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Professor to give insight into future of wool

September 22, 2005

Cottle.thumb.JPGA public lecture in Armidale next week will take an insightful look into the future of Australia’s multi-billion dollar sheep and wool industry from the perspective of education and research.

The University of New England’s Professor David Cottle administers a national education program for the Australian Sheep Industry Cooperative Research Centre. In delivering his Inaugural Lecture in Armidale Town Hall, he will outline the achievements and aspirations of this program, and UNE’s central role in its delivery throughout Australia and New Zealand. He will also talk about educational initiatives that are in the planning stage at UNE (including a Master’s degree program for students living in India and China).

David Cottle, Professor of Sheep and Wool Science at UNE, will outline some of his plans for the future of sheep and wool research at UNE that involve working with local members of the industry, and thus strengthening ties between country, town and “gown”. Professor Cottle is a leading advocate of new technologies that can help in making farm management and marketing decisions. One proposed project would involve the designation of certain farms as “demonstration farms” in moving towards the integration of these new technologies. The free lecture, titled “Nature’s Wonder Fibre”, will be at 7.30 pm on Thursday 29 September.

Professor Cottle (pictured here), who gained his Doctorate at UNE, took up the new Chair of Sheep and Wool Science at UNE in 2003. Before that, he worked for five years as a member of the senior management team at the Wool Research Organisation of New Zealand. He was an Associate Professor of Wool Science in the Department of Wool and Pastoral Science at the University of NSW in the 1990s. That department, which closed in 1997, was recognised as the national tertiary centre for wool education and research. Now at UNE, as Australia’s (and the world’s) only Professor of Sheep and Wool Science, he is back at the centre.

Professor Cottle, an international expert on wool science and sheep breeding and management, is the editor of "The Australian Sheep and Wool Handbook". He edited the international journal "Wool Technology and Sheep Breeding" from 1992 until, earlier this year, he guided its transformation into the Web-based journal "The International Journal of Sheep and Wool Science". He is now Managing Editor of that journal.

He is optimistic about the future of Australia’s sheep and wool industry, which sees the annual export of products valued at $4.5 billion. “The Merino wool industry is not a cottage industry,” he emphasises. “The top 20 per cent of producers are doing just as well as the leading producers in other agricultural industries. And I believe that, particularly if promotion were to be renewed, we could see an improvement in the market as a whole.”


Media contact: Professor David Cottle, School of Rural Science and Agriculture, UNE (02) 6773 2178 or 0427 409 271, or Jim Scanlan, Public Relations, UNE (02) 6773 3049.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at September 22, 2005 04:26 PM