Animals & Us
Dr Nan Bray
A marine physicist who chose sheep farming learned that reducing stocking rates solves animal welfare and land regeneration at once.
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Dr Nan Bray grew up hearing stories about working dogs and ranch horses, longing to farm despite her parents' insistence on a profession. She became a physical oceanographer instead, spending years researching ocean currents at MIT, Woods Hole, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Then, on a visit to Tasmania in the 1990s, she glimpsed sheep grazing near Government House with the Marine Labs visible beyond, and realised she could have both farming and oceanography in the same place.
When she started sheep farming, she was fortunate to meet David Carnes, a retired stockman who came out of retirement at 75 to teach her conventional wool growing. But as she learned about Fred Provenza's research on how animals self-medicate and nourish themselves when given biodiversity and knowledge, everything changed. She stopped weaning lambs at three months and let them stay with their mothers for two to three years instead. She hasn't needed to drench an animal since 2009. She stopped mulesing, tail docking, and eventually stopped sending sheep to slaughter altogether. When she got to know individual sheep as she shepherded them, particularly pet lambs like Vicki, she realised she couldn't put them on a truck.
The economics didn't work with fewer animals, so she moved up the supply chain and started White Gum Wool, selling knitting yarn made from her sheep's fibre. By 2015 or 2016, the yarn business was profitable. Today she runs about a quarter of the sheep she once did, each producing roughly 30 percent more wool, while the land regenerates and her animals live with their mothers, their social structures intact, their friendships honoured. She has data showing wool quality doesn't degrade with age. She has an assisted living paddock for aging sheep where stress often lifts and they stop falling down. What began as a search for a way to farm has become a quiet proof that reducing stocking rates solves animal welfare and land regeneration at once.
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