Visiting a Falklands Sheep Farm

Saturday, November 4 -  Fitzroy Sheep Farm Tour

Brochure from Fitzroy Farm, with green area showing their farm land holdings

After driving about 45 minutes, we made it to Fitzroy Farm, part of the Falklands Landholdings Corporation, which was incorporated in 1991.  FLH land consists of about 25% of the total farmland in the islands - about 295,000 hectares (1140 square miles) with 145,000 sheep, 750 cattle and they employee 30 some staff. 

The Fitzroy Settlement is managed by Gilberto Castro, along with his partner Suzi Clarke, a 6th generation islander, and 3 other employees.  A handful of other people have chosen to live in the area of the Fitzroy Settlement.  The Farm is home to 20,000 Merino sheep, 40 cattle with a dairy herd for milk production, 35 chickens, 11 dogs and 6 miniature horses.  Gilberto has managed Fitzroy since 2015 and has introduced a holistic grazing system for the sheep.

Gilberto Castro, Fitzroy Farm manager, demonstrating the sheep shears

Suzi Clarke, associate manager, talks about the quality of the wool

We met Suzi and Gilberto as they welcomed us into the sheep shearing barn. It’s the time of year to shear the sheep and collect the wool. They practice sustainable agriculture, by letting the sheep roam freely, but they are careful to move them every two weeks, as needed, after they have eaten the grass down to the first layer. This carefully leaves some grass stubs to regenerate. This time of year, the sheep are corralled with 4x4s and dogs and brought to stay in groups until they are sheared.  We first saw all the sheep waiting together in the holding pens. They’re really quite funny because they all look at YOU.  Suzi explained they produce the whitest wool in the world. The wool is very fine, only 6 or 8 microns in diameter, which makes the wool very soft.  They achieve this partly by managing the genetics of the flock.

These experienced sheep shearers finish cutting the fleece off a sheep in less than 90 seconds!

Fitzroy has a team of hired sheep shearers on site from New Zealand and Australia.  It usually takes about 2 weeks to complete the shearing.  They work for 8 hours each day and can shear about 200-300 sheep in a day.  I watched one man shear a whole sheep a 1 minute and ten seconds.  The fleece comes off the animal as a single intact mat, which is flung on a table as soon as the sheep is finished with the cutting.  On the left side of the shearer is a chute where the sheep wait in the queue for their haircut and on the right side is the chute where they are guided out when they are done, naked without their fleece.  The ones we watched were totally docile, allowing the cutters to turn and twist them to free up their wool with the cutters.

The barn was filled with the music of a great, rousing play list.  We walked into Marvin Gaye’s Heard it Through the Grapevine, and also heard Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen and many other fine artists. When the fleece is cut, it’s collected, tossed onto a nearby table, and spread out like a rug, all intact .  It’s inspected for bad bits, and then passed over to a guy with a big wheel that turns, like a mini trampoline.  He does another inspection and grades it.  Then it's folded up and sorted into the right bins, waiting for baling.  An impressive woman named Rachel was running the bailer, she had biceps to dream for.  She kept lifting piles of wool pelts into a large machine that holds the bale bag. The bag is about 4 x 4 feet, and 5 feet tall.  Suzi says they make about 400 bales in a season - about 20 or so in an 8 hour day.  The bales are taken to Montevideo to be processed and they will make about $400,000 in a year on the commodities market.

Rachel packing fleece into the baling machine

Examples of the wool from Fitzroy Farm

Suzi says its the softest and whitest wool in the world - each fiber is less than 8 microns

Sheep in the outdoor holding pens, waiting their turn for the shearing shed

We were then invited to see a demonstration of sheep dogs at work.  Gilberto and Suzi and two dogs basically corralled a few hundred sheep that were waiting in the outside pens into a group and kept working with them to get them to enter the door of the shearing shed.  Impressive work! 

Fitzroy Farm is located on a bay, allowing boat transport to Stanley

An old railway trestle crossing the bay