In this exclusive extract from our FREE Fashion Supply Chains Report 2023, MJ Bale head of brand Jonathan Lobban reveals how it is reducing methane emissions in its supply chain by up to 80%.
Livestock is the third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in Australia, just behind energy and transport. This is according to the Department of Primary Industries, which further notes that agriculture contributes about 14% of New South Wales’ total greenhouse gas emissions, with livestock methane accounting for over 80% of that.
But this isn’t the only reason why MJ Bale began feeding sheep with asparagopsis seaweed to reduce methane emissions in its supply chain. The other catalyst was the Black Summer bushfires in late 2019.
“In about August/September 2019, there was a fire up on the mid-North Coast that was getting closer and closer to our farm partners in New England,” MJ Bale head of brand Jonathan Lobban says. “There was no grass on their paddocks, and suddenly it was very Armageddon-like. The sun was this little orange spot in the sky because the air was filled with smoke.
“Emotionally, it was tough to watch them go through this. Farmers were spending $50-$60,000 a month to feed their flock of Merino sheep."
“So Matt Jensen, our CEO, said, If we lose our farms, we lose not just our fibre, but communities of wool growers.”
And so, MJ Bale commissioned a scoping study into its greenhouse gas emissions, led by environmental scientist Andrew Moore. According to Lobban, Moore isolated a two-piece MJ Bale merino wool suit for the initial study, with early numbers indicating that 52% of all its emissions (just the jacket and trousers) were coming from the farm itself.
“We were gobsmacked,” Lobban says. “The methane emissions formed a large part of the emissions.”
Serendipitously, in the same year of 2019, Lobban met up with an old friend named Sam Elsom, who started a seaweed farm in Tasmania called Sea Forest the year before. Elsom is also a former fashion designer for The Upside.
“What Sam had done was taken the CSIRO science out of the labs, which showed that if you fed merino sheep asparagopsis seaweed supplemented at 0.2% of their daily diet, that it would reduce methane emissions by up to 80%,” Lobban says.
MJ Bale was hooked and secured a partnership with Sea Forest. The next step was a phone call to Simon Cameron at Kingston Farm in Tasmania, MJ Bale’s single-source wool partner since 2015.
“We actually took the very first seaweed that came out of Sea Forest, and by about July 2020, we began feeding it to 48 merino sheep, 300 days consecutively. And then shearing was in June 2021.”
From those 48 sheep, MJ Bale accrued 105 kilograms of greasy wool, with 75 kilograms of that being sent to its Italian-based fabric mill Vitale Barberis Canonico (VBC), who weaved the wool into tailored garments.
Lobban reveals that in a discussion with Jensen, the pair realised they didn’t want to send all this wool overseas as the transport emissions would defeat the purpose. So they sought to get some of it locally processed, spun and knitted into garments, as well as transported through a climate-friendly method.
“We transported it using this sailor called Two Dogs,” Lobban explains. “We cycled 30 kilograms of this methane-reduced wool out of the farm, sailed it up the east coast of Tasmania and across the Bass Strait in an engineless sailboat. Because the purpose was to have a zero carbon footprint, really.”
This then produced a selection of hand-knitted knits. Lobban says his team has about six of them, which were being quality tested.
“One of our quality tests we're doing is Two Dogs, our sailor, he's sailing at the end of this month (March 2023) from Sydney to Alaska,” Lobban says. “He's going to hand off one of our knits to a special person in Alaska as a gift.
“In terms of in store, we think that it'll be more like July, August for the knits, and then we'll hopefully have the cloth that VBC is making from the methane-reduced wool, which is being made in our Japanese workshop into blazers, and we're hoping to have that in stores by September.”
Looking ahead, Lobban says this was just the beginning. Following the yield from the 48 sheep in 2021, MJ Bale put 500 sheep on the asparagopsis seaweed at Kingston Farm.
“Now, that yielded 1.3 tonnes of methane-reduced greasy wool,” Lobban says. “And then one tonne went to VBC, and we've got 350 kilograms, so we're going to do the same journey all in regional Victoria and Tasmania. But we're about to make an announcement with a leading Australian university to make this wool into knitwear here in Sydney.”
“In terms of our linen shirts, we're now working with a single farm in Normandy (France), and those shirts will be coming out in July, August this year.”
Read more supply chain stories like this in our FREE Fashion Supply Chains Report 2023, with further insights from Decjuba, Wittner, Michael Hill, Cue, Workwear Group, alongside RMIT's Dr Alice Payne and supply chains expert Professor Vinh Thai.