Country Calendar - Cashmere

Television (Full Length) – 1986

This excerpt from a 1986 episode of NZ TV’s longest running show comes from the heady pre-crash mid-80s when NZ farming was getting off the sheep’s back and diversifying to stay profitable in changing times. Here Robert Hall is stocking the “hard hill country” of a farm near Taumaranui with goats. Rather than hunting goats as pests, the young industry — fuelled by “large amounts of city money” — is attempting to farm them for their cashmere wool. It offers new opportunities for women in farming, but teething problems include low yields from feral animals.

We need to breed an animal that's going to survive on hill country, and to do that we can't select on fleece alone, We need to select for things like constitution, hardiness and genetic abnormalities ...
– Goat farming entrepreneur Robert Hall