Like in Australia, South America's wool industry in recent decades has faced a declining slice of the textile market, animal activism and environmental critics.
As a result, the exercise of creating a new, more sustainable and profitable model for the industry has thrown up some big challenges.
Even with significant environmental outcomes under their belt, the founders of Patagonia's Ovis 21 have had to return to the drawing board to overcome attacks from extremists like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), as well as to fully realise the productive potential of their sheep, while also being able to collect and present credible data on their system's environmental performance to back up their marketing.
In the early 2000s, when Pablo Borrelli and Richard Fenton started down a new path of sheep breeding with high hopes of also rejuvenating Patagonia's wool industry, they had little clue of what lay ahead.
Now 18 years since they established what has become a globally recognised wool brand, they admit they've had some tough lessons, the toughest of which have come since The Land last caught up with them a decade ago in 2011 (in a story called "A Patagonian path to profit").
Mr Fenton had in the early 2000s just completed his tertiary education at Victoria's Glenormiston College. His family's 26,000 hectare farm, Monte Dinero, is situated on the opening of the Strait of Magellan.
He had returned home with a head full of new ideas, his beliefs around breeding sheep challenged by what he saw among SRS and multi-purpose Merino breeders in Australia, and decided the way forward was to form new and closer relationships with the world's premium wool brands - but how?
In 2003, after realising no single farming operation alone had the scale and volume to create lasting change, he formed Ovis 21, a collaborative organisation with the objective of carving "a new path to profitability on their own terms".
He partnered with Mr Borrelli, a rangelands scientist who at the time was employed by the Argentine government to coordinate a national sheep program, a fiduciary fund that supported the re-entry of farmers into sheep production.
Like in Australia, a lot of producers had got out of sheep, or reduced their numbers, and the sheep and wool industry had significantly declined.
This was also a tumultuous time for Argentina - in one month alone in 2001 the country had four different presidents.
The upside for Mr Fenton was that Mr Borelli, having been fired from his job amid the changes, became available to be co-founder of this audacious plan to reimagine wool production in the region.
Mr Borrelli said collaborative networks were "only just appearing in the text books" as they set out to create their own network of wool producers, which at its peak would include 62 farms, totalling 1.3 million hectares and 325,000 sheep.
The organisation started with SRS genetics, but soon switched to multi-purpose Merino (MPM) lines, having also entered into an ongoing contract with several Australian studs.
Among the newly-formed network, these genetics were multiplied in several "seed" flocks from which the rams were then sold into commercial flocks.
"The change in productivity and farmer profitability was huge," Mr Borelli said. "However, in 2008 we had to realise the results from our grassland management were not going in the right direction.
"We had great success on the genetics side, but we were not getting any success on the rangeland management side."
The group had been working with sheep classer and MPM co-founder, Wallace O'Connor, Gilgandra, who suggested they switch to an holistic management program.
Mr Borrelli said they had heard of this concept, but it was not scientifically proven. Yet, they needed to do something drastically different to change course and so invited Brian Marshall, a grazier at Guyra and holistic educator with the Savory Institute, to train the group's first educators.
"We saw things we had never seen with the grasses coming back. This is a cold, dry region, and in a lot of places it was stagnant with a lot of bare areas or a lot of palatable species being replaced with woody species.
"In deserts, the changes are slow so people don't necessarily see it, but none of the ecosystem cycles were working."
He said when it rained, they would lose the moisture to run-off or evaporation, which was adding to a sense of failure.
When The Land checked in during 2011, they were a few years into an holistic grazing management strategy and beginning to turn things around by grouping together sheep to form extremely large flocks, the largest reaching 25,000 head.
Mr Borrelli said, at that stage, the forage production was being measured across 25 farms totalling 500,000ha and they were seeing annual carrying capacity increases of as high as 25 per cent.
"So we found something that could restore the land while increasing stocking rate ... without using inputs and by planning just twice a year," Mr Borrelli said of their holistic planned grazing.
In 2011, they also developed a standard by which to measure landscape regeneration, called Grassland Regeneration and Sustainable Standard (GRASS).
At this time, the group also began exporting its "sustainable wool" to the outdoor clothing brand, Patagonia - the concept was a success.
That was until in 2015, when the wave of support and increased sales would come crashing down. Extremist group PETA had begun uploading videos with misleading information that targeted the group.
The effect was the program collapsed almost overnight, destroying relationships with the clothing brands, and also the Nature Conservancy with whom they were also working by that stage.
Mr Borrelli said they weren't mulesing their sheep, so they thought they were safe from attack, including that all the attention had been on Australia.
"We were a bit naive ... we lost all of our clients except one," he said.
"At that stage we were in conversations with other brands to export our wool, it (PETA's attack) was very effective because it generated a heap of emails to the brands and they were so frightened by the response of the public that they dropped us.
"So we had to start again, and we got involved with the Responsible Wool Standard."
Since then they have been gradually recovering their exports and continued on their holistic management path, although the number of producer members is yet to fully recover.
The branding has also changed to "regenerative" wool from "sustainable" because they have since joined the Savory network, working to develop the protocols for that organisation's Ecological Outcome Verification (EOV) so land regeneration can be credibly measured.
This replaced their GRASS standard and works on a combination of shorter term environmental and landscape indicators, as well as longer term, more expensive measurements, such as for soil carbon.
They have also learned that, while the positive environmental outcomes were more rapid when using the extremely large flocks, there was a tipping point where animal productivity would decline.
"We learned the hard way that you can't move sheep around large areas without damaging performance," Mr Borrelli said, remarking on the sheer area flocks of 20,000-plus head required in a rotation and the associated distances when constantly moving to new grazing areas.
They have since determined the maximum area around which they can move sheep without detracting from performance is 10,000ha, which is also the network's average farm size. The stocking density varies from one sheep/hectare to one sheep/10ha across the group's 13 climatic regions.
The organisation, which Mr Borrelli said was making livestock part of the climate solution, now includes about 70 cattle producer members as far north as the Pampa region, and also runs a Savory Institute training course that has been taken up in Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Uruguay, Spain and Chile.
Their virtual training course for holistic management has also attracted Spanish speaking attendants from countries such as Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
And since 2019, the Savory Institute has hired Ovis 21 to manage the EOV certification program globally.
"So we are exporting our Patagonian experience to unexpected places, (and), I have no doubt that in 10 years the environmental services will be more valuable than the meat and wool combined."
Meanwhile, Mr Fenton also remains a key leader of the organisation in his current position of program manager for regenerative wool and sheep breeding programs.
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Andrew Norris
Editor at The Land
Editor at The Land
