This is the time of year strapping lads pose the usual question of ….`Been anywhere nice on your holidays then…’ to a succession of ladies, and a few gentleman who pass through their impromptu salons.
The trouble is that there aren’t really enough of these ovine barbers to go around, and any farmer who finds a good reliable contract shearer is best advised to treat them with love and care, to cherish them.
Like so many jobs on the land shearing isn’t that well paid… unless you’re really fast at it. But you have to be fast and careful, it’s bad form to remove the leg of lamb whilst the sheep still needs to use it. But even then the pay is only about £1.25 per animal and you have to do about 30 an hour to make decent money.
Traditionally much of the work has been done by gangs of New Zealanders, but since some sections of the tabloid press declared that all foreigners are bad, and all they want to do is come over here stealing our women, taking our jobs, and destroy our culture, HMG has been getting sniffy about Johnny Foreigner doing just that. Last year infact there was a proposal to increase the paperwork burden on these peripatetic `wool-dressers', although fortunately the government saw sense and withdrew the plan. Hostility to migrant workers is having an impact on farming, and especially food production.
The result is that crops go unpicked, as those who can come here without limit…i.e. the Poles and the Hungarians find they can now earn much better money at home, don’t have to leave their families and don’t have to live in a dilapidated caravan in the arse end of Herefordshire for months on end, and have a friendlier welcome from the locals.
Meanwhile with the pound crashing through the floor compared with other currencies a summer spent in Britain relieving pommie sheep of their wool isn’t that attractive, and there are precious few UK youngsters who fancy this backbreaking work.
So there’s a major drive by the British Wool Marketing Board to get home-grown talent trained up. As farmers get older and their offspring are exploring less arduous lines of work, the situation’s getting pretty urgent.
When the sun’s out you can just take your jumper off…. If you're a sheep, that’s not an option… you have to get someone to do it for you, otherwise you’ll just have to find a shady tree to sit under, and hope that the flies don’t attack you and lay their eggs in your wool and give you sheep scab.
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