Why We Need to Add Wool Back to Our Closets and Homes
I talk a lot about meat (and food in general) in our Factual Fridays - which makes sense, given that we raise livestock for meat.
But there’s another commodity that I think is worth talking about a bit more: fiber.
When we first got sheep back in 2018, our plan was to raise Icelandics for both meat and fiber. What we quickly learned, however, is that the US wool market is far from what it used to be.
**J&R Pierce Family Farm is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to allow sites to earn advertising fees by linking to products on Amazon. I often link to Amazon when recommending certain products, and if you choose to purchase, I may earn a small percentage of the sale. It costs you nothing extra, and all recommended products are ones that I personally vouch for.**
Our Farm and Wool
Our first few years of raising sheep, we paid a shearer to come in and take care of it for us. Since we only had five sheep the first year and only a couple dozen the year after, that made financial sense, especially since our shearer only charged $5 per head (in my opinion, far less than what he should have been charging).
In year one, our plan was to sell the wool…until we realized how little wool was selling for. Even if we washed and carded the fiber ourselves, we were going to lose money just sending it away to be spun into yarn.
We learned how to shear sheep ourselves, but shortly after, decided to transition to hair sheep. The meat was what was selling, and we wanted to transition to a breed that would produce a meatier lamb and didn’t need to be sheared.
After all, even if you don’t plan to do anything with the wool, wool sheep still need to be sheared for their comfort, to reduce heat stress, and to reduce the risk of parasites and other diseases.
The best sheep shearers in the world don’t take very long to clip a sheep - the fastest recorded time was 37.90 seconds - not minutes, seconds - by Ivan Scott in Ireland. That’s the record, of course - the average time a professional shearer will take is a few minutes, while for novices like us, it takes closer to 15 minutes to half an hour, depending on the animal.
It’s incredibly labor-intensive. Few trades burn as many calories as professional sheep shearers - it’s estimated that a single day of shearing burns more calories than running a marathon.
We have nothing against hard work, but doing all that work just to have sheep that didn’t get as big as we needed to didn’t seem like a smart investment, so we made the switch to hair sheep and haven’t looked back.
Through all this, though, we realized the paltry state the American fiber industry is in.
The Current State of the American Wool Industry
Very little wool is imported into the United States. We currently produce around $45.36 million dollars worth of shorn wool per year. The largest buyer? The Department of Defense, capturing roughly 15 to 20% of the market for uniforms and bedding.
Prior to 2018, China was the biggest buyer, purchasing about 59% of American wool. Then, trade relations fell apart, leading to an exchange of penalty tariffs on a laundry list of products, including wool. COVID-19 made things worse as textile production facilities shuttered in China as well as the rest of the world.
Currently, we have massive stockpiles of unused wool sitting in factories. Nobody knows what to do with it.
One of the biggest drivers for this change is that Americans, along with the rest of the world, are moving away from wool in favor of cheaper textiles like nylon, rayon, cotton, and of course, polyester - the most widely produced fiber
There are two key reasons for that: cost, and animal welfare concerns. Cost is perhaps the biggest driver.
Cost
Polyester comprises half of the world’s fiber market all on its own - and it’s petroleum-based, a part of the fossil fuel industry we seldom talk about.
Wool lasts a lot longer than polyester and can be produced locally - but it costs more. About 97% of our apparel is made overseas, something that has drawn a lot of scrutiny, with the “fast fashion” industry in particular being criticized for its reliance on cheap (poor) labor and contributions to environmental degradation.
However, I’d like to note here that wool is a unique fiber compared to others because it’s extremely high in carbon. Sheep are essentially mini-carbon sequesters, walking around with emissions-fighting fibers growing right on their backs.
Comfort
Another issue is that wool isn’t always the most comfortable. The biggest market for wool is in next-to-skin fabrics, the ones that have made brands like SmartWool so famous.
There are companies that have developed solutions to this, creating blends that are more comfortable to wear and not quite so scratchy.
The Value of Wool
We also need to recognize the other ways wool can be integrated back into the environment. Even if you don’t wear wool, it still has immense value as a commodity crop in the US.
Fertilizer
One is as fertilizer. When we were still shearing our sheep, we used all the shorn wool (rather than selling it at a loss) as a compost ingredient. It’s high in nitrogen and releases nutrients slowly - unlike other high-nitrogen organic fertilizers like chicken manure.
The issue with wool as fertilizer is that it’s dense, heavy, and tough to transport. Some companies have come up with a solution to this, creating a new market for wool by turning large fleeces into wool fertilizer pellets that can easily be applied to gardens.
Fabrics
Coarser wool can also be used for interior fabrics, like carpets and rugs.
Here, wool shines in another way. I already mentioned how polyester is one of the most widely sold fabrics in the world.
It’s not just used in clothing, however, but in things like linens. Polyester bedding is manufactured chemically, sometimes blended with other natural fibers to create a more natural feel. However, the thermoplastic particles in polyester create plastic molecules during the heating process (and the blends themselves are often treated with things like ammonia and formaldehyde).
Even furniture, carpets, and rugs can contain VOCs, or volatile organic compounds. Volatile organic compounds are gasses emitted from certain liquids and solids. Products that contain VOCs release them back into the air we breathe in a process known as off-gassing.
That’s not to say that these chemicals are always inherently bad, but in an indoor environment, particularly one that’s not well-ventilated, VOC-containing products can be harmful, with high levels of VOCs causing symptoms like eye and nose irritation, the worsening of asthma symptoms, and headaches.
Formaldehyde is one of the most potent VOCs and again, is often used to treat polyester fabrics.
So it’s easy to see that making the wool swap here makes a lot of sense.
What About Animal Welfare?
The other part of the argument here is the animal welfare one. We’ve developed a distaste for wool in this country, some of which is due to price and personal comfort preferences, but some of which is due to a misguided perception that it’s cruel to animals.
I can’t speak for every single farmer in the world - I’m sure there are, and always will be, bad actors - as there are in every single industry in every single walk of life.
Some people worry that sheep are injured during the shearing process. There’s an absolutely appalling image that PETA likes to circulate of a lamb bloodied and battered, with the caption, “Here’s the rest of your wool coat.”
The image doesn’t make sense for a lot of reasons, one of them being that it’s clearly a young lamb who wouldn’t have been sheared yet anyway. The other big issue there is that I don’t know any professional shearer - at least not one with a reputation to uphold - who would do that to an animal.
Not only would it be cruel to do that to an animal - it would take an actual sadist to think it’s okay to treat an animal that way - but it would destroy your business because the wool would be of such poor quality. Not only that, but most countries have laws in place to make sure the sheep are not injured during shearing.
Let’s use our brains here. There are certainly sadists in the world, and again, I’m sure there are plenty of bad apples. But that’s a human problem - not a wool problem.
Another site claims that sheep are “deprived of food and water before being shorn, in part so they’ll feel weak and put up minimal resistance.” That statement is laughable. The reason why animals are often sheared in a fasted state (usually just food, by the way, not water), is so that they aren’t full and trying to digest food when they’re rumped (sat on their butts) to be sheared.
Fasting an animal prior to shearing is done primarily to make the animal more comfortable. Just like it’s uncomfortable for you to sit or move in a certain way after you’ve had a large meal, it’s also uncomfortable for the animals.
We also “fast” our animals before administering dewormers and other medications - just like you might be asked to fast before going into a medical procedure.
The doctors aren’t asking you to fast so you put up less of a fuss on the exam table. They’re doing it so that the treatments or tests they’re doing are more effective. It’s logic - but it’s logic we often forget when it comes to cute, cuddly animals like sheep.
So What’s the Solution?
Some people argue that it’s cruel to shear sheep because in the wild, they would not grow that excess wool and would instead just shed it off naturally, like other animals do. That’s true. Humans have selectively bred sheep for their wool for at least 10,000 years, which is why they now require regular shearing.
We can’t simply go back to not shearing, at least not from an animal welfare point of view.
To release these animals into the wild and allow them to revert to their natural state is not only impractical, but arguably just as inhumane - producers who’ve dealt with coyote, wolf, or mountain lion problems know what happens to a sheep left to its own devices.
I’d argue that a comfortable life of 10-12 years spent eating grain and hay and getting a once- or twice- a year haircut is favorable to three or four years in the wild, that then ends with a life cut short by a hungry predator who doesn’t care about making sure your death is quick and painless.
So for the folks arguing that we need to stop raising sheep for wool production…I think that ship has sailed. For those saying we should stop intervening and let sheep go back to their natural state, I encourage you to think about life without any kind of intervention at all.
Not shearing, a modern practice, by all means, would be the equivalent of asking you to skip all of your doctor’s checkups and stop taking your medications. Our earliest ancestors didn’t see doctors, did they? They didn't take statins. They didn't get a flu shot.
When we think about any industry that has anything to do with animals, it’s very easy to get caught up in a conversation about what’s humane and what isn’t (and that's not a bad thing. Animal welfare DOES matter). But the reality is that the world we currently live in does require a give and take.
We rely on animals to meet some of our needs, just as they rely on us for theirs. We can certainly do this with constant attention to animal welfare and well-being, but, as always, we need to keep the big picture in mind.
For those arguing that plant-based products and foods are cruelty-free and a better alternative to safeguard animal welfare…I invite you to learn how crops are harvested.
Soy fabric, one of the biggest fibers PETA would like to see us transition to, is made from, you guessed it…soy plants. Soy is harvested with combines.
Combines, along with other machinery used to harvest crops, kills more than 7.3 billion animals each year - not counting insects. But since they’re not the “cute, famous ones” - we’re talking about mice, ground nesting birds, sometimes deer, etc - it’s easier to ignore those deaths and focus on the easier targets.
The Takeaway
The long story short is - if you eat, you harm animals. And likely, what we wear has a similar impact. But let’s focus on fibers that can make a difference in other ways.
Wool is perhaps the most sustainable fiber there is. We don’t use it nearly enough, whether it’s on our backs, in our carpets, or in our gardens.
While I completely respect that price may still be an understandable concern for many, my hope is that, with greater awareness of how the wool industry actually operates, we can return to some of our roots and start incorporating it more.
