Farm to fleece to market

Fibersheds are the latest entry in the grow local movement

by

Isthmus Cover Stories

I met Rainy on a dry fall afternoon. As I dug my fingers into his fleece, lustrous and warm, the other sheep at Oak Springs Farm eyed me curiously, some also approaching to receive head scratches. The farm, owned by Karen and George Mayhew, is located on a rise in the Driftless area of southwest Wisconsin. The couple raises heritage Clun Forest sheep and Clun mules like Rainy, a crossbreed of a Clun Forest ewe and a Bluefaced Leicester ram whose wool has nice bounce and takes dye well.

The Mayhews know their animals by name, use such sustainable practices as rotational grazing, and enjoy the relationships they’ve built over the years with the fiber artists and neighbors to whom they provide wool and lambs. Like many other small-scale farmers they also need off-farm jobs that make it possible to keep their flock.

Small farms like this are the heart of the fibershed movement, a national initiative working to support small sheep and flax farmers and boost the relationship between fiber farmers and fiber artists. Ultimately, fibersheds work to create what movement founder Rebecca Burgess calls a “place-based textile system.”

Similar to the local food movement, fibersheds emphasize connections between place and people, prioritize the health of the local ecosystem and champion the labor of farmers and manufacturers. They promote farmers through online directories, farm tours, and other educational events.

Wisconsin’s climate is good for raising sheep for wool and for growing flax, the plant that can be processed into linen fabric. So it makes sense that Wisconsin is home to three fibershed groups: Fibershed Heartland in southwest Wisconsin and northwest Illinois, Northern Pines Fibershed in northern Wisconsin, and the Three Rivers Fibershed that encompasses western Wisconsin and parts of Iowa and Minnesota.

Practically speaking, these fibersheds draw attention to the production of wool and flax and build and grow markets, so small textile farmers can have meaningful and sustainable businesses.

But ultimately their vision is more transformative. The Three Rivers Fibershed’s mission statement is unapologetic on this point: “It is our mission to abolish unjust textile systems and create in their place, strong, decentralized textile economies that build from the resources within our own communities.”

Building the movement

Alex Spaulding is a member of the Northern Pines Fibershed. She also works as the field and market manager at Red Door Family Farm, an organic produce CSA in Athens, and serves as the Marathon County chapter president of the Wisconsin Farmers Union.

Spaulding says that people generally understand why local food is valuable and why protecting clean water is important, but understanding the need for local fiber is “on the edge of people’s awareness.”

Three years ago, Spaulding started growing flax at the Red Door Family Farm, about the same time that the Northern Pines Fibershed started organizing. As Northern Pines grows, it is finding success in farm tours and events like the flax harvesting day at Red Door last fall.

“We started by talking about the farm, and then jumped into a deep dive of how I grow flax at the farm, how it is harvested and spun,” says Spaulding. The event drew participants from Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula as well as Wisconsin.

“We don’t often think about how we get dressed or how many textiles are in our lives on a daily basis, like the towels we use to shower or our clothing that keeps us warm or cool,” says Spaulding. “Fibersheds teach people where those things come from and why choosing better sources is important. They’re in a key position to get people to make that connection.”

Jane Hansen raises Coopworth sheep at Autumn Larch Farm in Ogema. She’s also on the board of the Three Rivers Fibershed. Hansen says that the fibershed has made a big difference in her farming experience since she joined in 2017. When Hansen bought her first sheep in 2009, Price County had a UW-Extension agent who provided university-tested advice on soil erosion, livestock management practices like rotational grazing, marketing, and more. Price County lost that agent due to permanent budget cuts following Act 10. Now the fibershed fills the gap, with monthly Zoom meetings where participants share resources on sheep shearers and supplements for new lambs, says Hansen.

Wisconsin’s fibersheds are a relatively recent development, spurred by changes in the local agricultural industry and inspired by the fibershed movement that began in 2011, when Rebecca Burgess, a weaver and natural dyer, founded the first fibershed. What started as a project to produce her own clothes from fibers and human labor all within 150 miles of her home in North Central California sparked a global grassroots movement that now boasts more than 79 fibersheds in 18 countries.

Kathryn Prince is president of Fibershed Heartland, which launched in 2020. She works in pollinator conservation and learned about the fibershed movement while working in agriculture in California. After hearing a talk by Burgess and learning about plastic pollution from clothing, Prince decided she “wanted to get plastic out of [her] wardrobe.”

Prince has a simple message: “consume less, consume intentionally, consume locally.” “Locally,” in the case of Fibershed Heartland, stretches from the Driftless to as far east as Milwaukee. Fibershed Heartland catalogs the producers of this region in its online directory so consumers have easy access to the resources within their fibershed.

“Madison has a very progressive stance about organic farming and sourcing locally, so there’s a huge market here for the values of the fibershed,” says Prince. “Then in the Driftless, we have all these sheep farmers and a few mills. A big part of what we do is connecting producers and consumers.”

When consumers attend one of Fibershed Heartland’s events — like a recent clothing swap at the Willy Street Co-op’s Aubergine space, and upcoming mending workshops to teach patching and darning at the Textile Arts Center in Madison — they’re learning ways to consume more sustainably themselves: “The most sustainable clothes are what you already have,” says Prince.

Good for the soil

Joanne Andrew grows produce and raises poultry as well as Shetland sheep on her farm, Kettle Moraine Meadows, in Kewaskum. Her sheep browse the overgrown buckthorn and graze the weeds and invasive goldenrod from the rocky pastures. Andrew doesn’t use herbicides “because the sheep will do a better job, and it feeds them.”

Many shepherds follow pasture management practices like rotational grazing. Beth Ivankovic, who raises Cotswold sheep in Eau Claire, moves her sheep every few days to allow the land to regrow and refresh. “What I’ve learned with sheep is that you can really improve pastures so that they’re absorbing more water, holding water in place, preventing runoff, and filtering out the water that lands on it better because of the organic materials you have in your pastures and in the soil. It really protects your watershed,” says Ivankovic.

These farmers are also good at finding ways to market every part of the sheep, even waste fleece that is too full of hay and other vegetable matter to send to the mill. Both Ivankovic and Karen Mayhew process discarded fleece into “wool pellets” that home gardeners can add to their vegetable gardens as fertilizer.

These practices fall under the wide umbrella of environmental sustainability. But farmers wouldn’t practice them if they weren’t also sustainable to their businesses. Rotational grazing means that for part of the year, farmers don’t have to buy feed.

Prince, of Fibershed Heartland, says that many farmers are motivated to try sustainable practices through federal or local cost-share programs in order to survive in a tough market. But “if you can’t qualify for big ag subsidies, the way you stay afloat is by using sustainability practices. It turns out that having healthier soil increases your yield. And having a good rotational grazing plan for your sheep makes your property able to support more sheep,” says Prince. “What’s good in practice, is good on a label.”

Many of these farmers are also raising endangered heritage breeds of sheep like Bluefaced Leicester, Cotswold, Clun Forest and Shetland. “Maintaining biodiversity within livestock and poultry — whether you use their products or not — is central to the long-term health of agriculture,” says Jeannette Beranger, senior program manager for The Livestock Conservancy, a nonprofit that protects endangered livestock and poultry from extinction.

Currently there are just a few breeds that produce the vast majority of the nation’s food and fiber. The lack of genetic diversity in commercial livestock is a problem when it comes to disease. But heritage sheep, bred for survival and self-sufficiency, can thrive in “challenging and changing environments,” Beranger says.

Shepherds are eager to share the unique qualities of their heritage breeds. Ivankovic praises the heartiness of her good-natured Cotswold flock, saying they “can be outside 24/7. I do have run-in sheds in case it gets super cold, but I’ll go out and it’s negative 20 degrees and they’re lying outside. And they’re doing a great job on my pastures.”

A farmer-focused program from The Livestock Conservancy called Shave ‘Em to Save ‘Em helps farmers preserve heritage breeds by incentivizing fiber artists to use their wool. Shave ‘Em to Save ‘Em has been a game-changer for farmers and their animals, says Beranger. With it, rare breed producers “are actually making money on their wool which hasn’t happened in a long time.”

Still, shepherds say they wish fiber artists better understood how much work goes into producing clean, quality fiber, from wool fleeces to roving and spun yarn. If a $35 price tag for a single skein of yarn is a shock to the system, that’s because global capitalism has made clothing and labor cheap.

Raising flax

Right now, you can’t find Wisconsin-grown linen, the textile produced from the flax plant, despite the fact that flax is one of the oldest cultivated plants and it thrives in Wisconsin’s temperate climate. There was a time when Wisconsin had a flax industry. Around the Civil War, there were two flax mills in eastern Wisconsin as Northerners sought alternatives to Southern cotton. But both those mills closed by the end of the 19th century.

There are some farmers like Alex Spaulding who are growing flax, but on the artisanal scale. That’s because there’s no supply chain for flax fiber in Wisconsin, starting with not having enough domestic seed supply, says Steffen Mirsky, an outreach specialist at UW-Madison specializing in commercialization of emerging crops. Crops like hemp, that have made the transition from artisanal to commercial scale, he suggests, could be a model for flax.

Flax would also diversify the farmers’ current crop rotation, which is mostly corn, beans and alfalfa. A more diverse crop rotation “helps break disease and pest cycles, especially when you have a crop from a different family,” says Sam Bibby of UW-Madison Extension.

Farmers will also need to be convinced that there’s a market for their flax harvests, and this is tricky. Flax will eventually have to compete with row crops, which Bibby says tend to be influenced by politics, and subsidies and ethanol mandates. “But a stable market with contracts that guarantee profit or revenue would go a long way.”

Leslie Schroeder is co-founder of the Midwest Linen Revival. She says there’s no better time for a linen revival, noting that flax garments don’t shed microplastics, for one thing. They’re also lightweight, breathable and durable.

She’s worked with Bibby to test growing and harvesting flax., partnered with UW’s Emerging Crops Accelerator and has received grant funding from WiSys for a supply chain feasibility study hoping to make flax fiber a reality for textile enthusiasts and a profitable crop for traditional row crop farmers. She’s also looking for allies within Wisconsin’s manufacturing industry to see if flax could replace carbon fiber in bioplastic composites, for example.

Not only does Schroeder grow flax, she also processes it into yarn. She says “we should stand in awe” of the care and quality that goes into making handcrafted items. As luxury brands become indistinguishable from fast fashion, Schroeder predicts that handmade, locally sourced garments will become the future of fashion, something that should excite any knitter or sewist.

Schroeder hopes that one day it could be possible to wear a garment sourced entirely from Midwest linen. It would be like wearing a piece of Wisconsin, says Schroeder.

Better than a data center

A growing number of groups are signing on to support fibersheds. Most recently the Wisconsin Farmers Union, an advocacy and lobbying group, published a policy brief in support of the state’s fibersheds. It calls on the Wisconsin Legislature to create a grant program to support the development of flax farming in the state as well as the building of fiber processing infrastructure for both flax and wool that would include mills, shearers and dyers.

Wisconsin has few large textile mills left and while there are a number of small “cottage” mills in the state, those are for wool only, not flax. Cerissa Stockton runs Twisted Oak Farm in Spooner where she also raises Icelandic sheep. Her mill can’t process the volume of fleece a larger mill could, and she is often constrained by the time and energy it takes to wash raw wool and prepare it for the picking and carding machine. Opening more mills would certainly ease the stress on the system, and more than a few farmers hope that these new mills could be cooperatively owned.

But “there’s still some infrastructure here that allows people who are interested in sourcing locally to be able to do that,” says Prince, of Fibershed Heartland. “Wisconsin has all the right ingredients to scale up,” she adds, from farms and mills throughout the Driftless to large metro markets like Madison.

Ultimately, farmers would like to make more money for their labor and be able to support their families with their farms. Supporting their labor is one way to protect Wisconsin’s family farms from being turned into commercial zones or, worse yet, AI data centers. Instead, as Prince advises, “consume less, consume intentionally, consume locally.”