Cozy Crops co-founders Kieran and Jess White started the business after looking at how they could utilise the wool waste from their sheep farm.
Cozy Crops co-founders Kieran and Jess White started the business after looking at how they could utilise the wool waste from their sheep farm.
Jess White, co-founder of Cozy Crops, talks to Tom Raynel about her transition from sheep milk to wool waste, and how wool can be used throughout your garden.
We were milking sheep at the time. I don’t know if you’ve covered any of the sheep milking in New Zealand, I’ll save you the trouble of investigating that one, it’s essentially turned to custard.
We were doing that and part of looking after about 1500 sheep at the time is they need to be shorn. Milking sheep don’t have high-quality wool, and for most New Zealand wool, there’s just not much of a market for it. It’s not worth enough to even sell it, it doesn’t even cover the cost of shearing.
So we were looking at ways we could utilise all of this wool we had. I was already using the wool in my own garden, around fruit trees and in the vege gardens and things. It’s one of those things that people have used on farms for years, they’ve looked at ways to use waste resources like that.
After a couple of seasons of using it ourselves and noticing what a difference it makes, I was like, “Okay, how can we turn this into something that’s a little bit more user-friendly for people who don’t have, say 1500 sheep on their back doorstep?”
All production for Cozy Crops, from sourcing to pelletising, is done on Jess and Kieran White's farm in Ōtorohanga.
Why are they good for your garden?
We use unwashed wool, so that’s how Cozy Crops is quite different from the other wool products you’ll see on the market. You’ve got a mixture of the dags and the clean wool so you are getting the manure, essentially, which is offering all the fertiliser components.
The wool itself holds on to moisture about 25 times its weight. When you mix that either on top of the soil or into the soil, it holds moisture in and around all of your crops, plants, vegetables and things that you’re growing. So it reduces the water loss from the soil but also the amount that you actually have to water it.
Then in terms of soil structure, as wool breaks down over time, it brings nutrients into the soil. Things like nitrogen, mostly, but it also helps to open up the structure of the soil so rather than getting really compressed gardens over time, it helps to aerate it and it allows all the worms and bugs to make their way through the soil as well.
It also does help to keep the slugs and snails away. Once the wool goes through the palletiser, it’s broken up quite fine and they don’t like crawling on the spiky fibres of the wool.
Cozy Crops co-founders Jess and Kieran White started the business after looking at how they could utilise the wool waste from their sheep farm.
How are the pellets made?
All production for Cozy Crops is done on-farm in Ōtorohanga, we have about 85 hectares. So it’s all 100% in-house, sourced, made, packaged, everything. Getting the pelletising machine into the country was relatively easy, but it was definitely more of an art to actually produce a pellet than we first realised. We thought, you know, you just chuck some wool in and have at it.
There is a bit of an art in getting it right and getting the right formulation of the cleaner wool to the daggy wool. On the website, we’ve got all of the nutrient profiles, and that’s an average across the product range.
How big a problem is wool waste?
Quite a bit. If you talk to any sheep farmer, they’re going to have a fair bit of wool that is just going to waste. They might be selling it, but they’re selling it at a loss from what it costs to shear. A lot of sheep farmers are really doing it tough, the cost of raising the animals versus what you get back, it’s not even a break-even exercise for a lot of them at the moment.
It depends on the type of sheep you’ve got. If you’ve got top-quality merino sheep, they’re going to fetch a better price for their wool, but for most people who are just raising sheep for either milk or for meat, that wool is pretty much worthless, so it’s all considered waste. A lot of people are just putting it into a pit, some people are trying to spread it on paddocks to try to improve soil quality, but for a lot of people, it’s just stacked up in a barn somewhere.
Cozy Crops pellets work in multiple ways to help your garden, from fertilising the soil to retaining moisture and adding needed nutrients.
What would be your advice to other budding entrepreneurs wanting to start their own business?
Just do it. I think everybody always has that fear of, is everyone going to think it’s a dumb idea? Is it going to fail? We had that fear as well, thinking, “Oh God, are people really gonna buy wool and sheep manure in a box?“.
Sometimes with those silly ideas, it’s worth just trialling it even on a small scale to see if it is commercially viable and then just running with it.
Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business and retail.
