Farm to fashion

 

Mary Jeanne Packer, the founder and co-owner of the Battenkill Fibers mill in Greenwich, NY., checks through some of the yarn the mill makes from locally raised wool. Joan K. Lentini photo

 

By MAURY THOMPSON
Contributing writer

GREENWICH, N.Y.

Just as the farm-to-table movement took off two decades ago to supply restaurants with produce from local farms, a newer “farm-to-fashion” movement has begun to open new markets for area farms that raise sheep, alpacas and other animals for their fiber.

The new, multi-pronged effort is connecting local fiber raisers and regional processers with New York City designers and garment manufacturers, increasing the demand for local fiber while manufacturers promote the importance of domestic fiber.

The concept draws inspiration from the local food movement, said Mary Jeanne Packer, founder and co-owner of Battenkill Fibers, a mill in Greenwich that employs 16 people spinning locally produced fiber into yarn.

“That next step becomes, ‘Who made my clothes? Where are the animals that made our clothes?’” Packer explained.

The strategy already has brought modest growth to the region’s fiber industry, but supporters hope it will gain momentum as they identify new markets and develop the infrastructure needed to support more production.

Earlier this year, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul included a $100,000 line-item grant in her state budget proposal to assist with developing “a fiber sorting and aggregation center” that would pool locally raised fiber to fill orders from garment manufacturers. Hochul also has proposed a new grant program for small farms and fiber raisers.

Assemblywoman Carrier Woerner, D-Round Lake, explained that raisers of animals such as sheep, alpacas, goats and llamas would bring their fiber to the center, where it would be graded and combined with fiber of the same grade from other farms. The facility would accumulate fiber lots ready for quick sale to large-scale customers.

Most of the region’s fiber raisers currently produce small volumes of fiber from herds that are manageable for an individual or couple. The result is that manufacturers interested in using locally raised fiber must contact farms individually to line up enough fiber and then wait for the next shearing — a process that can take months.

“The designers, they don’t want to wait 10 months,” Packer said. “They want it now.”
The new sorting and aggregation center most likely will be located in Mechanicville, in unused space in the same building where a new scouring facility will soon be operating, said Packer and Lilly Marsh, owner of Lilly Marsh Studios in Glens Falls.

Packer and Marsh both are directors of the Hudson Valley Textile Project, which is setting up and will operate the scouring facility. Hudson Valley Textile Project is a nonprofit coalition of fiber industry entrepreneurs that focuses on developing intermediate processing operations between farmers and the fashion industry.

 

Assembling pieces of a puzzle
Pieces of the region’s fiber industry puzzle have been gradually coming together since late 2022, when Hochul signed the New York Textile Act, a law written and sponsored by Woerner and state Sen. Michelle Hinchey, D-Saugerties, who is chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee.
The law established fiber textiles as a priority for Empire State Development Corp., the state’s economic development agency, and established an industry “working group” to advise the state on farm-to-fashion development.

The first major initiative was a $10 million state grant to establish the Fashion Innovation Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy. The research and development center’s mission is to promote collaboration among universities, businesses and agricultural leaders to use locally produced textiles and help position New York as a leader in sustainable fabric production.

In December, the new center at RPI announced it was seeking applicants for an initial round of competitive grants of up to $10,000 each for initiatives in fiber processing and development. The center is expected to announce the grant recipients soon.

Clean Fleece New York, the new scouring facility at Mechanicville, is another piece in the puzzle. The facility repeatedly washes and squeezes fiber to remove dirt and impurities, using equipment resembling an oversized ringer washing machine, and then dries the fiber.

The Mechanicville facility has completed testing and is now beginning to accept fleece for processing, Packer said in a telephone interview in March.

Commercial scouring facilities, the closest of which is in South Carolina, typically will only handle quantities of 1,000 pounds or more. Clean Fleece will handle quantities of 100 pounds or more.
The new facility fills a gap for local farms that typically produce significantly less than 1,000 pounds of fiber per shearing, and its proximity to local producers will greatly reduce transportation time.

Colleen DiVincenzo, the manager of the Clean Fleece facility, described its niche in an April 2023 Zoom presentation.

“What we would consider a reasonably sized flock in our region may have 300 to 500 pounds, which is still a huge pain to wash by hand,” she explained. “However, it’s not enough to meet the minimum of a more commercial-scale facility.”

Packer said in the same presentation that Clean Fleece “is going to make for us is a faster turnaround, a cleaner product, and, hopefully, a little cost savings.”

Another piece in the puzzle, yet to be realized, is to upgrade a small-scale dye house in Schoharie County. The facility needs an additional water supply to be able to increase its capacity, Packer said in an interview in March.

A dye house in Philadelphia that many local producers had been using was damaged by flooding in 2022 and did not reopen.

Expanding to meet demand
The demand for local fiber had been steadily increasing over the past decade and then spiked dramatically during the Covid-19 pandemic, when garment manufacturers had difficulty importing fiber from other countries, Packer said.

At the same time, people staying at home at the height of the pandemic took up knitting and weaving as hobbies, which increased demand for specialty yarns.

Lilly Marsh Studios of Glens Falls, which weaves locally produced fiber into garments, scarves and blankets for farmers to sell, or for wholesale customers, is an example of a local textile operation that benefited from the increased demand.

The operation recently moved into larger quarters at 182 Maple St., a building newly added to The Shirt Factory, a former industrial complex that provides studio spaces to an eclectic range of nearly 100 artists and artisans.

Marsh said she needed a larger space to accommodate several new looms she bought from a weaving center in Indiana that was going out of business.

“I’ve doubled my capacity and hired three employees,” she said.
On the fashion front, the New York fiber industry has begun to have success in supplying fiber to small-brand garment manufacturers. But large brands continue to be a challenge, primarily because of the lower prices they expect to pay, said Laura Sansone, director of the New York Textile Lab, a consulting firm that works with fiber raisers and processors and designers within a 300-mile radius of New York City.

“We’re simply not there as a region yet,” she said.
One of the challenges to pricing is that typically only about 20 percent of the wool or fiber sheared from animals is suitable for garment manufacturing, Packer said.

She added that research is under way to develop new uses for lower-grade wool for such products as fiber wall decor, blankets, rugs and insulation. There is no added cost to the farmer when less wool is discarded, and developing new uses for low-grade wool will lower the overall price of wool, she explained.

“We have to find uses for all the wool that comes off an animal,” she said.

 

Growing agricultural niche
One long-range goal of the region’s fiber industry is to convince the state to offer incentives to garment manufacturers in Southern states to open additional manufacturing plants in New York.
“That’s really the goal — to say, ‘You love our fiber. Come, be close to it,’” Woerner said in a 2022 interview.

Sansone, director of the New York Textile Lab, also works with an organization that certifies that fiber raisers use environmentally sustainable methods. The certification increases the chance of selling fiber to companies that cater to environmentally conscious customers.

Woerner has said fiber farming can be a vital part of keeping agricultural land from being developed at a time when traditional dairy farms struggling to survive. Fiber farms are “value-added” operations that keep the land in production, she explained in 2022.

“It’s a growing sector and one that we are really ready to take a part in,” Woerner said.
Fiber farming also increases tourism, as many raisers offer farm tours and other events that draw interest from outside the region, said Laura Oswald, the economic development director for Washington County. An annual self-guided tour offered by the county’s fiber producers is scheduled for the weekend of April 26-27 (details are at washingtoncountyfibertour.org).
Elsewhere in the tri-state region, the nonprofit group Western Massachusetts Fibershed has been working to collect and pool wool from small farms to create a reliable supply for local crafters and artisans. The group, which hopes to lay the groundwork for a functioning local textile economy, covers the Pioneer Valley and the Berkshires — a region that produces more than 21,000 pounds of sheep’s wool annually, according to a report published last year in the Greenfield Recorder. The region’s fiber producers and artisans show off their work and wares at the Massachusetts Sheep and Woolcraft Festival, held annually on Memorial Day weekend at the Cummington Fairgrounds in Cummington, Mass.

Western Massachusetts Fibershed is a chapter of the national nonprofit organization Fibershed, and Vermont fiber producers have set up a state chapter as well.

Vermont Fibershed’s immediate goal is to establish an online directory of Vermont fiber producers, processors, production weavers, knitters, felters, sewers, dyers and other services, according to the organization’s website. The next project will be to compile a list of near-by out-of-state processors and dye houses.

The Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund, a nonprofit economic development organization, has identified fiber production among its priorities. The fund recently received a Vermont Housing and Conservation Board grant to conduct a wool inventory in Vermont that will develop baseline information about the quantity and quality of wool being raised annually in Vermont for commercial production, the fund recently reported on its website.