Len and Gail Simmons from West Brookton, watch their last clip sell at Western Wool Centre

Originally 62 bales - most of the clip was held over until the first wool sales of the new financial year because the West Brookton couple sold off more than 2000 sheep at an average of $200 a head in the previous financial year - it was their 50th and last.

Len, 73, and Gail, 72, have retired from the 809 hectare farm they bought as a bush block in 1971 and cleared.

They have settled into a new home on an estate just south of Lancelin.

Son Ian has taken on 1200 of their Merinos and 200ha of the arable farmland - as well as another block he runs cattle on - and a neighbour has leased 300ha from them.

"It's pretty hard to leave the farm, given that we started from scratch and looking at where we are today," Mr Simmons said last week, when he and Gail came from Lancelin to watch their final clip sold with their wool broker, Carl Poingdestre.

They watched their prices come up on the live screen in the Dyson Jones Wool Marketing Services office at its Bibra Lake wool store.

"Carl has been looking after us for about 28 years," Mr Simmons said.

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"We originally started with Cargill (Wool), then Primaries (of WA) and when Carl went from Primaries to Dyson Jones, we followed him across - he's done the right thing by us so we've stuck by him.

"I only retired from full-time shearing three years ago - one bloke wanted me last year but I said 'nah, I'm retired'.

"I still did my own crutching and this year I gave Ian a hand to crutch the 1200 we left him - he's a shearer too and he said, 'I see enough sheep all week working' so he didn't want too many, he's got cows.

"There's one place where I've been mulesing for over 30 years and when I finished last year he said 'who's going to do my mulesing next year?'

"I said I'd come back and do it - I've got to start that next week, there's 3500-4000 lambs, it'll give me something to do for a few days.

"We're still backwards and forwards to the farm to give Ian a hand when he needs it.

"But (at Lancelin) I've got a good boat to go fishing when the weather is right, I've got a good vegie garden in the back, a patch of lawn at the front - life's good."

Mr Simmons grew up on the farm next door to his own and he and his older brother went shearing when they finished school.

"There wasn't enough work on the farm for both of us," he said.

"Then I bought a bush block (next to the family farm) and made a farm out of that - Gail and I got married in March and we bought the bush block in July.

"We got a small flock from my father- we were in partnership with him for a while and got a few surplus sheep to begin with.

"Gail was my right-hand man on the farm, we did all the hard work together - always 100pc Merino, no cropping.

"We got up to 4500 sheep back in the late 1980s - we bought another block of cleared land and ran wethers on that for two or three years - and we got up to 125 bales of wool in our clip at our best.

"In the later years we've cut our numbers back to make life a bit easier."

Mr Simmons said they used rams from Woolkabin stud at Woodanilling exclusively for more than 30 years and paid up to $16,000 for one a few years ago.

"We've still got that ram - we bought good rams and we've got a nucleus flock," he said.

"I used to go down and shear sheep at their (Woolkabin) field days for them and Elliott (stud founder Elliott Patterson who died in 2011) gave me a ute load of the stud ewes I shore to take back to the farm.

"I put down a lot of my sheep learning to shearing.

"You learn from different farmers, the ones that are doing alright when you go there to shear, you pick their brains and the ones that are not doing so good, you shy away from.

"The one thing I do know, if you don't put fertiliser on, the sheep don't do any good - they're completely different sheep to shear.

"Fertiliser was always our first priority on the farm."

Mr Simmons, who classed his own clips, said their last one was shorn a month early because of difficulty in getting shearers, but the main fleece line of eight bales still came in at 105 millimetres in staple length and the rest of the fleece lots ranged from 103mm to 89mm.

Staple strength ranged from 52N/kt to 29N/kt across the nine fleece lots.

Mr Poingdestre described the clip as very good, consistent wool from good commercial sheep.