A gang of Mongolian sheep farmers 12,000 kilometres from home are on a Kiwi exchange that has the potential to radically change their lives.

Budee, Baasca, Ama and Ahanda are from a long line of nomadic farmers that tend to their flock in one of the coldest regions on earth in winter – as they had done for thousands of years – shearing their sheep with a pair of scissors.

A chance meeting with a New Zealand bank manager on holiday in Mongolia had led to the quartet travelling to New Zealand on a shearing sojourn, arriving three weeks ago to work a summer, staying in Piopio. Rabobank finance manager Paul Brough was trekking through Mongolia in 2019 when he came across a group of farmers who had built pens out of branches and were cutting wool from a herd of 900 with scissors at a rate of 30 sheep a day. Brough said he discovered there had been attempts to provide modern shearing gear to Mongolia before, but with no instructions on how to use it properly or maintain it, those efforts were doomed to fail.

An initial idea was hatched to run some courses in an exchange with visiting New Zealand shearers, and from there it made sense to see if the farmers themselves would benefit from travelling and learning in New Zealand through the establishment of Share Mongolia – Farmers Helping Farmers. Rabobank flew Budee, Baasca, Ama and Ahanda from Mongolia, organised work, lodgings, gear and tuition using shearing gear and handpieces commonly used in New Zealand and other parts of the world.

There had also been an educational visit with a group of Kiwi shearers travelling to Mongolia teaching 68 farmers to shear and leaving them with machinery and teaching them how to use and maintain the gear properly, sponsored by the Australian Embassy, United Nations and the Rabobank Community Fund.

At the end of the exchange the farmers will return to Mongolia having worked and earnt money that they would be able to invest in their families and farms.

(source:nzherald)