At Roseville Park, decades of selection and data are producing a distinct style of merino wool that now runs through flocks around the world.
A wave of ewes rolls over the hill, woolly bodies packed so tightly they’re barely discernible from one another. They carry Roseville Park’s next line of lambs, the result of decades of careful breeding. “They’re just coming into lambing now,” says Charlie Coddington as he skirts the mob in a buggy with a kelpie named Frog in the boot. “And condition-wise they’re right where we want them.”
He’s the sixth generation to work in the family merino stud—though the weight of Roseville Park rests, for now, with his father. Matthew is shaping the flock with a mix of inherited knowledge and evolving technology. “We’re able to set long-term breeding objectives and smash them pretty quick with what we’re doing,” he says. “It might look like nature at work, but behind it is generations of selection and a lot of very deliberate decisions.”
Roseville Park was founded in 1938 and spans six farms around Dubbo in the Central West of New South Wales. “Sheep love it here,” Matthew quips. But, as it happens, his sheep love it in plenty of places - like Argentina, New Zealand and India to name a few of the dozen countries where Roseville Park genetics have ended up. Around 70 per cent of Uruguay’s flock can be traced back to his stud.
It’s a legacy built on never standing still, and Charlie has come back into the operation at a point where that pace is only increasing. “A lot of people are afraid to change,” he says, “but we’re more afraid of being left behind in a really fast-moving industry.”
He describes the stud’s genetics program as “fire and ice”—bringing together opposing traits to land somewhere in the middle. “A true dual-purpose merino producing a fine fleece while still having lambs and a good carcass,” he says. “Those traits can pull against each other, so you’re always trying to balance them.”
When RB Sellars visits, Roseville Park is in the throes of shearing and the shed is full of activity. “I just love wool,” says Georgia Cluff, moving between the stands with a scanner, matching fleeces to the animals they came from and pulling samples as they come off the board. As data and producer manager, she weighs, tests and records each one.
“We capture quite a lot of data points throughout the whole lifetime of the sheep,” she says. Every animal is tracked from birth—tagged, measured and sampled. By the time a ram is sold, there’s very little guesswork left. “Our clients know what they’re buying and exactly how much wool each animal is going to cut.”
What all of that data is working towards is fibre—measured in microns, the thickness of each strand. The flock here sits around 17.5 microns, shorn every six months to maintain consistency. “Roseville Park wool is a certain style of wool,” Matthew says. “Very bright, very white, with a unique lock structure and crimp character.” It’s the result of years of selection—shaping not just how fine the fibre is, but how it behaves. And yet, at the end of all that science, the inputs are elemental. "You go to sleep at night and there's more of this being grown," Matthew says. "It only needs water, grass and sunlight to do it."
Australian Grown Merino
