Margaret River, known for wine and surf, seems an unlikely place for a new breed of sheep.

But just as surprising is the man behind a 25-year breeding program which has led to the new "lamb master" meat sheep.

Neil Garnett made his name in the fine wool industry. He was once Australia's most successful merino breeder, setting an industry record — that has stood for 30 years — of $450,000 for a ram.

The fleece of a merino sheep. ( ABC Rural: Emma Brown )

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He has re-emerged from a quarter of a century of self-imposed media silence to launch his new breed, which is a fast-growing, easy-care meat sheep with its own registered trademark.

Mr Garnett gained national notoriety as the owner of South Australia's historic Collinsville merino stud.

When it collapsed in 1990, leaving debts reported at the time worth $43 million, it made him the biggest individual bankrupt in SA history.

The spectacular crash and burn came after the Australian Government withdrew its guarantee of the reserve floor price for wool, which sparked the greatest crisis in the industry's long history, with more than $15 billion lost and 12 million unwanted sheep slaughtered.

The value of Australian wool has reached record highs lately. ( Supplied: Mecardo )

From wool to meat

Mr Garnett had moved from Gnowangerup in WA in 1985 to take on Collinsville and immediately captured the industry's imagination through innovation.

He pioneered breeding techniques such as frozen sperm, laparoscopic insemination and the synchronisation of ewe fertility cycles.

Now he has spoken publicly for the first time about the events which led to Collinsville's collapse.

He has accepted responsibility for debts worth $23 million but said he was a convenient scapegoat for circumstances beyond his control.

"When you get into a situation where blame is required, the Wool Corporation was in [a] mode of collapsing," Mr Garnett said.

"We were banking with the State Bank, the only bank in the history of Australia to collapse. It was chaotic … very troubled times.

"We had just been through the interest rates of 19 per cent. I'm not sure how people would cope these days with those sort of hits.

"Whilst I'm not trying to blame other people, of course there were policy decisions you make especially when the government guaranteed the floor price for wool and that it would never change."

Mr Garnett oversaw the world record price for a Merino broken six times. ( Landline: Glyn Jones )

Mr Garnett said his whole business plan was based on the success of the Wool Corporation, which was admired globally for its industry leadership.

"I was the only shareholder in Collinsville. There was no-one else, there was just me," Mr Garnett said.

Mr Garnett added he was proud to achieve world record prices at Collinsville on about 10 occasions and for bringing cutting-edge technology to the merino-breeding industry.

Before the collapse he had increased turnover at the farm from $2 million to $10 million in a single year and sold $1 million worth of semen from a single ram.

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"I had to take most of the blame. It's Murphy's Law, this is what happens," Mr Garnett said.

"If I was five years earlier or five years later, it would have been a completely different story.

"We just simply got to work using technology and using everything I'd ever learned to introduce change into the wool industry," Mr Garnett said.

The lamb master is a composite of eight different meat sheep breeds and owes its genesis to Mr Garnett's involvement with a breeding group, which imported 10,000 embryos of meat sheep breeds such as the Damara into Australia in the early 1990s.

Mr Garnett had been working on the lamb master ever since, selectively breeding from the best meat sheep breeds in Africa, Israel and Europe.

The new breed of sheep 25 years in the making. ( Landline: Robert Koenig-Luck )

"I sort of felt that I'd climbed Mount Everest in the wool industry and I really wanted to do something completely different and certainly these sheep couldn't be more different because their skin is like a cow," he said.

"It's completely no wool, no shearing, but it has a lot of the common traits and common principles in developing this new breed."

Mr Garnett said he had selected genetic traits to emphasise easy care, strong confirmation, high fertility and good feet for walking long distances.

The lamb master would be ideal for marginal rangeland grazing or on small blocks that needed low-maintenance sheep that could keep grass down like cattle.

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