Having been involved in the shearing industry since the age of 18, Darren Major purchased a crutching business two years ago and now crutches over 180,000 sheep each year.

He also operates a 2023 hectare mixed cropping property and runs 1000 Merino ewes and 300 Merino-Prime SAMM cross ewes and 300 Merino-Prime SAMM-Corriedale cross ewes.

Last year Mr Major noticed many of the flystruck lambs he was crutching were not mulesed.

He said in his area four farmers had trialled not mulesing their lambs and it had gone horribly wrong.

"Some farmers decided they would not mules last year, but they ran into a lot of trouble," Mr Major said.

"Out of those farmers we crutched somewhere around 5000 lambs, all of which had been shorn six weeks prior and over half were struck.

"I was booked in at one farm and couldn't get to another farmer for 10 days.

"By the time I arrived there of the 1500 lambs, 300 couldn't walk.

"It was really disgusting and awful to see.

"These lambs had been shorn in October and only had six weeks of wool on them.

"They were very hard to crutch and were struck very badly."

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He said he had a similar problem at another grower's farm.

"I had crutched some ewe lambs in March and was then called in again to crutch them less than six moths after," he said.