What a total shambles every attempt to create some use for wool levy funds has been since the wool board stopped propping up auctions and evening out the the wool price for it's stakeholders.

Farmers know f*uck-all about where their product goes or why demand is created or dissipated. I'm a very practical man but when the auto gearbox fails on my car I take it to someone who knows.

If I try to do it myself and things go wrong, I'm simple enough to get angry and go looking for someone to blame. That's what the woolgrowers have managed to maintain for twenty years or so.

And we all know what happens to our smart brain when we are angry, right?

These wallies, collectively, have allowed their precious funds to be burnt up on hare-brained biotechnology schemes. Someone said "innovation" and they scrambled onto the bandwagon. Someone should have pointed out that a 1% chance to capture a new market with a new product is damnably expensive and not for those who can't afford to lose their money.

Someone should have asked "Why?"

They all lose sight of the simple fact that they produce a superb product that practically sells itself. But if you want to control the profits that flow back to you you need to control the channel: the auction system gave a rudimentary form of sell/withdraw control, but creating demand can easily be the most effective way to greater returns. Leaving promotion to those further down the channel means those who spent money promoting will expect to capture the rewards for themselves. There is no economic logic in expecting otherwise.

Wool is an incredible product that has evolved over millennia to protect a mammal that lives in temperate regions, doesn't shower or have access to dry cleaners.

The stuff has advantages that no amount of oil-based synthesis can duplicate as effectively or in combination with so many other factors. Amazingly, I have had the former Chairman of the Wool Board enthusiastically singing the praise of his polar fleece jacket to me. That pretty much sums up the psychological disconnect prevalent with woolgrowers.

Forgeting carpet, where the following principle is equally true, people always need clothes. Not all of them can afford them, and a tiny minority have the luxury of choosing what they wear and being able to pay for that choice.

Convincing a very small percentage of that tiny global minority that wearing garments that have advantages only occurring in wool will absorb almost all of our output and stabilise auction prices.

In future, highest quality contract growing has to be the national specialisation.

Merino NZ just made this work with a combination of shrewd politicking, quality product and business nous, in particular marketing skill.

When I read this sort of line: "must be lean and mean and under the firm control of the farmers it represents" I wince - what a recipe for disaster, blithe claptrap that carries the unmistakable hallmark of someone who doesn't know sh*t.

If the woolgrowers really want to see some improvement in their returns, and use their own money to do it instead of wasting it on whatever schemes some smooth-talker from Lincoln or Auckland comes up with, they ARE going to have to let go and trust the organisation that they select to create demand at the coalface.

NB, the coalface isn't where it's grown stupid. It's where it's sold.

I'd love to step in and advise them, but as far as collective intelligence goes, this industry is best characterised as a mob.