Running 3500 ewes he had lost his fair share of new-born lambs over a couple of decades, especially in three-day southerly storms.
After a marriage break-up and partial farm sale in the mid 1980s Brown had a few years as a grain agent. Canterbury’s Big Snow of 92 threw him sideways again.
Like so many other volunteers Brown hit the road to help farmers trapped in one of the worst storms of the century.
Worn down by seeing so many lost stock and broken properties he called one day at Wool Research of New Zealand at Lincoln.
Thinking of the stock losses Brown asked one of the technicians if they could make white underfelt for lamb covers.
Senior scientist Ian McFarlane told him WRONZ thought of the idea the year before but rang six farmers who said the young sheep weren’t worth saving.
Lambs at that time were barely worth $12 at the farmgate but Brown reckoned WRONZ was talking to the wrong six farmers.
Predicting lambs could be worth $30 by the next season he argued covers would be worth every cent.
The research institute made some fabric for Brown and he took it AgResearch’s Ruakura research centre with a roll of fabric, a pair of scissors and a stapling gun.
“We wanted to find some live lambs, to look at the ewe-lamb bonding and look at just how good the covers were.”
After a few days of field tests Brown asked Christchurch clothes maker Lane Walker Rudkin to cut the material. By this stage he had a design patent on the product, estimating the first run of covers would be 20,000.
That turned out to be too conservative. He sold 50,000 in the first eight weeks.
His customers take their covers off a first young lamb after a week, wash them and put them on a second lamb and sometimes a third.
“They’ll put them in the washing machine. You wouldn’t believe what farmers will do.”
The design has stood the test of time.
Woolover’s NZ sales peaked in 1998 at more than 100,000 covers in New Zealand at its 1998-2000. With the fall in the national sheep flock, the numbers dipped to about 45,000.
The Woolover Lamb cover is made totally of wool and the design allows ewes to smell the tail and the head, ensuring ewe-lamb bonding is maximised and reducing reproductive waste.
The covers pay for themselves, he said.
“A lamb lying out on a frosty morning at 6 o’clock, by God, it’s a long time till the sun’s got a bit of get up and go. That lamb’s at risk just because of frost. But a 4 o’clock southerly this afternoon … these guys are saying ‘right, there’s six sets of twins out there. Before the onset of the storm, whip out there and put some covers on those twins’.”
In comparison, the plastic covers can be noisy and affect ewe-lamb bonding when it is windy or rainy, Brown said.
Some sheep breeds are more suspicious about the lamb covers than others but to help the ewe-lamb bonding process farmers can smear a bit of afterbirth on them. Corriedales can be a bit funny about it.
“And there are some ewes out there that want to be solo parents.”
Woolover also sells calf covers but only a few thousand because most Kiwi dairy farmers have ready-made shelter on farms, including woolsheds and barns.
Brown got a start in the United States when the late Rob Cox, the New Zealand manager for World Wide Sires, suggested he give the country a crack through World Wide Sire’s parent company.
By chance Murray Prattley of Prattley Industries in Temuka needed someone to drive for him in the US while he navigated his way around on client visits.
“He said ‘I’m bloody hopeless at driving over there. Meet me in Sacramento on Tuesday week’.”
So away Brown went, turning up at World Wide Sires’ base at Handford, California. The marketing manager asked Brown to supply 400 covers, promising to pay for them and do market research.
“But what they did, they sent 400 covers to their worst-performing clients in the states.”
The approach was something like “Dear Sir, here’s a cover, pay us for this cover if it’s any good and don’t pay us if they’re not.”
World Wide Sires rang Brown eight weeks later and said it wanted a worldwide franchise on the covers.
The number of fibres in a cover is important, Brown said.
“The more fibres you have in there, the warmer it is. You want lots of fibres, all tangled up, doing their work.”
Wool length is crucial too.
“It’s quite critical that, because, if you get the wool too short the covers will come apart. We’ve been there, done that, tried to punch too short a wool.”
Woolover covers are made by Christchurch firm Terra Lana, which takes about 2.5 tonnes of machine-ready Woolover fibre at a time. Woolover sources a 32-micron blend of wool from PGG Wrightson through its subsidiary Bloch and Behrens Wool for the lamb cover and coloured wool for the calf covers.
