Michael on the market options for raw wool in Vermont

“So you’ve got some, some things that Vermont, commodity wool, if you want to sell your wool and get it into one of those beautiful bumps of comb top, you have to have white wool breeds you have to have a fine wool breed and you kind of have to have a lot of it, really to make somebody interested in either coming to get it or taking the time to, you know, sort it for you and grade and getting it into that system. And it doesn’t pay a lot. It’s just you know nothing. And if you want to market to hand spinners, you have to put in a lot of effort to get a perfect fleece because that’s what a handspinner wants. They don’t want to have to pick all the hay and all the poop and all that stuff. It’s got to be really pristine. Handspinners love that, as you know. That’s what makes it really delightful experience is when it’s a pleasure, every aspect of it, even scouring. Yeah, so that’s a challenge. Vermont loves to have every breed of sheep that you could possibly think of, the farmers here have everything. You know, the latest is the Valais Blacknose Sheep that a few folks have gotten and they’re beautiful and they’re cute, cute, cute, but their wools not great. There’s nothing great about that wool. So what happens when people get tired of just seeing the cuteness? You know, is that something, Is that really sustainable or Vermont in terms of wool? Probably not, probably not. So Vermont can’t really participate much in commodity wool like that. There are a few larger sheep producers. And like Dave Martin, who’s the president of the Vermont Sheep and Goat Association, he’s got, he’s lambing out 65 ewes this year, it’s a lot and his flock are mostly kind of a Montadale breed. So there are a white wool breed, kind of not the finest of wool, but you know, occasionally he lucks out and he’s got some really beautiful fleeces, I’ve spun some nice wool for him. So he’s kind of at the high end of number of sheep in terms of, and when you have that many sheep, you’re obviously not going to produce the kind of quality fleece that a handspinner is going to just die for. You’re going to need to get it into some kind of commodity program. And in Vermont, there’s the wool pool or has been, I don’t know if we have one this year had one last or not, but we have in past years had this wool pool. And there’s a buyer, which is, it varies who it is. And they come to Vermont with their truck, and they’ll pick up basically anything, they’ll take anything that you’ve got, and they’ll pay you 60 cents a pound or some something not much, not very much. And some of those fleeces will wind up in, potentially in a, in a bump like this, or it might wind up in the carpet industry or some other industrial use. But it doesn’t even pay for the shearing, in most cases. So it makes you wonder why? Why would anybody get sheep? Well, why would anybody own a mill? Because they love it. And even if it didn’t pay anything, they’d still do it.”

Sam on the end of government programs supporting wool

“When my wife and I kept our ewe flock in Dummerston, we were marketing all of our wool to the Green Mountain Spinnery. And we took a lot of care and skirting the wool and then grading it, so we had like, would sell fine wool and medium wool and we were able to really market it more aggressively by taking really good care of it and providing really clean high quality wool to the Green Mountain Spinnery that they would then use to make their yarns. And that at that time, so this was back in the middle 90s, there was still a really, really good pro government program, the wool incentive program, where they would, they were they were actually paying 230% of what you were able to sell the wool for as a government program. So I just filed with the Farm Service Agency, so if we sold our wool, fine wool, to the Green Mountain Spinnery at 90 cents a pound, the government would then send us a check for 90 times 230%. So it was like it, it more than paid for the shearing. And now I’m getting the LDP payment, loan deficiency payment for wool, it’s another government program, and they’re paying 40 cents a pound just across the board, which doesn’t even pay for the cost of shearing. So the shearing is an expense and that’s, to me, that’s the biggest challenge with the sheep is for years and you know, 1000s of years they’ve been bred to produce lamb and wool. And now, the second thing that they do is no value at all.”

Mary on how challenging it is to make money from raising sheep

“It can feel like, because the market prices for lamb don’t really match up with the expenses of just the slaughter and butchering, not to mention the expenses of raising a sheep. So if you’re just looking at like how much money you get when you sell lamb, or how much money you get when you sell yarn, which is even worse, it’s like impossible to make money. It’s not impossible, but it’s like pretty close to impossible to make money off of yarn. There’s a great article that was in taproot magazine, and it was about like, the real price of yarn. And so this farmer figured it out. And she was like, if I really wanted to actually make money from yarn, I’d have to charge so much. Because a real skein of yarn is like $60 worth of work. So to make money off of that, I’d have to charge more than $60 a skein. And skeins of yarn are like $30. So it’s like really crazy. But to put all of those things together, like the money you make from yarn, the money make you from lamb, the improvement that you’re doing to your land, and the sheep skins and animal sales all this stuff, you can kind of come out ahead….Because people ask me all the time, well if you charge me this much for shearing, that means I got to charge this much. How am I going to make what I need to pay you from the wool? And I’m like, you might not be able to, but your animals will be healthier, like you have to shear em. So it’s hard. It’s hard to justify those things. So it’s like I can’t shear for free.”

Don on the instability of wool prices

“In addition, the market for wool have always been fickle. When we began raising sheep, it was supported by a government subsidy. So for every pound of wool that you can produce in 1975, let’s say, and sell for, in a good year, maybe $2 a pound in wholesale markets, the government would pay you another $3 for that pound of wool. Fabulous. It wasn’t as sweet deal as the dairy farmers had, where the government basically agrees to buy all the milk you can produce at a price that is not unprofitable to an efficient producer. And that’s why there was too many dairy farms, too much milk, too many cows. They had, they had a great government subsidy. We had a pretty good government subsidy and it was based on the perception that the military needs wool for high quality uniforms. And we wouldn’t want to be in that position of having to buy that wool from outside the US, you want to have a domestic source for wool. So that justified the government pumping up the price of wool. The market for wool is really worldwide, because it keeps so long and so easily. So the wool that’s produced in North America has to compete with wool from Australia, South Africa, New Zealand anywhere really. In Australia, the government had been, not secretly, but quietly propping up the price of wool for many years by putting most of it into warehouses. Wow, interesting. You can make parallels with the price of oil and the ways in which oil gets stored and you know, but and so the the world price of wool, both Australia and in the world was artificially high because the Australians were doing this. This is in the 70s? Yeah. And then because of world events, and I think it involves the demise of the Soviet Empire because the Soviets had been buying a fair amount of Australian wool for their military. But then when this when the Soviet Empire went belly up, I forget when that was, they stopped buying Austrailian wool. And now there was really too much wool in the market. So the Australian said, you know, fuck this, we’re going to open the warehouses and sell this stuff. And the world price for wool droped to about 10 cents a pound, and it had been a dollar a pound in the 1840s.”

Don on the end of the wool pool

“For many years the Vermont Sheep Breeder’s Association would sponsor an open wool pool, anybody could bring shorn fleeces to a place, it was usually at the state’s ag school in Randolph, VT. And there would be one big buyer who would buy everything at a price, let’s say $1.39 a pound or something, you could sell your wool. And then I think they stopped doing that about the time that COVID came in. So now there’s a lot of wool sitting around the state. And it’s very heterogeneous in quality, so usually it gets all mixed up together and made into socks or something where there doesn’t have to be a particular consistency or fineness. There are other ways to sell wool, but usually it means you as the producer front the money to a smaller scale woolen mill to have it made into yarn, then you’ve got to sell the yarn to people. And as I said, before, I like production management, but not sales in that kind of niche system. There was even some of the bigger woolen mills in the region have became notorious for not paying the bills on time, not paying customers for their wool. So I’m not sure what’s gonna happen along those lines.”