A large crowd of obviously interested spectators watched New Zealanders shearing sheep, in part of a programme organised by the New Zealand Wool Board in Osaka, Japan at Expo 70.
This is a sign of the times, New Zealand looking to Japan as a market.
The wool producer starts it off.
The shepherd gets his share, the shearer, shed hand and the classer gets theirs.
So, too does the driver of the truck who transports the wool from shed to store.
Store staff, stock and station agencies, transport from store to ship and from ship to market; they are all in a chain that depends on wool being grown, shorn, transported, sold, and eventually manufactured into garments, fabrics, and carpets.
Take wool out of the New Zealand economy and all that chain would feel some influence of slump in their incomes unless some other commodity is on hand to take its place.
It is not easy to purchase land these days, far easier to obtain leases and the amount of rent payable for those leases caused eyebrows to be raised at the recent inter-provincial conference of federated farmers in Wanganui.
From investigations I have made, it can safely be said that the number of leases affected in areas close to Wanganui has been a record.
“The greatest number in my lifetime,” a Wanganui farmer said to me, and he has been farming for 30 years or more.
In most cases the price asked for the land is too high, beyond the capital resources of the intending buyer, and outside a figure that would be approved by responsible lending institutions.
Time was when a dairy farmer, owner of a small area which was soundly economic in the old days, could easily find a buyer on retirement.
The land was sold at the price asked and that was that.
He asks $300 per acre which the State Advances Department could rule to be too high, and rightly so.
Yet a neighbour could drive his stock from that locality two miles to graze on land he has rented at $22 per acre. A share milker can no longer make good wages on less than 120 cows.
Grain growing
Grain growers are on the look out for the type of land that is traditionally used for dairying.
They invest substantial capital in the modern machinery they must have or must be prepared to pay on contract for sowing and harvesting.
In many cases owners of land have had to substantially reduce their original price.
One case for bare land not far from Wanganui, the price asked was $350 an acre, a sale effected at $200 an acre.
But in the backcountry, where access is not good, land is unlikely to be sold at the value placed upon it by the government.
One only has to look at advertisements to see that land is available and some of it quite close to Wanganui at prices ranging from $160 an acre to $500 an acre. But this seems to be the season for leasing rather than buying land.