"We had the same with the lamb a few years ago, when everyone went nuts about lamb and the following year it went cold."
There was a limit end users could pay for wool and there was stiff competition from other fibres. New Zealand had suffered from "an influx" of imported synthetic carpets.
Most buyers at the auction would market it internationally, with about half going to China.
Auction buyers had visited Napier wool stores and viewed samples of the lots, each coming with detailed reports of technical specifications.
This week's sale was the last for the second-shear wool season. Most farmers shear in the spring to get heavy wool off sheep before the demands of lambing and hot weather.
Of the wool that goes to China more than half of it is greasy - unscoured. Scouring cleans the wool and is used by buyers to combine smaller lots into a uniform larger amount.
Australia has lost its wool scouring industry and consolidation of New Zealand's will see the two main players combine, subject to Commerce Commission approval.
A draft determination approved the merger of Cavalier Wool Holdings and New Zealand Wool Services International's operations.
About half of the firms' combined staff are in Hawke's Bay. Cavalier is New Zealand's largest scouring operator based in Clive, Napier, and Timaru.
Australia-owned NZWSI operates wool scours in Napier and Christchurch and is New Zealand's largest exporter of wool. The merger would ultimately give Cavalier an industry monopoly but the anti-trust regulator's draft determination said public benefits outweighed any loss of competition.
Mr Maunder said New Zealand needed a scouring industry because manufacturers throughout the world didn't have ready access to wool scours.
The amalgamated company would be big "but a far cry from where it was 10 years ago" because of the fall in New Zealand sheep numbers.
Improved wool prices were not enough to make farmers swing back to wool, he said.
"A lot of farmers are actually just growing grass for dairy industry - like a dairy support system. It takes a quite a bit of time to revert back into sheep and can be quite expensive but it may be an option for some of them particularly if the dairy prices continue low for a number of years."
Federated Farmers meat and fibre chairman Rick Powdrell said it was a possibility if lamb prices also improved. Many were already thriving.
"The guys that are farming sheep very well are making good money - those top 5 or 10 per cent are actually doing it very well."
Primary Wool Co-operative chairman and Waipukurau farmer Bay de Lautour said the sustained wool price into autumn was heartening. The days of farms converting to sheep were not far off if current trends continued, including low dairy prices.
"I would have been laughed at a year ago," he said. "There are a lot of sheep farms that were offering dairy support are losing that. A lot of dairy farmers are cutting down their numbers so they can support the stock on-farm."
Primary Wool Co-operative was formed in 1974 to increase the returns for wool growers by capturing the value chain.
It is a 50 per cent owner of Elders Primary Wool, with the other half recently returning to New Zealand hands following its purchase by the South Island-based Carr Group. From September, the company's name will be CP Wool.
It has an export arm, a yarn factory and its Just Shorn brand of carpet yarn earns a royalty in Australia and the United States.
"You can report me as being optimistic about the future," Mr de Lautour said.
