With wool selling for only 10 to 70 cents a pound, sheep farmers say it makes more financial sense to burn or compost it rather than pay to clean, bag and transport it to the Lower Mainland, then Alberta or Ontario for processing
Lamb prices have never been better, but John and Lorraine Buchanan are at a loss when it comes to the endless amounts of wool that comes off their ewes and market lambs.
“In the old days, a fleece was worth a day’s work … now it’s less than five minutes,” says John, who has been farming sheep since 1969 on the Island. “The farmer I learned from said he would pay for his winter feed from the wool he took off that year, and the lambs were going to be for his wages. Now winter feed is nearly $200 [a sheep] and the wool isn’t even worth a dollar.”“It’s just not worth selling it anymore for the amount of work you’ve got to do to sell it,” said Lorraine Buchanan.
“Most of the wool that’s grown around here gets thrown away,” said John. “If you’ve got five sheep and you’re getting a dollar a fleece, it’s not worth worrying about.” The wool is shipped from depots in the Fraser Valley and Kamloops and trucked to mills in Lethbridge or Carstairs, Alta., or loaded onto trains to Carleton Place, Ont., where it’s graded and prepared for world markets.
Barbara Ydenberg, B.C. director for the Canadian Co-operative Wool Growers, who operates a 60-head sheep farm in Langley, said it’s a challenge for Island producers who face the extra cost of ferries to bring their wool to a depot.Instead of keeping it clean and dry, many aren’t bothering to even keep it. “Wool Growers is trying to make an effort to collect it, but there isn’t enough wool to collect, so it’s a vicious circle, really.
“I have farmers who live in Maple Ridge fairly close to me and they say it’s not worth the fuel to deliver them,” said Stevens. “So you can imagine the farmers on the Island, or even places like Williams Lake. The depots are few and far between for them to get their wool to market.” And while demand for fine wool such as Merino — from Merino sheep — is up, coarser types produced in Canada have tanked by more than 65% since 2018.
She’s already collected more than 6,000 pounds of fleece and waste wool and is processing the material, selling online and in a growing number of retailers. She’s eager to expand outside the Okanagan. Maksymiuk said the business not only helps the struggling B.C. wool industry, it boosts food and plant production in times of severe drought.
Ydenberg said the Canadian Co-operative Wool Growers is also studying new uses for wool, including as packaging fill that can replace polystyrene foam, and as home insulation. She had pieced together a patchwork of equipment — including an 1870-built carding machine made in Philadelphia that was the longest continually operated machine of its kind in North America — and produced custom yarns and wool batts for three years.
In the Cowichan Valley, there was a carding mill from 1978 until about a decade ago, when Sarah Modeste, a Cowichan Tribes member, closed it down. The Modeste carding machine now sits in a Crofton warehouse. Nicole and Jeff Link now operate the province’s only full-service fibre mill out of a 6,000-square-foot facility in Kamloops.
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