WOOL | SCOURING AND CARDING

good morning sheep fans cami's a name sheep's the game and we're here today at the scouring factory you knew this was coming because i told you in the last vlog look at me i am so excited i have never been in a scouring plant i'm excited to see what happens to our will after it's sold at auction as always if you're enjoying these videos make sure and click that subscribe button give this one a thumbs up we drove down to bradford for this one but that's enough of that let's get inside and see what goes on behind those gates [Music] here we're not only just scaring british wool we're doing norwegian wool as well because we're part owned by a norwegian cooperative um so we've got many of these green bells which you'll have seen earlier all from the british wall marketing board um so we get all the wool out here ready for blending in inside the room so in here this is where we start with the blends of the wool we they all get a blend sheet to decide how we're going to scale the wool each to each type the wall is all in here ready to go onto the scouring belts and this is where we open the bales and it will go through the machines ready to hit the the first wash ball so the wall you saw next door he's all been fed into these two hoppers here one on each side one for each line so you see you're willing to upper there they're traveling through these machines here and the idea is these two machines here initially knock as much buck out of the wall as they can before it gets wet it's just easier to deal with while it's dry so there are grids underneath each drum you can see the spike sheets here when that gets unworn it starts up you'll see that that's a spike belt so it'll drag the wall upwards this one's full and ready to go so again your walls are in the crosshair on your way belt that device is weighing it on the way you'll see it'll be doing about two and a half tons an hour at the moment that controls all the doors in further down so so there's eight wash balls bottom scouring four of them are rinse the wool hits the water gets washed all the impurities get washed off into the water the squeeze here you're going about 20 tons on the wall so the idea is you keep the dirty water back that the clean will travel forwards you can see there's a rake action there just pushing the wall wall under the water and driving it forwards there's a slightly different action further back in the ball with like a crankshaft well you see as you're traveling down wall's starting to brighten up no that's all right kind of whistle so so these shorter bowls are our rinse bowls and if you look at the water here you'll see how much cleaner it is the waters on these bomb these last four bowls have been recycled through an auto filtration plant so we're taking the water from this cleaning it up and running back to the beginning of the process again big perforated drum here and the wall is sucked onto the drum travels underneath the first drum over the second down like that just to increase the surface area so where's your scoured wool you still see the veggie and things like that in there but you've been able to call me so you can see that's where they get it out so these lads here just pick in the wall for any impurities bits of black bits of plastic anything you get in there i mean your sheep tend to wander around and pick all sorts of stuff up as you'll be well aware [Music] uh there's light curtains around me so as soon as you walk in the machine will stop but if you don't have a push of that that's fairly solid and that's you that's your wall it's like up here yeah it's like yeah and these lads now put ways around it strap it they made that look easy but i'm telling you no you won't be clicking them together like that [Music] you can see there there's a rod it's a bit hard to see there's a rod there that go that goes into the middle of the bait pushes that into the bale at the other end it's like a hydraulic cylinder and forces it in so the bale will travel down here [Music] and what it'll do first of all is it'll just go in a little bit will the bail if you watch it now it'll then take a sample now take a second while it builds some pressure see the wall traveling down we might not be able to see it there yeah [Music] and if you look there all your blue circles are in that side bales of wool that have just been scoured and these are going into into the hopper getting ready to start the cooling process to go upstairs to the carding machines i'm using amazing i was gonna say the sheep smell but i think it's lanolin i can usually smell it yeah yeah it's totally out of it now there's nowhere [Music] yeah you can't make yellow wool go white it's impossible and and you'll always there's always still bits of vegetable matter in there there's nothing nothing you can do with and also the combing process will remove that so that's that's the end of step one the washer we've just seen yep and then we'll go upstairs to where it starts uh getting excited getting excited [Music] it comes up from downstairs and goes into the back of the carving machines where it starts this process in the in the corner as you can see the vegetable matter is still in there and the idea is through the machines is that we're going to take this out align all the fibers in a straight line so so so so you've got you've gone from the big sliver to the smaller and then this is going into the corning machines now so the corbin the combs will remove we'll try to remove the vegetable matter that's in there straighten up the fibres let me see now we've gone from from that stage one to this it's been through the comms see the vegetable mata has all been removed beautifully yeah ready to go to uh for spinning whether it's for a hand knitting machine that's you've got it ready to seal with that yeah so the next day just to put it to prepare it to send to the customer so this is the uh what we call the bumping machine and it comes out like these and these are ready to go to the customer they can start their spinning process or the dyeing process whichever so sheep fans we are here at a scouring plant in bradford howard's encore house scouring company i'm going to let andrew who works you don't work here i work for curtis wool direct who are we holding company with howard scouring okay and you're here regular yes we are here every day checking the quality of the wool making sure it's perfect for our customers and uh the curtis group as it is do they own this and what else they're doing um we've got companies in ireland um we've got jameson smith in shetland ireland right and we've got a company in new zealand as well quite a big company then by the sounds of it yes we're the biggest buyer of british wall through the auction system um we buy 50 55 of everything that is produced by the virtual marketing board so we buy one in every two fleeces that you see is that right that's quite a lot of will yeah so how much will was that then last year uh that last year was um the clip is about 27 28 million so we bought 13 14 million kilos of wall through the british will auction yeah quite a lot of oil yeah quite a lot of oil and does all of that go through here uh the majority of it goes through here uh through the scouring plant the scouring plant here we scour about 25 million kilos a year but we do have the capacity to do a million kilos per week incredible that is incredible so you're doing 25 million you bought 14 or so from the so where's the rest come from the rest is from ireland from norway other places around the world yeah new zealand as well i've been sharing in norway uh different i suppose shorter fibers a lot of time shorter staples because this year twice there share twice long staples as well yeah um and we get around 80 percent of all the wool produced in norway eighty percent of it bought by ourselves is that a good quality because there might be a pink nose bit and those sheep there's no reason why it's a very very good quality the black fiber count is very very low yeah um so it's used for a lot of it for blending with the new zealand wool as well because new zealand will have very little black fiber so they'll get quite a good price in norway do they uh yes yeah is there well subsidised in norway uh it says by the farmer cooperative yeah yeah i thought that is this just like a monday friday thing yeah 24 hours a day starts monday morning finishes saturday morning right and then we've got saturday and sunday to clean any maintenance and then we're ready to go on monday morning so 24 hours monday to friday 24th 24 5 this thing's operating yes day chef night shift dare shift nap shift so there's three shifts you've got your morning shift your afternoon shift and your night shift i suppose it makes the best use of all the equipment sitting here yeah there's no point in that setting idle no no not because it's expensive to keep the water warm yep and you know of course you've heated all this that volume of water another reason you want to use it you don't need to go cold no and what about like waste products and stuff um nothing nothing goes to landfill from the site we're very keen on that we're one of the most uh eco-friendly scavenge plants in the northern hemisphere if not the world yeah um even the wool grease that we take out of the dirty water the lanolin is sent for shrimp farming cosmetics uh i think that's fascinating that you saw like these fancy well i think it's amazing that they can be used for both a cosmetics and like shrimp farms like for food for the shrimps but like you're saying cosmetics so i think you mean like fancy creams creams yeah um makeup yeah yeah the grease from sheepswill that's a byproduct is it is yeah does it is a lot of it comes with the fleece you know do you need well if uh if you if you look um 100 kilos of wool that goes into a scarring plant yep approximately 68 70 comes out so you've got 30 of waste which is grease dirt muck that comes off the fleece all the dags that you're left in that's part of that so yeah so you're getting 70 you're buying that weight from the british whole marketing board and other sources yeah and you're getting 70 of that back out at the end product yes a lot of expense in this part of the process yes there's a lot of expense in the process like even just obviously massive buildings massive machines yeah breakdowns streamline the operation as much as possible yeah you know so we can give back to the farmer as much as possible and obviously we need our customers to keep going they'll love you for saying that are they saying all the right things they get back to the farmer it's good you'll get a job with the wilburton no no that's not saying all right things of in yourselves supply you touched on the base in shetland jameson is it in shepparton jameson smith jameson smith in the shetland islands you you send them will that's all they send us wool the shetland will from the crafters ah right they get yeah okay and all that will be scoured here and so are they like our competitor of the billboards um no it's two separate businesses um after parliament in 19 whenever in the uh all the farmers had to send their wall to the wall board but the shetland islands voted against it all right so it's always been that way it's always been that way it's like one of those things in farming it's just i bean as we'd say up the road just i been that way farmers love seeing that a good reason to keep doing something it's always been that way yeah but no that sounds interesting i love traditions like that and shetland was always a very good will yes um excellent well yeah and it's another one of these things like we spoke about heldwicks in the last vlog talking about this traceability and i'm sure those big opportunities if not already been done for shetlands to be the same because you know most shetlands are in shetland so it's the whole story of it is really nice apart from the odd one in escher as you've seen with me we'll get in we'll have a look and hopefully it all comes together good thanks andrew is richard the real farmer it must be yes looks more like a model didn't he you'll maybe see this guy laugh with all the excitement of the day i forgot to film an ending for this video so i'm just going to wrap it up here with us having a wander round looking at some of the cool products that have been made with british wool thanks very much to curtis wool direct holdings for allowing us to have a look around this incredible processing plant while it's operating and thanks to both andrew and richard for explaining the process to me and given me their time also thanks to billy from the virtual marketing board for our engine and i hope you've enjoyed this sheep fans we'll see you for the next one

Channel: The Sheep Game

Views: 175,403

Keywords: sheep, the sheep game, scottish sheep, shepherd, this farming life, farm vlog, sheep vlog, sheep farm, sheepishly me, sandi brock, tom pemberton, farm life, the hoof gp, farm scotland, lambing 2021, how to lamb a sheep, sheep 365, a day in the life of a farmer, farming life, one man and his dog, sheepdog, sheepdog trial, shearing sheep, how to shear a sheep, trained dogs, sheepdogs, command dogs, angry ram, right choice shearing, gareth wyn jones, carneddau, wales

Id: aKisFmS3utQ

Length: 20min 4sec (1204 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 06 2022