Inside Ben Ohau Station

Ben Ohau sits on the north-western edge of the Mackenzie Basin. Drive south out of Twizel, take the Glentanner road, keep going. Tussock rolls away in every direction. The mountains along the western boundary are the Southern Alps. At 1,000 metres above sea level the sheep graze country that would kill anything softer.

This is where most of our wool comes from.

The land

Thirty thousand hectares. That's about the size of Wellington City plus the whole of Porirua. Tussock grasslands, shingle rivers, shallow lakes that freeze in winter. The country is marginal for almost any kind of agriculture except fine-wool merino. The sheep thrive because they were bred for exactly this — cold, dry, high, hard.

The station has been running merino since 1857. The breeding programme has been refined continuously since then. The flock is currently held at 17.5 micron average fibre diameter by a combination of ram selection and grazing management.

The sheep

Sixteen thousand head, give or take a few hundred after shearing season. Pure merino, a line called Ben Ohau Reds (the ear tag colour, not the sheep), developed on the station over a century and a half.

A merino ewe at Ben Ohau produces about 4 to 5 kilograms of greasy wool a year. After scouring — washing out the grease, dirt, and vegetable matter — you get about 3kg of clean fibre. A Long Jon crew uses roughly 450g of finished yarn. So: one fleece makes six base layers. One sheep is a family's winter.

The shearing shed

We visited in October, peak shearing. Eight stands working from seven in the morning till six at night, five days a week, three weeks straight. The board is full of shearers, rouseabouts, and wool classers — the classers are the ones who matter for our grade.

Each fleece lands on the wool table whole. A classer walks around it, picking the fleece apart by grade: the shoulders and back (the finest, softest fibre) go into one bin, the neck and legs into another, the belly wool into a third. Our contract is for the top grade only — the crown and shoulders of the AAM (Advanced Merino, 17.5μ or finer) fleeces.

The classer at Ben Ohau has been at the same job for 29 years. He can feel the micron with his fingers, within half a point, without a reading. He's usually right.

What we pay for

A lot more than the wool. Paying by grade and by weight, not just weight, means the station is financially incentivised to keep breeding for fineness. Paying on long contracts — three years, not season by season — means the station can plan. Paying fair, regardless of global wool auction prices, means growers don't get burned when the auction crashes and can't gouge us when it spikes.

We'll publish the actual rates once we've shipped our first full season. We want the numbers to be useful, not marketing.

What we don't do

Mulesing. Ben Ohau doesn't do it. We wouldn't buy from them if they did.

Backcountry-pastoral tourism. The station doesn't need us retelling their history for Instagram. If you want to see it, drive the Glentanner road.

There are a lot of brands that tell nice stories about their supply chain. We'd rather publish the basics — who, where, what grade, what price — and let you ask the questions.

Next profile: Omarama Station. Where the 320gsm Heavyweight comes from.