Grant Campbell swings into new role with Elders

As president of the Western Australian Axemen's Council, Mr Campbell has just spent six weeks helping to organise a contract to secure logs for the woodchop events at this year's Perth Royal Show in September.

To top it off, he has also secured a world title and two Australian titles for the show's woodchop competitions.

As a sheep man, Mr Campbell has just joined the Elders Wool team as district wool manager for an area sweeping from the South West up to Northam and out to Quairading.

His family background was in timber, rather than sheep.

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"My great grandfather was a timber miller at Darkan and my grandfather owned an earthmoving company that was bought out by Wesfarmers, so I grew up in Collie with a timber and earthmoving background," Mr Campbell said.

But one of his early jobs back in 2001 was with wool - working for construction baron and sheep breeder John Roberts, who provided farmers with an on-farm wool bale core testing service.

Mr Campbell joined the timber industry in 2008, but switched to coal mining when the global financial crisis cut timber harvest quotas to "pretty much nothing".

In 2018, with coal mining becoming more tenuous, he put some of what he had learned as a young man knocking about farms with mates into practice and switched careers again - becoming an agricultural contractor.

"In the first 12 months I found myself working with the same group of farmers and handling the same flocks of sheep four or five times a year," he said.

"So, I started my own business.

"It got me well and truly through COVID.

"I'm probably one of the lucky ones because agriculture never shut down

" I was flat out like a centipede with a skipping rope for a while there.

"While doing some cattle work and helping with fertiliser spreading and seeding, the majority of his work was with sheep.

"Some of the woolgrowers discovered it was an easier option to have me come and pick up their 9000 lambs (for crutching) instead of asking their mum and their wives to pull them out of the catching pen.

"With a lot of the farmers I was going to, their annual shearing ran into harvest so I was pretty much managing their sheep for them - bringing them up out of the paddocks and back lining them before they were let go."

This job led to Mr Campbell ending up at Elders Wool, because he said, in the wool industry, a willingness to help and personality will get you a long way.

He has been at Elders' Bibra Lake wool office for the past month learning about catalogue preparation and auctioning aspects of the industry and will shortly move with colleagues to the new Elders Wool Centre at Rockingham, near where he and his partner have been building a house.

He is also in training for the Perth Royal Show, having first competed there in the woodchop at age 19, and he expects to be competing in his favourite standing block events.