If you’re not well-versed in the natural fiber economy, Kristen Buchanan wants to help with that. Buchanan manages a small family farm in Southwest Washington, and she’s the co-founder of PNW Fiber Connect, an organization that wants to create a support network of different players in the regional fiber industry.
The organization aims to educate consumers and share resources from shepherds to mill owners to yarn stores and beyond. Buchanan wants consumers to make intentional choices about where their wool and textiles come from, in the hope that the Pacific Northwest can one day sustain a more robust fiber economy.
Kirsten Holbo is a shepherd at Iron Water Ranch in Albany, Oregon. She’s been in the fiber industry since 1984 when her family took over Iron Water Ranch. She and Buchanan join us to share more about the current state of the wool industry in Oregon.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The price of wool has more than doubled in the last six years, but it is still not an easy time to be a sheep farmer. In fact, domestic wool production has declined by about 45% in the last 20 years.
We’re going to get two perspectives on this right now. Kirsten Holbo has been a shepherd since 1984. That’s when she and her family took over Iron Water Ranch in Albany. Kristen Buchanan manages a small family farm in Southwest Washington and is a co-founder of PNW Fiber Connect. The organization aims to create a more robust fiber economy in the Northwest.
Kirsten and Kristen, welcome to the show.
Kristen Buchanan: Thank you for having us.
Kirsten Holbo: Yeah, thank you.
Miller: I’m gonna do my best to not mix up your names as we go. Kristen, to start with you, what led you to start Pacific Northwest Fiber Connect?
Buchanan: That’s a great question. I have two other co-founders, Hannah Paquette and Jolene Quaintance, who come from different areas in the fiber world. After I closed a technology startup in 2023, I started to get a little bit stir crazy and looked for something that would be more connected to my personal interests. I’ve been a fiber person, sewing, doing stuff with fiber since I was 7, and I wanted something very far away from venture capital.
So I got inspired by an organization called Fibershed, which is out of California. It was founded way back in 2013, and wanted to create an affiliate, but they weren’t accepting affiliate applications. So we made it ourselves. We chose a different structure intentionally than what Fibershed has. We are a chamber of commerce, and we decided to do that because we wanted to bridge a lot of gaps in our industry here in the Pacific Northwest and help this industry become the professional organization, professional industry that it really should be to compete on the national and the world stage.
Miller: Kirsten, I think of you as being at the starting point of a wool economy, raising sheep for wool. What does a typical day look like for you at Iron Water Ranch?
Holbo: Well, I have to tell you, we’re kind of an anomaly because raising sheep for wool is not actually a common profession. Usually, there’s a lot more involved in that. So my daily activities involve checking sheep. They’re out grazing in different fields. I am checking to see that they’re all healthy, everybody’s looking good, and then I usually end up either skirting or processing wool that I’m direct marketing.
We actually have a band of sheep, which is, if you want to look it up, 1,000, and that’s through seven different breeds. And that’s one of the reasons we’re actually able to direct market, because we can be profitable because of the breeds we’re using, and because it is really a hands-on activity. I mean, we’re not sending large quantities of wool off.
And I do wanna address that because what you’re talking about for the higher prices of wool, most shepherds are not seeing that. They’re not seeing the higher prices. They are currently not able to actually pay for their shearing with the cost of shearing versus the kind of income they can actually get if they can sell their wool.
Miller: Well, why not? So, can you help us understand that?
Holbo: Sure. So currently, there are large, more than bands, like tens of thousands of sheep that families run in the Willamette Valley. Those are the ones I can really speak to, but there’s other bands in Eastern Oregon. This is like not a long time coming. It’s been a slow decline. We used to sell all our wool to the U.S. government for the military. And then with the administration before the last, they stopped buying it. The U.S. military stopped buying it, so there wasn’t a market for it. And then the shepherds were trying to sell into foreign markets, and now with the tariffs, they’re not able to do that either.
So, they’re really caught in a bad spot. And quite a few of my contemporaries here in the Willamette Valley have more than three years’ worth of wool stored in their sheds because they can’t sell it. They don’t have anywhere to sell it to, and they are just storing it. Actually, I spoke with several of them last night in anticipation on coming on your program. I said, “What do you want me to say?” And they said, “Well, we can’t sell it. We don’t have a market for it.” And that is just a slow disintegration of the infrastructure that we used to have in the Pacific Northwest for actually processing, purchasing and being able to go forward with the wool. So there’s these large warehouses around the Pacific Northwest that have a lot of wool in them.
Miller: Kristen, what are the different pieces of the market that, I guess, have been destroyed or have evaporated over the last few decades that would need to come back in order for those warehouses full of wool to find domestic consumers?
Buchanan: Yeah, that’s a really good question and probably should go back to things like NAFTA, and as Kirsten said, it’s kind of a long time coming. When we say that there’s not a market for this wool, it’s sort of confusing because there’s actually a surge in interest in natural fibers from a general consumer perspective, but the problem is that we actually almost entirely lack consumer level, commercial level infrastructure. And when I say infrastructure, I really mean things like scouring mills and wool processing mills. So, you have to actually shear the sheep, clean the wool, which is a big process in and of itself. And then you have to spin that wool, and you have to weave it or knit it.
Right now, the infrastructure that we have is really, what I would say, at the cottage level. So, we have a huge rise actually in the cottage-size wool mill, fiber mill, because we also have other natural fibers here in the Pacific Northwest – alpaca, angora, a little bit of mohair, all of that good stuff. But to be at truly a competitive level where these large farmers and ranchers could actually sell their wool at a reasonable price, there has to be somebody on the other side saying, “I can process this.”
And you already mentioned tariffs. It’s difficult to send things out of the U.S. now, but there’s not anything here to build that. So we actually need to invest in United States manufacturing, and that may or may not be in the Pacific Northwest, although a lot of that manufacturing used to be here. But it’s kind of a bigger and broader economical conversation.
Miller: It almost seems like what you’re saying is because the processing infrastructure has disappeared in this country, it’s a kind of niche craft market for wool here, as opposed to a broader mass market. So what does that mean for the price difference between wool that was grown and processed in the U.S. and wool that was grown or processed, say, in India, China or New Zealand?
Buchanan: I won’t necessarily name names, but there are a few companies in the U.S. that are selling U.S.-grown and processed clothing,. For the most part, it’s out of merino wool. Kirsten mentioned that her ranch has multiple breeds of sheep, and we could get into the value of that at some other time. But that item of clothing, let’s say it’s a hoodie or a sweater, a lot of the stuff is sold as sort of technical wear because wool has so many great technical qualities to keep you warm and keep you cool. That’s going to be from at least $100 for that single item of clothing. It can be pretty expensive for the average consumer, and you can buy something out of wool or wool mix that was grown and processed in, say, India or China for a fraction of that.
So there’s sort of the question that these farmers, both at the large-scale level, tens of thousands of sheep, and small scale farmers who have 30 sheep or 100 sheep, even less than that sometimes, they do have to go and seek out different markets. And there definitely is actually a huge surge in interest at the craft level. Learning everything from spinning to knitting to crochet, and certainly an interest in understanding the sustainability and the supply chain of where you’re getting that fiber to make your own object. But I would say that the majority of consumers don’t want to make their own object. They’d really like to buy a well-made textile object from somewhere that they know [so] that they can trace that supply chain.
Miller: Kirsten, you’re raising special sheep specifically for wool, but what do ranchers in the Northwest who are raising lambs for slaughter, lambs for meat, do with the wool that they get?
Holbo: Like I said, they’re mostly warehousing it at this point. It costs more for them to shear it off than it does for them to be able to sell. One of my friends told me they could get 30 cents a pound for it – that’s the current market price that they might be able to get. But that’s before they ship it somewhere, and it’s not a local buyer that they’re gonna be selling it to.
And then I also talked to a shearer last night about this –she’s awesome. She said that the problem that she’s seeing is that because the shepherds are feeling hopeless and that they’re not feeling like they can actually direct or sell it, or there’s any buyers out there, they’re not really paying that much attention to it anymore. So instead of separating out the bellies and the leg wool off of their fleeces, what they’re doing is they’re just throwing it all into the same bag, because they’re not going to get any benefit to present premium wool. So they’re either storing it or they’re composting it right now.
There’s a lot of markets right now, what I would call the lowest common denominator, where they’re utilizing all their wool as waste wool, and it’s going into these pellets that they’re able to utilize for the nursery industry … which is great because wool has a superpower in that it helps retain moisture and ambient temperatures. So that’s really great for plants. That’s a good thing, but it’s also bad because we also have all this other wool that’s just not going anywhere and it’s not moving.
Miller: Kristen, one of the pillars of your organization is called connection stewardship. What does that mean? What do you want all of us to be keeping in mind?
Buchanan: We called it connection stewardship, and it is one of our three pillars that we focus on in our organization. Before, there had been a couple of attempts in this region to try to pull the industry together that unfortunately had failed for a number of different reasons. We kind of saw that and felt it was very clear that one of the reasons these things have failed is that people were not connecting the dots properly. So we’ve sort of seen ourselves as the steward of those connections.
We’ve actually released a free-to-the-public map. You can go onto our website and actually interact with the map, and you can look for producers. And producers is language for sheep farmer, sheep rancher or alpaca farmer, etc. You can see yarn mills, you can see yarn shops, you can see educational institutions like guilds and schools, and sometimes instructors. So, you can actually interact with that because we’re pulling the pieces together so that people can see that this is actually truly an industry here.
We do absolutely have a lot of challenges. Kirsten spoke to that. If it costs you more to try to sell and make something out of your wool, you’re not going to go through the effort of separating it out to make a good product that can then go into something else. And wool doesn’t have to go into being a garment textile. It can go into insulation, it can go into car seats, it can go into all kinds of different places, but there, again, has to be a buyer for that.
So part of our work in connecting and stewarding that network is trying to connect bigger organizations, bigger businesses that already have supply chains that include natural fibers. But those natural fibers aren’t being sourced from this area, from this region. So we want to sort of slowly onboard them into the possibility that they could source it from this region.
Miller: Kristen Buchanan and Kirsten Holbo, thanks very much.
Holbo: Thank you.
Buchanan: Thank you so much.
Miller: Kristen Buchanan is co-founder and co-executive director of PNW Fiber Connect. She manages a small family farm in Southwest Washington. Kirsten Holbo is a shepherd at Iron Water Ranch.
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