♪ (music) ♪
My name is Livia Firth,
and I'm on a mission to bring about a more beautiful future for fashion,
one that connects us with the people and places
that produce the clothes we wear.
My quest to unwrap this increasingly complex supply chain
has taken me all over the world,
exploring everything from factories to fibers.
Now my journey has led me here to Tasmania,
just off the southern coast of Australia.
I'm here to examine wool up close--
a fiber with a long history,
and I think an important future.
To meet wool producers in this extraordinary landscape
is a long-held ambition of mine.
I want to learn about the impact that wool has on the animals,
on the land, and its true effect on the environment.
My first stop is to meet local farmers, Matt and Vanessa Dunbabin.
The farm they manage has been in this family for seven generations.
We see ourselves as custodians.
We're the current custodians of the land, and we have all the generations
that had gone before and the ones that will come after us.
So we need to really care and nurture and look after the land
during our generation,
so that it'll still be there in another seven generations' time.
(Vanessa) Because our property is so heavily forested,
we've put a lot of effort into conserving
a lot of the forest types that we have here.
So we have 2,000 hectares of nature conservation reserve.
We have our foreshores fenced off so that they can grow.
A lot of the properties are looked after just for its nature conservation value,
rather than farming.
So the small parts of the farm
that are productive and are good for farming,
we actually work those,
so that they can produce wool and be productive,
so that we can actually care for and manage all their bushland.
(Matt) All of Tasmania's native animals are represented here on the farm.
So 80% of the property is bush.
We're managing more native-- many more native animals
than we are sheep.
(Livia) I knew I was going to visit the frontline of wool production,
but what I hadn't appreciated is that Tasmania
is spearheading an ambitious program of landscape-scale restoration.
Farmers like Matt and Vanessa are an integral part of that program.
To them, protecting the Tasmanian devil and indigenous flora and fauna
goes alongside raising their sheep and, of course, their brood of children.
(boy) Well, I think we might need to move a bit.
I'll lift you up.
(Matt) We press the wool into bales, so there's some bales over there,
so the fleeces get put in and pressed up.
- It hasn't been trod down yet, so it's-- - (boy) Yeah.
(Livia) Is that the process?
It's so cool. (Matt chuckles)
- (Vanessa) And so you can fit more in. - (Matt) Yeah, otherwise it builds up.
(laughter)
(Vanessa) Who has a place while you jump?
We have been so divorced from where-- who makes the clothes,
where the materials come from.
And obviously, in terms of materials,
most of what we're wearing today is all either polyester or synthetic.
There's no natural material like wool.
People don't really know about it anymore.
No, and-- wouldn't have touched a sheep and seen the wool in its raw state
like we have here.
Yeah, all of that sort of thing, yeah.
So anybody that wants to come and help tread down the wool at shearing time,
they're more than welcome to do that.
(Matt) Because, as growers, we are looking after animals,
and every animal doesn't have a name,
but they're all individual and you manage sheep as individuals,
and you're doing-- you're handling them a lot over their lifetime,
and you're looking after them and shearing them,
and you've got this wonderful product and that's an individual thing.
(Livia) Alright, so you take it from the two sides to there.
And then we go there.
(Matt) And hold on to those bits. Big flick.
The sheep are bred to produce this soft fine wool
which will get mostly used in lightweight woven fabrics.
So it'll end up being processed and woven and weaved
into a lightweight yarn which will be fine wool suits.
And then, how does it happen?
So this is what we call the board.
So the sheep are in pens out the back, there's no sheep in here now.
And the shearers will bring a sheep out to the front here
and then they have a handpiece which is just a set of clippers
and shear the wool off each sheep, so it's a very individual tactile job.
Each sheep takes about three minutes or so.
And then the shorn sheep is let go, and then the wool comes off there
and onto the table.
(Livia) Rodrick O'Conner is another local farmer, managing a farm
that has been in his family since the early 1800s.
I wanted to know about the impact the wool growing process
has on the animals themselves.
(man) That's what we're after.
(Rodrick) Beautifully [inaudible], marked, lovely.
- Do you see how it's even? - (Livia) Yeah.
(man) So we try and keep the feed constant and all the--
(Rodrick) That's broken.
When you shear them, who does the actual shearing?
(man) Professional shearers, so they come in.
(Rodrick) This bit comes off.
And this bit of wool here,
that all the pizzle and the bits and the pieces come off.
The best wool is here, all the way along there.
And then there's the back wool, so that has to all be separated.
I suppose that you have to do very carefully not to hurt the sheep.
- With the shearing? - Yeah.
Oh, absolutely, yeah, I mean there are training classes
and all sorts of things to prevent any injury or any cutting.
(Livia) But there is another animal welfare impact
that astonished the reputation of the wool industry,
and that is mulesing.
This practice of trimming folds of skin around the hindquarters of the sheep
to prevent flystrike
has put many wool producers at odds with consumers and some retailers.
If you're given time, alternatives will appear.
The trouble is everybody wants an immediate answer
or an immediate fix.
They said, "This has got to stop and it's all bad."
But the industry just can't move that quickly.
You have to breed traits into animals, to eventually try and initially make sure
that that area is properly tighter on the skin,
so you could actually naturally do it, but that could take 20 years.
Or you can do it and then use pain relief and other drugs
to make sure the animal's fine.
If I see four or five animals out of the 12 or 14,000
that we either treat here, dead in a year, that's all I'd see from this process,
but I could see hundreds or thousands if they were left untreated
for flystrike in a bad year.
So I think putting it into context, are there solutions?
Yes, there are. I think the industry is doing something about that.
Ideally, at the end of the day, will I like to stop using? Yes.
But it's going to take me a long time to get there.
(Livia) But even the mulesing debate
does not apply to all wool production here.
Some of the herds in this landscape branch over such a vast acreage
that they're not prone to flystrike at all.
So what is the environmental impact of sheep in large numbers
across such a vast area?
I spoke to Sebastian Burgess who heads up the environmental initiative,
Greening Australia.
I think Australia is so well known for growing wool
and some of the finest wool in the world comes from this landscape.
But in recognizing that people are part of the landscape,
we need to have a balance between people and nature.
The way I see all the land and water management
is people management.
We've let things deteriorate across the world
with pollution and climate change, and so on.
So we need to lay some action to reverse that decline.
One of our targets here for messaging is threatened species.
And has this sheep farming compromised that?
Or do they live together happily?
They can live together.
(Sebastian) So what we're replicating in this landscape
is an open grassy woodland where the native mammals, the birds,
can coexist with the productive system.
We can get good coexistence of native vegetation and sheep farming.
We can hit a sustainable system where we can maintain a balance
between productivity and good environmental outcomes.
(Livia) But despite such sustainable progress,
the livelihoods of wool producers are under threat
as wool loses its market share to cheaper synthetic fibers.
Confusingly, eco-claims are increasingly made
on behalf of synthetics.
I asked Dr. Beverly Henry, one of the world's leading experts
on the ecological impact of wool,
to help me understand some of these claims.
Wool is one of the most environmentally low impact fibers there are.
That's because sheep are often produced on natural pastures.
The landscape is virtually in its natural state in many cases.
Whereas, with plant-based fibers, you have to plow up the land,
you lose a lot of soil carbon.
You don't have trees in the environment that sequester carbon
and also help to turn over soil carbon and build it.
Over the last 40 years, there's been a lot of research
and a lot of investment in understanding how to produce wool more sustainably.
And this is showing fruits in better production systems
that don't damage the landscape.
And that has really added to the efficiency and the sustainability
of wool production, particularly here in Australia.
(Rodrick) If you take the view that you don't own it
and you're a custodian-- it makes it a lot easier.
Being a custodian gives you the freedom, and to say,
"What should I do?"
And what does your heart really tell you that you should do?
It took me quite a few years to get there, I've always had that bent.
But it probably wasn't till about 15 years ago, I said no.
Balancing production as the prime motive,
it was just too hard.
Droughts or floods, or whatever, other things came on by,
and it'd take too long to recover, so there's got to be a better way.
So, which really isolated the place, and I said,
"Okay, where can we grow our best production,
that the ground can sustain that on a continuous basis,
or a rotational basis?"
And then what can't, let's work out what we should be--
what stock we should be putting there.
So basically, we halved our numbers, halved our [life zone].
My first thought was,
"If I do that, how am I going to make any money?"
Well, like most things, surprisingly,
the animals were bigger, they grew more wool,
so it wasn't as bad as we all thought.
And that's just got progressed further and further.
So now we're looking at how we can continue to [raise sheep],
reduce numbers, but get more production out of individual units.
And you can only do that if you look after your land
and if you look after the animal.
Do you think there is also a bit of a myth about wool
that is perpetrated by the fact that the fast fashion industry
wouldn't be able to survive on wool garments
because it will be too expensive?
The growth in the use of synthetics over the last 30 or 40 years
has meant that they-- and the cheapness of them--
has meant that the number of garments produced has grown exponentially.
But wool has a longer life, it's recycled more often.
If you have fewer garments that last longer
and of a higher quality,
you do more for the sustainability of the whole fashion industry
than sort of buying new garments every season
or several garments that you probably don't even wear,
and then throwing them out.
(Livia) When it comes to supply chains, there is not one solution
to the growing ecological pressures we face across our world.
There's no perfect fiber,
no silver bullet.
But what I found here in Tasmania are producers of fine wool
were not just taking a long-term view,
but are deeply committed to landscape restoration,
and who see themselves as much as stewards
of this natural habitat as producers.
Above all, they're letting the planet set the limit.
(Matt) Yes, everybody needs to wear, most people need to wear clothing.
So you've got to wear something.
So the question is,
"What are you going to wear and how's it made?"
We think wool, as a fiber, has got such a great story
and it's such a great use of our landscape,
and we can manage the landscape and all the valleys of the landscape
whilst also earning a living here and producing a beautiful product.
(Livia) Each time I explore stories from producers
and how these precious fibers end up in my wardrobe,
I'm inspired all over again
to choose well and cherish every item that I buy.
♪ (inspiring music) ♪
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