Woolgrower Nan Bray does things her own way – and it’s finally proving profitable

…but gave up her well-paid and prestigious job as the head of the CSIRO division of marine science in Hobart to take up farming. Her flock of superfine Saxon Merino sheep raised in the Midlands of Tasmania now produce some of the best wool in the world.

White Gum Wool knitting yarn is known worldwide for its quality, appealing to knitters who care about animal welfare and the environment. Part of her clip is also sold to Another Tomorrow, a New York fashion house that prides itself on only using fibre from animals that can live their natural life.

Meeting Nan is a delight. She is cheerful and a clear thinker, but you can hear a stubborn streak. When she was in her mid-forties, Nan bought the 330 hectare White Gum farm near Oatlands, an hour north of Hobart, and decided to run superfine Merinos, contrary to local wisdom. She freely admits that she knew next to nothing about farming but loved working sheepdogs, and she thought there must be a margin in wool, if you go by the cost of a woollen suit.

Nan describes herself as an outlier, and some farmers even think she is a bit mad because of her unconventional approach to farming, “but I’ve got used to that”. Nan does not dock her lambs’ tails, nor does she drench or mules her sheep. In addition, she does not use synthetic pesticides, herbicides or fertilisers. She runs the sheep as one mob and practises active shepherding. Her stocking rates are low, and she believes in ‘nutritional wisdom’: that sheep can learn to eat a nutritionally balanced diet with plenty of medicinal herbs.

It’s crutching time when I visit. So — after giving Pearl, one of her Border Collie sheepdogs, a quick pat — I head into the shearing shed to find it’s almost smoko. Over a cuppa, we chat about Nan’s decision to start farming and her less-than-conventional approach.

Why don’t you tail dock your sheep?

I’ve become a follower of behavioural ecologist Emeritus Professor Fred Provenza from Utah State University. He says that if you allow animals to get abundant feed, diversity in their diet and plenty of herbs, they will learn to self-medicate and stay healthy. They can fight off intestinal parasites so they do not scour, which means flystrike is not an issue. No scouring means there is no need to tail dock.

To get abundance, you’ve drastically reduced the stocking rate on the farm.

The combination of native and improved pastures provides plenty of energy and enough medicinal compounds to keep the sheep well-nourished and healthy. I graze them as one mob and practise active shepherding with my team of sheepdogs. It is a long, slow process, but I love the time in the paddock with the sheep and the dogs. After several years of becoming friends with my sheep, I decided to let them live out their natural lifetimes. I just didn’t want to put them on transport trucks any more.

Your first few years on the farm were tough; you were still working full time and travelling the world. How did you manage?

It was only with the help of Davey Carnes (Mr Dave, as I often call him) that I survived the early years. At 75 years old, he came out of retirement to support, guide and teach me about sheep and farming. He adamantly opposed mulesing so we’ve never done that. He taught me that animals have souls. They were more than grass-eating machines that produced wool. They were part of his family. There was a gentleness and ease in how he handled the sheep. There was empathy. It took a while to sink in but, eventually, I got there.

I checked all my crazy ideas with him, like leaving the babies with their mothers, leaving the tails on the lambs and allowing sheep to live out their natural life. We argued sometimes, but mostly he would support me. We were a team for 13 years until he retired (again) at 87.

I want to return to the nutrition story: how did Fred Provenza’s theory of nutritional wisdom change the way you graze your sheep? 

It began with a ewe called Alice. I named her after the Arlo Guthrie album Alice’s Restaurant, ‘where you can get anything you want’. Alice was sick. She’d lost a lamb and couldn’t walk, but wanted to live. So I bought a sheep walker and dragged her out into the paddock each day to stand up and feed. I watched her graze, and there was a particular order: first was lucerne, then chicory, plantain and clover; she would not touch the grass. Then she’d look at me as if to say, ‘Can we move now?’ I observed what she was doing, and she got better. I didn’t understand, but stored that knowledge.

A few years later, when I was on the point of giving up farming after three terrible years of drought, Alice’s behaviour started to make sense. It was about 2008. I fed animals in the paddock the first year and got them through, but no paddock was left. So the second year, I created a drought lot — a makeshift feedlot — and fed them full rations. It was backbreaking work. It was ruinously expensive, because it was an Australia-wide drought, so grain prices just kept going up. Unfortunately, the drought lot was on a slope, and when it finally did rain, the tractor slipped, and I took out a whole section of fence. So after eight months on feed and all the costs of keeping the sheep in good nick, I had no grass to show for it.

I just thought, ‘You know, this is not fun any more.’ It was one step forward and two steps back with regard to the landscape, animal health and the wool. I reached a point where I had to do something radically different or find a third career. It was then I remembered a DVD that a friend had loaned me: a series of lectures by Fred Provenza, who believes animals have an innate nutritional wisdom. So if you allow them to eat in a natural way, if you give them a choice, over time they will learn how to medicate themselves and stay healthy.

How did you train the sheep to graze like this?

Trial and error! Intellectually I knew what I was trying to do, but didn’t know how to achieve it. I had biodiversity and plenty of feed, but I had to train the sheep to know how to graze the pasture to get the best diet. Mothers will teach their babies, but I can tell you it is hard to teach the ewes and even harder to train the dogs and me.

In about 2014, I decided I wanted to run the sheep as one mob. Fred Provenza made me look at active shepherding, which involves moving the sheep through the landscape consciously and deliberately so they can discover, by trial and error, what plants are there and what those plants do for them. I found it challenging. First, I had to understand how sheep graze. Sheep want to walk uphill, and they want to walk into the wind, so you shouldn’t start the day by walking them downhill and downwind. That will only make them grumpy.

You have to be patient. First, you must move in sheep time, which is absolutely in the moment. Once I could do that, I conveyed that to the dogs with my body language and, eventually, the dogs learned to curl up and go to sleep while the sheep were grazing or resting in the middle of the day. I did that for about three years, three or four times a week, and developed a cohort of sheep that understood the grazing pattern and could pass it on to the rest of the flock. I plan to spend more time shepherding this winter.

Is there any hard evidence that active shepherding and the concept of nutritional wisdom make a difference to the sheep and wool quality?

Yes, by reducing stocking rates and giving them plenty of diversity and abundance, I cut out intestinal parasites and haven’t had to drench for over a decade. Second, my wool yield increased by 40 per cent, which is a phenomenal increase. You don’t get that with genetics. You get that by feeding them. Third, lambing percentages and fertility increased, and interventions in lambing fell. In addition, the quality of the wool improved. My wool averages 17 microns with a tensile strength of 50 plus, which is world class.

But did the economics stack up when you reduced sheep numbers?

Not really, but I was happier with the whole system, and that was when I decided to take more control, which has proven an enormous success. Initially, I was selling my greasy wool through the auction system, but got frustrated with being a price taker. So I decided to move up the supply chain, look into processing and direct marketing the end product. It took years, but eventually, I found Canterbury Woolscourers and Design Spun in New Zealand, who process my wool into yarn. I also sell greasy wool at a premium to Another Tomorrow.

So, underneath, you’re a bit of an entrepreneur. 

I guess I am an entrepreneur, just like my dad. But as it was with farming, I had no idea; however, knitters trust other knitters. They know a good product and spread the word. Social media was ramping up when I started White Gum Wool (WGW) in 2013, so I tapped into that.

I was about to receive my first batch of yarn, and ABC Landline was doing a story with me. The response was unbelievable. People love the idea of Australian yarn. They liked the story, and the clientele built itself. The only marketing I did was to include a sample card with each order. The rest of it happened by word of mouth.

Your superfine Merino yarn is at the elite end of the market (around $29 per 100 gram ball). How did you position yourself?

It’s an excellent margin once you have a market, and mine developed by word of mouth. Even before the pandemic, WGW was very popular. There is a new generation of knitters in their twenties, many young mothers with disposable income and time.

My website tells the story of WGW and day-to-day life on the farm, and I’m also active on Instagram sharing the experience of shepherding, with all it’s joys and frustrations. Marketing the wool is a side benefit: knitters love Instagram and seem to like the candid posts — videos as well as still shots — that I put on my Instagram feed. 

How many people buy your wool because of its animal-welfare and environmental certification?

It is hard to quantify, but the fact that it is ethically produced, soft, superfine, and beautiful to work with ticks all the boxes for the knitting community. 

What are your plans for the future?

I am 71 this year, and I want to go on doing this for as long as I physically and cognitively can. But I am thinking ahead to how I need to position the farm. The plan is to sell the entire clip to Another Tomorrow in New York every second year and in the other year I’ll keep the clip and have it processed and spun as WGW yarn in New Zealand. That combination works well for managing the running of the farm, the farm expenses, and having a bit of profit. 

As a going concern, I have bequeathed the farm to the Tasmanian Land Conservancy, so it will continue as a working farm to show there is another way to farm and that not all production has to be destructive of a landscape. Sometime in my eighties, I’ll probably turn much of the day-to-day work over to somebody else. But until then, hopefully I will be healthy and physically able to do what I’m doing.

What’s your message to Graziher readers?

First, there is a different way, a more nurturing way, to produce wool than the industry norm. That message is more for women involved in wool production, but who are not in the driver’s seat. My empathy with the animals often seems to resonate with them.

For knitters, the message is that some wools are so beautifully soft it is like wearing a cloud next to your skin. They are the antithesis of the scratchy jumper you wore as a child. Before I started the yarn business, I was selling my wool to Zegna, the Italian men’s suit company. I used to describe my yarn as Zegna suits made fluffy. You can have that luxury of a men’s suiting fabric if you find the right wool. And the best wool is superfine Merino.

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In this episode of Graziher’s Life on the Land podcast, The Shady Baker chats about her love of cooking and life on the family’s sheep station east of Broken Hill, New South Wales.