robert Long, 2012).

BIG ACHIEVEMENTS

  • Australian irrigated lint yields are now the highest of any major cotton producing country in the world, being about three times the world average.
  • The Australian cotton industry has achieved a 40% increase in water productivity over the last decade. (source: Australian Grown Cotton Sustainability Report 2014).
  • Australia’s cotton growers have improved water use efficiency by 3-4% per year since 2003. (source: Third Australian Cotton Industry Environmental Assessment, September 2012).
  • Australian cotton growers have reduced their insecticide use by 89% over the last decade, with some crops not sprayed for insects at all.
  • Cotton growing has a better-than-neutral carbon footprint. Net on-farm emissions of greenhouse gases on cotton farms are negative because the cotton plants store more carbon than is released from production inputs used during growth.
  • The cotton industry uses an innovative system to support farmers adopt rigorous best practice standards. The myBMP (Best Management Practices) program has helped to deliver a responsible Australia cotton industry which is regarded as maintaining the world’s best practices and is seen as a model for change by other sectors of Australian agriculture.

resources

FURTHER INFORMATION

Cotton Classroom

Cotton Education Kit

Cotton Australia Website

The Australian Cotton Story Video (primary version)

The Australian Cotton Story Video (high school version)

How to Grow a Pair of Jeans

A Typical Cotton Season by Cotton Grower Bess Gairns

Resources on the web

Cotton Industry Fast Facts

Investigate the field to fabric process in Australia
How to Grow a Pair of Jeans
The Australian Cotton Story (primary version)
Visual Story of Cotton
Cotton Australia Website
Cotton Growers Blog

Past, Present and future of cotton production in Australia
The History of Cotton

A Life in Cotton (DVD for mid-senior secondary)
A Sustainable Cotton Industry
Fact Sheet – Research, technology and innovation

The Cotton Education Kit
The Australian Cotton Industry
Sustainable Cotton Production
Cotton and the environment
The Australian Cotton Story for high schools
Sustainability
ABC Report: Green Cotton
Australian Grown Cotton Sustainability Report 2014
Fact Sheet: Water
Fact Sheet: Practical Approaches to Water Use Efficiency
Fact Sheet: Cotton’s myBMP Environmental Program
Fact Sheet: Cotton and Biodiversity
Fact Sheet: Cotton and Climate Change

Research
Fact Sheet: Research, Technology and Innovation
A Sustainable Cotton Industry
Fact Sheet: Cotton and biotechnology
CSIRO - Cotton Research from seed to shirt
Interview a scientist – Contact Scientists in Schools to arrange to speak with a cotton scientist by emailing SIS.NSW@csiro.au
The Cotton Research and Development Corporation

Farming Futures
Drone crop checking

Self-steering tractor planting seed

3d Printing

Wearing and using cotton
Cotton as a Consumer Product
Cotton as a competitive commodity

Marketing Australian cotton to the world
Cotton Leads
Cotton Leads Further Information
The Australian Cotton Industry
A Sustainable Cotton Industry

Natural fibres have lost market share to synthetic fibres over the last 30 years. Explore, analyse and assess the clothing fibre consumption trends in your community.

Careers
Career Harvest
Cotton Industry Awards
Science Taking you Places
Cotton Industry Awards
Art4Agriculture
CSIROpedia-Telling the story of CSIROs achievements and achievers