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Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

BusinessJuly 6, 2022

How Geoff Ross’s controversial sheep station is helping a UK startup ‘reinvent knitwear’

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

Behind the headline-grabbing Vivaldi, white paint and drop-chute mattresses is an ambitious plan to take high grade, carbon-negative merino wool to the world.

Think of sheep’s wool, and there’s a good chance you imagine a scratchy patchwork quilt, a hand-knitted scarf or a tight fitting Icebreaker. It’s probably fair to say that sheep’s wool is unlikely to bring to mind Vogue Magazine, carbon-negative supply chains or a grey-bearded Tom Hardy.

Edzard van der Wyck, the co-founder of Sheep Inc, the UK knitwear brand that supplied Hardy’s jersey – or “jumper” in Brit-speak – is looking to change that. Launched in October 2019, his company claims to be the world’s first carbon-negative fashion brand.

According to the World Bank, our wardrobes are responsible for 10% of annual global carbon emissions – more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. What’s more, if the fashion industry maintains its current trajectory, emissions are expected to rise more than 50% by 2030.

Van der Wyck became all too aware of the industry’s dark side at an online fashion outlet he founded prior to Sheep Inc. “I really had to operate within the industry to realise how bad it was,” he says. When it came time to found Sheep Inc, he and business partner Michael Wessely decided to start from scratch, focusing on sustainability and transparency in all areas of their business.

A row of models of differing ethnicities and genders wearing colourful knitwear. A sheep is in the foreground.
A Sheep Inc promo image (Image: Supplied)

The most fundamental problem they saw was that manufacturers typically have very little understanding of where their products actually come from, meaning even if they wanted to source sustainably, they wouldn’t know where to start. A 2021 KPMG survey found that of the more than 200 clothing industry executives questioned, less than 20% said they had full visibility across their supply chain.

In looking for the right material for their business, merino wool quickly became the number one contender. “It’s a good technical material, it’s very soft, it doesn’t itch and it doesn’t need to be washed as regularly so it has a long lifecycle,” van der Wyck says.

“The only problem is that sheep produce methane.”

That’s a big problem. On the hunt for a solution, van der Wyck rang up the New Zealand Merino Company and asked to talk with their most sustainable merino farms. They put him in touch with Omarama, Middlehurst and Lake Hāwea Stations, his current suppliers.

Geoff and Justine Ross at Lake Hāwea Station (Photo: Supplied)

Serial entrepreneurs Geoff and Justine Ross – the couple behind 42 Below vodka, Ecoya candles and Trilogy skincare – bought the 6,500-hectare Lake Hāwea Station near Wānaka in 2019, with the aim of using their business know-how to make the station the vanguard of woolly innovation.

The couple hit the headlines last week when a Country Calendar episode on their unconventional farming practices attracted a huge response on social media. Or to put it more bluntly, it made farmers the length and breadth of the country very mad.

So what exactly are the Rosses trying to achieve? Wool production at Lake Hāwea Station is special, Geoff Ross says, because of what he calls his “three platforms”. First, the farm is carbon negative – it removes more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits. That’s quite an accomplishment for a station that runs 10,000 merino sheep and a couple of hundred Angus beef cattle. They’ve achieved it through a variety of methods, primarily through planting trees – a lot of them. So far they’ve planted 16,000 native trees, “and that’s just the beginning,” says Ross. Their goal is to plan a total of 100,000 – 10,000 a year for 10 years.

According to Ross’s calculations, the trees and reforesting gullies they’ve already established sequester over twice as much as the 2,500 tonnes of greenhouse gas the farm emits per year, 78% of which is methane produced by livestock. As with their tree-planting goal, their carbon sequestration goal is ambitious: 10 times what they emit.

The second “platform” is a focus on regenerative farming, in particular pastoral biodiversity. Some of the Rosses’ pastures have as many as 30 different seed types, each with a different role to play in promoting the biodiversity of the land. A greater variety of plant life attracts a greater variety of birds and insects, ultimately enriching the soil and improving the overall quality of the farm and its livestock.

Lastly, the station has been making impressive inroads in animal welfare. One example of this are its efforts to shake up the shearing model, the focus of that controversial Country Calendar episode. The Rosses’ relatively minor alterations – painting sheds white, playing classical music and cushioning a sheep’s fall down the drop chute – were what grabbed the headlines, but it’s a change in the way their shearers get paid that could be truly transformational. Rather than the typical per-sheep model, shearers at Lake Hāwea are rewarded according to a metric that considers how sheep are treated at traditionally high-stress points along the shearing journey. The aim is to promote the welfare of the sheep while making it easier on the shearers too.

This is all exactly what Sheep Inc’s van der Wyck was after.

Sheep Inc co-founders Edzard van der Wyck (left) and Michael Wessely (Photo: Supplied)

From the South Island of New Zealand, the Lake Hāwea purebred merino wool travels to Italy to be spun before heading to a solar-powered and family-run factory in Portugal, where it’s made into a variety of colourful designer clothes.

Each item of clothing comes with a “connected dot”, an NFC-enabled tag that allows the buyer to trace their particular garment all the way back to where it came from in New Zealand. A scan tells you the CO2 impact of your hoodie, t-shirt or beanie – a net negative, thanks to their carbon sequestration and supply chain initiatives. You can even connect to a sheep on the farm, which you’re welcome to name and keep track of.

Van der Wyck says the connected dot was important to include because it makes the fiendishly complicated issue of carbon calculations easy for their customers to understand. And what about the opportunity to meet your sheep? Fashion is an inherently “emotional industry”, van der Wyck says, and the feature allows for a deeper “connection with the product”. It attaches the consumers to the history of their clothing.

Asked whether Sheep Inc will be in a position to source wool from somewhere closer to the UK in the coming years, both van der Wyck and Ross say it isn’t likely. There are particular features of New Zealand’s environment that suit negative-carbon farming, Ross says, and the dry climate and high altitude of the Southern Alps one of the best places in the world to farm merino sheep. The region is also excellent for growing trees, making the carbon sequestering process relatively uncomplicated.

As he fills up the car for a Matariki weekend outing, a snow-capped Mount Maude and the pristine Lake Hāwea behind him, Geoff Ross says he ought to stop rambling and get off the phone – his family are looking at him funny. A week before he and his wife find themselves at the centre of the biggest (and some say silliest) media story of the day, he has one last thing he wants to tell me: “The Lake Hāwea Station, New Zealand Merino and Sheep Inc model is the way forward for New Zealand agriculture.”

“It’s better for the planet and it’s better for farmers’ pockets.”


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Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

BusinessJuly 5, 2022

The great electric car conundrum

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

Rising petrol prices have many wondering if now is the time to go electric. But even at $3 a litre, one expert suggests it might be better to hold off.

What’s your tipping point? Is it $3.50 a litre? $4? An unthinkable $5? At some point, New Zealand’s record-breaking petrol prices force each of us to face a future that doesn’t involve petrol. Yet, with rising inflation and grocery prices pushing up the cost of living, upgrading a vehicle isn’t a realistic option for many. “I would love an EV, but I can’t afford one and don’t see that happening anytime soon,” says Stewart Sowman-Lund, The Spinoff’s live updates editor and resident petrol price watchdog. “For now, I’m destined to keep throwing hundreds of dollars at my shitbox petrol car until the government steps in and intervenes further to bring petrol prices back down below the $3 mark.”

That doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon. Petrol is making people angry. Ridiculous things are happening. A weekend convoy formed as angry drivers drove their cars in protest. A pointless petition has been started by one Dannevirke resident. Log jams of drivers at petrol stations are predicted when the $0.25c tax break ends in August, reports Stuff. Then there’s this: over the weekend, my local West Auckland petrol station didn’t even bother posting the price of 91 to customers. Are prices really so bad they won’t tell us what they are?

petrol
Petrol prices in West Auckland: 91 to infinity. (Photo: Arlo Schulz)

By now, you know your options. You can walk or cycle more often. You can grin and bear it. (Some appear to be turning to crime.) Or, if you can afford it, you can upgrade your car. Tesla. Mitsubishi. Nissan. Toyota. Lexus. BMW. All of these brands offer vehicles that can get you from A to B and C using far less petrol, or no petrol at all. We’re talking about electric vehicles, both hybrids (a petrol-powered vehicle with bonus battery power for savings), PHEVs (plug-in EVs that have both petrol and electric options) and full EVs. It’s the future: to cut emissions, the government wants 30% of the country’s light vehicle fleet electrified by 2035. Sooner or later, everyone’s going to have to get one.

Yet, like Stewart says, electric vehicles aren’t cheap. Even with the maximum clean car rebate of $8625, a brand new electric vehicle could set you back $50,000 or more. If you’re looking at second-hand options, electric vehicles hold their value. Another workmate told me she recently purchased a second-hand 2017 Leaf for $17,500 (minus the discount of $3,450). Pro: it gets her around 120km per charge. Con: she’ll never take it out of Auckland because she suffers range anxiety. She’s kept her petrol car that’s more than a decade old and has a one-star safety rating for those trips.

If you’re making yourself a pros and cons list yourself, no one would blame you. But, here in 2022, it probably still looks a little light on the pros, and heavy on the cons.

  • Pros: Big petrol savings, low carbon emissions, cool car, smug factor.
  • Cons: Expensive initial outlay, range anxiety, import wait times can be ridiculous, increased power bills at home, most charging stations suck.

But there’s another factor at play. Is electric vehicle technology good enough yet to warrant getting one? “I’m keeping my vehicle for three years and then I’m moving to some form of electrical,” says Terry Collins. He’s the principal policy advisor for the AA, and as you’d expect, he’s done his own research. In three years time, he believes EV battery power will be greatly improved, even competing with a full tank of petrol for range. “Price parity is going to hit around the middle of this decade … They’ll be a lot better car in three years than what they are today.”

You can see that change happening already in Mitsubishi’s Outlander Phev, a popular family car in Aotearoa that, if you purchased the 2020 or 2021 model, would get you about 50-odd kilometres of electric travel before the engine flipped over to petrol. But those that waited to purchase the 2022 model received a car with upgraded battery power that gets them around 85 kilometres before turning to petrol. That’s a vast improvement in just 12 months.

Even if you want one now, getting your hands on an EV can be difficult, with wait times of a year or more reported by several car brands. “We’re saying to customers, you’re into the first quarter of next year,” says Andrew Davis, Toyota New Zealand’s general manager. He’s got a waitlist of 1,000 people wanting a new Lexus, Toyota’s brand of luxury electric vehicle that comes in a range of models one of which will get you 350 kilometres on a single charge. “We’re having to talk to customers really early. You have to think about your next one now, because we might not be able to supply it for a year.”

So, should you take the plunge? Don Rowe recently toured the country in a high-end BMW EV to file regular reports out on the road. It was a fascinating trip that took in characters from around Aotearoa, so I asked him that question. “I think the technology and charging infrastructure is at a point where EVs are a vastly superior option, but it is far from a panacea for those most vulnerable to high fuel prices,” Don says. “Recommending whānau purchase an EV when they can barely fill their tank is ridiculous. Cheap charging costs are irrelevant if you don’t have the capital to upgrade in the first place.”

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