[Lesley Silvester]

I recently acquired 6 Suffolk x Texel fleeces from my local farmer. He's not sure how much to charge for them. Another farmer suggested £4 per fleece and while I am obviously happy with this price, I don't want to cheat him by paying less than they are worth. I don't know how much he would get from the wool marketing board (or wherever they send them) and nor will he until he gets his cheque. Obviously he wants to charge more than the pittance they would give him.

The staple seems to be about 2 inches, maybe a little more in places and there is a reasonable amount of crimp. They are fairly clean, ie not too much vm.

I have just been online to see if I could get an idea of price but nowhere seems to be selling that breed. Does anyone have any idea how much I should pay him?

[BALLOCH]

I would say that is a good price and as much as he would prob get from the wool board,and u will be paying him straight away so he wont have to wait for his money

[SallyintNorth]

Balloch's right, most of the money from the Wool Board takes a year or more to arrive...   It's a complicated system and it is very hard to work out what they actually pay for a given clip; each payment contains the balance payment on the previous year's clip and an advance on the current year's clip.

We've just had the wool price schedule from them, in which it says that for 2012, which was a poor year, the average clip value was 86p/kg for Suffolk and 89p/kg for Texel.  A fleece from that sort of sheep will weigh what, 3kgs-ish? 

Our own clip, we estimate, will have fetched just about £1/kg, around £3/fleece.

If a farmer sells one or two fleeces to handspinners, then £5/fleece for this type of fleece would be fine.  A little more than s/he'd get from the Wool Board, as it should be - it takes a bit of organising, assessing and taking out nice fleeces while clipping, I can tell you!   

If the farmer sells more than a very few to handspinners, then the removal of many of the better quality fleeces will downgrade the whole clip and will reduce the payment from the Wool Board disproportionately - they value each sheet (very large sack to you and me) as an average quality, so if your best fleeces aren't there, the average will be lower.  So if the farm produces quite a bit of fleece is that is nice enough for handspinning, you may need to pay quite a bit more than £5/fleece to compensate for the reduction in payment from the Wool Board.

However, most sheep farmers also love to know that the wool will be used locally - and would love to see some of the results, too.