Wool is not dead in Ohio

By Matt Reese

In 2023, the nation’s wool industry saw the end of an era with Mid-States Wool Growers Cooperative closing its doors after more than a century of service to sheep producers. The central Ohio location in Fairfield County was the last of the cooperative and for outside observers it appeared that the wool market was dead.

“Wool is not dead in Ohio,” said Amy Schroeder, a Hancock County Merino sheep producer. “Wool has a lot of different forms than what everyone’s perceptions are. When Mid-States closed, it seemed that wool was really not worth anything. Why should we bother putting any effort into creating any kind of infrastructure, a wool pool, anything of that sort? And that really irritates me because wool is worth something. It depends on what kind of wool you have. If you’re going to raise meat breeds and market lambs, then yeah that’s probably true, your wool is not worth anything. But there are a lot of wool breeders in Ohio and all over the United States who raise their sheep for wool. Wool is not worthless, you just have to find where it fits in and you have to put forth the effort to make that happen.”

Schroeder got started with sheep through the 4-H projects of her children.

“We had crossbreds and some Suffolks when my kids were in 4-H. My youngest was graduating from high school and I really didn’t need the sheep anymore. My mom was the one who said, ‘Well you should get a wool breed and raise wool.’ At the time it was very difficult to find good quality wool yarn in the United States. Everything was acrylic. So, I got a spinning wheel and put it together. I went to a class and took my mom with me. We were there 10 minutes and I looked over and she was sitting by the spinning wheel, but instead of spinning and learning, she got her knitting needles out was knitting. I realized I was going to have to do the spinning,” Schroeder said.

In the early 2000s, Schroeder began researching wool breeds of sheep, ultimately deciding on Merinos.

“I knew nothing about it so I started reading things online, looking at magazines, going to fiber festivals, taking classes, and doing a lot of things to learn about the wool,” she said.

She learned quickly that good quality wool (and markets for that wool) depend heavily on genetics and production practices. Today Schroeder maintains a small flock of about 20 carefully cared-for Merinos raised with the specific purpose of producing high quality wool.

“Wool is highly inherited so you want to make sure that you’re keeping the best ewes and the ram that you’re keeping has a good fleece,” Schroeder said. “A lot of times that’s the first thing that we’ll do is to test the ram to make sure that you’ve got the fineness of the fleece. That’s going to stick around because it tends to get coarser as they get older.”

Proper nutrition is also important.

“You need to pay attention to diet so that they’re getting enough nutrition to produce the wool, especially for the lambs. Most farms want ewes to lamb twins. I prefer singles because all of the nutrition from that mother is going to that one baby. With twins they’d be getting half of the nutrition. The wool follicles are developed at a very young age and that first 6 months you want to make sure they’re getting plenty to eat. That lends a little bit of density to the fleece,” she said. “There are no special feed ingredients. I just want to make sure that they’re getting enough energy and they’re getting enough protein. I got a feed mix way back when and I’ve taken that recipe to several different places and had them produce it for me since then.”

Daily management for a clean wool clip is an important part of high-quality wool production.

“The way you feed is another thing to think about. If you have a hay feeder hanging on the wall or something where they pull the hay out, it goes all over the backs of the other sheep and then you’ve got all that vegetable matter in the wool,” she said. “I had a guy out West who told me to keep the baling twine out of the wool. I cut the string and I throw it away so it’s not an issue. It depends on how you manage your flock and mine is small enough that I don’t have a problem with that.”

Potential issues with briars, dust and other contaminants also need to be minimized. 

“Our sheep are very rarely on pasture and about half of them are coated — I keep blankets on quite a few of the ewes, because if the if the fleece is really clean, I can sell it for more money,” Schroeder said. “Different producers do things differently with the blankets. Some of them get their blankets on the lambs and they have a blanket on the rest of their lives. I kind of rotate and if I have 20 sheep, I’ll have 10 with blankets on and 10 that are going to have lambs and then switch those groups around.

“The blankets don’t really affect the animals. That wool is an insulator and if it’s hot it’s keeping the animal cool and if it’s cool it’s keeping the animal warm, so it the blanket really doesn’t make any difference in terms of that. If they’ve had blankets on all year round, some of them get really gross looking, but other than that there’s not a problem. If you’re going to let them outside in the elements, rain or snow or whatever, you probably don’t want the blankets on. If they’re going to be able to get into shelter and the blankets don’t get wet, they are not an issue. I use cotton blankets, and if they get wet it can lead to some matting of the fibers, so I have to watch that.”

The timing of the shearing is another factor to consider.

“A lot of ewes, with stress or a fever from lambing, will have a break in the wool that makes the fiber less valuable. You want to pay attention to the timing of that,” she said. “And the time of shearing varies from year-to-year depending on if you want a certain staple length of the fiber. You want it to be long enough to be able to sell and there’s not a whole lot of point of putting a blanket on a ewe that’s going to lamb and the fiber is only going to be an inch or so.”

Schroeder can do the shearing but typically hires someone to do it.

“You have to be careful about contaminants when shearing and you need a shearer that knows what they’re doing to help you sort the wool as it comes off the animal,” she said. “For example, you don’t want the leg wool, the belly wool or any urine-stained wool to stay with the fleece. That usually gets bagged separately. Then I have a skirting table and I skirt the fleeces (remove undesirable wool) after they’re shorn before I bag them up to be sold.”

The climate and weather can also impact wool quality.

“Ohio’s humidity tends to make the wool more yellow. It’s hard to keep it white,” Schroeder said. “That’s just Ohio weather and we have to accept that’s the way it is. It takes a lot of hands-on management to be able to do what I’m doing. You can’t just turn the sheep out on pasture and hope for the best. It’s labor intensive, but if you love it, you love it.”

Once all the proper steps have been taken and a good fleece has been produced, then Schroeder looks at several ways to market the wool.

“There are fiber festivals all across the United States and that is where most of the wool I raise is sold. Hand spinners or knitters who like to deal with certain fibers will come and buy the fleeces or the roving — that’s the wool that’s been processed, washed and carded they can use for spinning. You can get really good money for wool that way. I’m selling something really cheap if I’m selling it for under $3 a pound, and that’s greased wool that hasn’t been washed. All I’ve done is skirt it. At the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, I’ve seen people put $50 a pound on their wool and get it, so it just depends on what you have, where you are and what people are willing to pay,” Schroeder said. “I also sell wool to hand spinners. In Ohio there is the Black Swamp Spinners Guild of Northwest Ohio event in March in Bowling Green. Young’s Jersey Dairy has their Wool Gathering which is in September at Yellow Springs and then the Autumn Fiber Festival recently moved to Mansfield and that’s in October. Those are the three events I’m participating in this year. I’ve taken wool to sell at the Great Lakes Fiber Show in Wooster which is over Memorial Day weekend,” she said. “Our local McComb group is starting a farmers market this year so I’m going to take some wool products there to sell too.”

Beyond these uses, wool is used in a variety of bedding, dryer balls for laundry, home goods, insulation for buildings, and as pellets for slow-release fertilizer/soil amendment products. Earlier this year, the Prospect Specialty Fiber Mill began offering a full list of fiber processing services in Marion County. The “mini-mill” caters to small scale fiber producers.

“There’s lots of uses out there for wool,” Schroeder said. “You have to take the initiative to go look for them and find the fit for the kind of wool you have.”