More producers should think about shifting their shearing away from the spring and summer peak period to beat labour shortages, industry stakeholders have said.
Shearing contractor Mick Taylor, from Nyngan,NSW, said in regions like far western NSW, woolgrowers tended to be reliant on local shearers and there wasn't enough to meet the demand when growers were changing into summer shearing.
"This time of the year if you lose a shearer, it's very hard... but if you get to the first week in April, you've got 20 phone calls and you could rely on a shearer to come in the next day," he said.
"Good advice to the owners, especially west of Nyngan for instance, where shearers have to come from away to get there, you should seriously think about shearing them anywhere from middle to end of March onwards.
"There are a lot of times of the year when there are plenty of shearers about but probably from November to February is a tough time.
"The New Zealanders come over after their season finishes at the end of February and the workload sort of disperses out again."
Mr Taylor said more producers were moving away from six monthly shearing for economical reasons.
"The money for wool on a 60mm compared to a 90 to 100mm, there's around about a 200 cents discount," he said.
National Wool Harvesting and Training Advisory Group chairman Don Macdonald said coping with the peak shearing period remained a major challenge for the industry, particularly in the southern states.
Mr Macdonald said last year shearers from the UK were recruited to help cope with the busy spring shearing period.
"We're not out of the woods completely but we're in a lot better position than where we were," he said.
"The circumstances that we had back in 2020 are not likely to be repeated again, where you get wet weather, COVID-19 restrictions, border closures, all those things happening at the same time.
"It's the peak period that we still want to focus on.
"There were something like a dozen Welsh shearers that came out for the spring summer period and that's expected to multiply."
Mr Macdonald said even though those measures were helping, they wouldn't altogether alleviate the challenge of finding wool harvesting teams during the peak periods.
"If you want to shear in the peak season in western Queensland or western NSW, you might want to rethink your management schedules because it will still be reasonably hard to attract good people," he said.
SCAA Shearer Woolhandler Training executive officer Glenn Haynes said while the bulk of the work was crammed into the peak period, there would always be times of shearer shortages.
"Where I am in the south east of South Australia around Naracoorte, when I was contracting our run used to go for over 11 months of the year," he said.
"Guys had to put in leave applications... now you wouldn't even get eight months' work around here.
"Most runs would be six months because a lot of people have changed their shearings and gone to crossbreds and they're all trying to shear in that peak season from September through until the end of November.
"In our area we've got roughly four million sheep and they're trying to shear 3 million of them in a three month period.
"The rest of the year you probably need 60 shearers within 100km radius of Naracoorte... all of a sudden in that peak period you need around 275 and then they have to have woolhandlers as well."
Mr Haynes said there hadn't been any problem getting people to take part in training, as eager men and women joined the industry.
"Every single school is full right through until April, we've got waiting lists on every single one... it's lucky we do more than one state because we're sort of shuffling kids in between Victoria and South Australian schools, to try and accomodate everyone," he said.
"South Australia's the same.
"The big improver schools that are 13 stands, they are all full right through until the end of June.
"With the learner school, there's a few spots for them once we get into March, April but most of them have got good numbers on them already."