Already a subscriber?Elders started out in wool handling in the horse and cart era and is returning to the industry with robotic handlers.group will use more than 20 automated guided vehicles to do the heavy lifting and stacking at a new wool handling centre in Melbourne with a 300,000 bale-a-year capacity. There will be no workers on the floor of the 35,000 square metre warehouse, but about 40 new jobs are allocated in wool testing and other roles.
A smaller facility south of Perth can handle 60,000 bales a year, but there are doubts over the future of the wool industry in the west on the back of the Albanese government’s decision to ban live sheep exports. The company’s new $25 million investment was the biggest in wool in more than two decades, he said, and came 185 years after Alexander Elder arrived in South Australia from Scotland with his family and started buying, financing and handling wool.“The idea was to significantly enhance the supply chain, make it more efficient and take the reliance on people out of it. This is the first material investment in the wool industry for a long, long time.
“Do we enjoy them manipulating price, holding back their buying and then ramping up their buying? No, we don’t enjoy that, but then we don’t enjoy a lot of things that happen to Australia in the world.”