 David Cornish from Ballarat. David, you sort of mentioned in one sentence, he reduced your production cost by 80% over 10 years and sort of just moved on. I find that quite phenomenal, given it's expanding business and all that. Is there any, you know, that would take a whole cultural change or a cultural focus on investment decision making, how you went about it. I've just, you know, briefed what would be guidance to people trying to do that in other businesses. Well, the fact getting at 80% was a big shock to me, too. The biggest thing was the whole management team right down the guys on the floor got behind the idea of what don't we have to do. It was a matter of not doing stuff. So that was the biggest thing. We had surplus machinery because we'd gone through a few ups and downs in terms of seasonal demand for our products. So when you sort of have excess machinery, you sort of say, well, what can we do better with that? So the biggest, single biggest step we did was putting the same volume through one machine rather than two, and that got us halfway home. Could I follow up? We hear a lot about the downturn in manufacturing in China, but also their labor cost rises and so on. How cost competitive, equivalently, if you don't mind, is your Australian operation now to perhaps an operation in China? Well, we can benchmark easily between Australia and China because we own two factories. Australia is currently cheaper. It's been a fascinating issue that you might not have thought of. As one of the things, perspectives you may not be aware of, we've got a major biosecurity challenge as an industry. If there's ever a foot-mout, there's an outbreak because the virus can survive in a greasy wall. One of the best ways to disinfect is to scour. There are very few scouring plants left in Australia. One of the great little ironies is that perhaps if you set up right, one of the best places to scour, it could well be here. Call me. Call me. LAUGHTER There's a plug. Any other questions from the two airspeakers? Yes? Andrew Johnson, Mick Farmer from Tidenaris, out of Australia. I enjoyed all your presentations, but Jason and Booth, I'm pleased you brought up about the six months here and because apart from ASBVs, on a commercial sense, it's something that we can do very easily and I wonder, Jason, whether you're looking at it as far as the productivity gains from that, you know, with better conditions. And then the second part to all panels, all people, one of the biggest limitations, I believe, in the sheep industry, I'm passionate about it, is we've lost capital. We've lost, over the last 20 years, lost the skill sets. And I do believe, and I've seen it in our area, Farmer's sons have come back and possibly taken a lost old choice and wanted to attract to the drives itself. Infrastructure's gone, warder's points gone, fences are gone. Is that going to be one of the industry's biggest limitations? Yeah, I'll be quick on the first one and I'll let Booth answer the second one. The six months shearing, I've got to be honest, the main thing that does is take a producer's wool goggles off. There's a big part of the year where so many breeding ewes out there we don't actually understand her true body condition. So is there a massive efficiency gain by shearing her twice? No, but you take the goggles off so you see her bare shorn. Because from bare shorn to three months of wool, basically you can really understand where she's at. So instead of having six to nine months of the year where we can't see where she's at, I think that's the biggest thing. It drives people to focus on the used body, condition score, at least twice as regularly as what they were. So that's the main outcome there. On the mixed farming front, Booth's experiencing that in his community. I'll let him add to that. But us as an industry, we're very conscious of that. There has been displacement of a lot of sheep in the serial sheep zone. And we are thinking about how we can better penetrate our messages into that situation. And maybe we need to get a bit more innovative in our communication means how we reach that mixed farmer because they can't devote the time to come to the same information exchange that we do. Booth, do you want to have a go? Well, I might just touch on both of them. There's a little bit different view than maybe than Jason with the six month shearing. I just found financially it's about a line baller. It had to be six months. It couldn't be eight months from me because I wanted to do away with the crutching, that labour and the time and effort. So it was either six months or nothing. So that's where those genetics came in. So I do away with crutching. You get about 10% more wool. So there is some efficiency of shears and sheep just do better off shears. And I'd love the research because I don't know whether anyone's actually put their finger on it, why? But everyone that runs sheep would know if their leams or whatever are doing too well, you shear them and they get a bit of a kick along. So you get a bit of a kick there. So you get an extra 10%. So the extra 10% wool and the saving on the crutching financially covers the cost of the extra shearing. So you think, well, why would you do it? You must love being in a shearing shed. That's the reasons that Jason said, but it's also I now join and shear that six to eight weeks off shears. And that is when sheep are just doing their very, very best. They are just the healthiest. They lamb now instead of having nine months worth of wool on them, they've got two, six weeks or two. That's where a lot of the immortality, if it's raining and wet and they've just gone through that lambing process and they try to get up and they've only got to produce colostrum and all the rest of it, take that extra weight off their backs. Like there's a lot of efficiency going. They seem to produce more milk but just seem to do a lot better off shears. So all the benefit, other than the only financial benefit is your cash flow. You actually get half your wool money six months earlier. So it can offset debt or something. Instead of wandering around the paddock, getting wet and weighing the sheep down and holding it back. You're actually, it's working for you in the bank account or something. And one of the other things I'll just flag is that not many people realize the staple strength measurement is biased by length. So as you go shorter, every 20 milliliter goes shorter. The staple strength goes up, I think, between four and eight. It's curvilinear. So, Buf, I would imagine you'd be getting up towards 50 Newtons. 60. And staple strength, when you look at it, it's just about over the last 10, 15 years and I've tried to get this data more isolated but it's nearly a bigger determiner of price than my current one. I know there's not much of a mark on the premium there, so staple strength is a big determiner. Just to finish the discussion, the issue you got, the other one you raised, which I called farming easy, is a massive one. Because it's one of those things we can hear about, we talked about, the profitability of the self-replacing around enterprise or whatever you describe it. I know myself, there's a lot of farmer's sons who can look at, there's a way of earning that profit easy and there's a way that's earned hard. In other ways, I don't think we as an industry measure our profit related to the man hours required to generate that profit enough. So certainly, I'll just flag as an investor in the R&D, there's a lot of interest in labor-saving technologies in the livestock industries. So dairy, MLA, AWI, we've got significant interest in that space. We've got two full-time staff members now in that space. And for the first time in our STRAT plan, we'll have a dedicated strategy for farm automation. So it's a space to watch, it really is a, we're playing catch-up of course against the cropping enterprises and so on, but unless we can tackle some of those things, being able to mount a persuasive profit case will never be enough. So Paul, I just wanted to quickly add for those in the audience that do have sheep and are gonna go to pre-lamp shearing, one thing that absolutely will happen in cold weather or appetite will go up by about 30%. Okay, so one of my reservations about pre-lamp shearing, if it's not on a farm with measure to manage practices, the you will eat her head off and by the time she gets to the lambing paddock, there's no feed resource. And then Amy's work on that lambing environment will tell us that that compromises maternal behavior and exacerbates lamb loss. So you've got to be careful about how you use some of these tools, okay? Okay, look, there are some other people with questions. Can I ask you to go? Yeah, Nick McBride from AJMP and McBride, South Australia. First of all, I've stuffed in real positive. I thought Caroline and David's presentations were really good, but I've got to be honest, I'm gonna be a little bit diplomatic and say I was disappointed with Jason and Andrew's presentation. And mainly reason is that we had no RII's return on investment figures given. We had no benchmarking figures given and we had nothing to say that these practices that they were advocating were any beneficial to anyone in this room. So the information is out there, the benchmarking figures are out there and I know they've just got sources of all, let's say strategies of running sheep. There are thousands of them out there in Australia right there today and not every one of them are winners. So that's just a comment and I appreciate the two other things where I found it very frustrating to listen to the other two. The other thing about Andrew, sorry, Jason, you're right about the sharing. My understanding is that when you share every six months, you do create the animal to be cold. You do up the ante on her appetite and she does a lot better when you take the wool off. And your comments there, Jason, are absolutely correct. If you did it prior to lambing, you would absolutely make that hunger you eat well. Thank you. So I'll take the right of one response because being a footballer, I sort of like to give a bit back after someone's had a crack, so that's okay. So the benchmarking I was referring to you in there and I talked about the 5% to 7% higher stocking rate and all that. I can show you exactly that on a gross margin return to asset basis. So there's a full data set behind that. And then I was also talking about the ROI on an industry level and investment in some of these initiatives. So I'm more than happy to take that up with you afterwards. We'd hoped to have representative from one of the major corporate producers here to talk about their actual real-life situation but unfortunately they weren't permitted to present on behalf of the company. And to finalize that, the best practice data that was in there was linked to one of those and they make 7% return on assets on the property that is delivering exactly those outcomes that I described. So there's plenty of depth in that area and maybe I'll take the point we should have included more of that. So I appreciate the feedback. Many reasons to be disappointed with Jason's presentation and that was just one of them. Are there any other questions from the audience? Yes. Is there a microphone that can be... Oh, sorry, it's Mr. Peer. Yes. David, a quick question and you might be able to solve this problem forming in about four or five words. The perceived wisdom that Caroline trotted out that low oil prices make for cheap synthetics. But a manufacturer told me many years ago that the cost of boiling the water in the scouring process uses up a huge amount of air to energy and dropping the oil prices is equal or a better benefit to wool than it is to the synthetics, true or false? Really complex. Yes, we use... Well, if I was using natural methane to heat my scour bowls then it would actually kill the argument completely. I'm not sure that it's necessarily a one for one with oil to synthetics. I think it's a bit more complicated than that. It comes down to the cuts of the oil barrel they want to take. So I'd have to say false because I just can't prove either way. But I will. Graham, I'm sure you'll be aware that there's like a 98% correlation between the price of the retail price of acrylic or polyester and the price of oil. You choose whatever benchmark you like. But the price of oil is no doubt a contributor to the cost of processing but it's not such a major determinant on the price of the clean filament per se when you compare the rural cost. But maybe that's something we couldn't come back to next year. I just can't pull the data quick enough, unfortunately. OK, there's a question. We might have to pull it up very shortly. Sorry, we'll take one from you and we'll take more from you, sir. And then we might have to pull it up. OK, thank you. I'm not sure whether this is a Dorothy Dixie or a devil's advocate thing. But I'm listening to what you say, having grown up in Hamilton on a wool farm and watching the whole area now becoming very much a wheat farming rather than a mixed farming, I'm wondering, does it really matter? The question down there was, how can we stop this or how can we adapt to it? Isn't just production itself the important thing and doesn't matter whether it's wool or does it matter whether it's wheat? What's the problem? I've got a problem if there's no wool around. I've got a problem if there's no sheep around. So is he, because he sells rams. Hi, Carol. This is the Fiverr session and I think we've all got a vested interest. There's definitely that. No, philosophically, as long as producers who want to be on the land are making a fair return for the effort they're putting into producing, whatever they've chosen to produce, there is no problem. But since we're talking about sheep, that's... Yeah. What I would say is, if you're talking about displacement of merino sheep, given that that's where I grew up in sort of 100k radius of Hamilton, as you know, you mentioned one pressure on merino sheep and that's cropping in that district, but I don't think there'd be another shire with a higher rate of displacement of superfine merino used for composite use in this country. So there's a lot of pressure on the merino industry in what used to be referred to as the wall capital of the world and that's part of where the redesigning of the merino is evolving because the sheep of yesteryear is perhaps not the same animal that's going to work in the future. So it's a real state of flux around Hamilton. It's a bigger question than this forum, which I'm sure you appreciate. And I represent a company as you do that exists for the common good, the national interest. And you could, depending on the price of wheat at the moment, and a lot of blacks, for example, in WA are really struggling, for example, the price of wheat, you would argue that it's probably in the national interest to have more sheep in those enterprises and you probably certainly could in terms of the sustainability of the businesses, potentially herbicide resistance issues, blah, blah, blah. So it's quite a complex issue that you've raised. Paul, just so you don't sound like you're speaking on behalf of the sheep industry, Plant Farm has just done a big review on exactly that in the eastern wee belt and they concluded exactly that. The sustainability of the businesses and the profit in the long run of the businesses that have got sheep and crop mixed is superior to those that are exclusively in crop. Thank you. We might park that there for a moment. And now this gentleman will ask, can you introduce yourself too, please? My name is Kevin. I'm calling from Donghai, Australia. I've got a question for Mr. Dewey. In your last slide, you mentioned, like, in the future, you're going to have supply directly from the grower. And I just have a general question. Like, what's the benefit for the grower and for the company and how do you actually operate like this? The grower is not paying fees to take it to auction. So that's a cost down for the grower. For me, the way we operate is through dealers throughout Australia. We offer pretty much cash on delivery. So it's a faster cash cycle as well. And if I can have a relationship with the grower and talk to him again next season, I actually can then start planning forward. The challenge for me right now is to go and buy 3,000 dollars a week at auction when there's only 2,000 dollars on offer. It's a bit tricky. So I actually need to have my supply side built here. Now, otherwise, my costs will go through the roof and I'll be stopping the factory more often than I'm running it. Okay, well, we might leave it there if you're comfortable with that answer. Can I thank you all for your attendance, your interest? Can I thank the speakers for the generally on-time presentations and the quality of discussion? That was fantastic. I'm sure Carolyn and I would like... We'd appreciate any feedback that you have on the nature of the session and any ideas you've got for next year. And can I also finish by again congratulating Graeme on his interest and contribution to this forum? Very disappointing. Only one question this year, Graeme. I know you've... Now, look, thank you all and I wish you well.