Woolen Mill business models?

We have so many failed wool mills on our small islands.  They struggle for a few years, then poof!  Belly up!

Most of them are the type where you bring your fibre to the mill, then come back in a few weeks/months/years to pick up the carded fibre.  Then the farmer has to sell the fibre or use it.  

There are a few reasons why this doesn't work.  
- the small batches (1-10 kilo) are inefficient.  
- the person dropping off the fibre gives the mill crap quality fibre and demands awesome quality fibre back (this could be solved with better education on how to grade the wool yourself)
- it is a lot more labour intensive than most would be mill owners expect.  They start this as a retirement plan, then life happens and they can't give the mill 40+ hours a week.
- life is messy.  You think everything is going smoothly, you've got the mill running so well you can hire a team to keep it going, then stuff happens.  

I suspect there are other reasons why this model fails.


Then you have something like Philosopher's wool where they started as a way of buying the wool from the local farmers (at good rates) and using various local mills to process the wool.  They have been around for a while now.  But they don't have their own equipment.

So I'm guessing they are using fibre mills that focus on large batches of 200kilo or more.  A bail bag is 200-500kilo of wool, so I'm guessing one batch is x number of bail bags.


briggs and little woollen mill has been running since the mid-1800s.  They buy a lot of local wool, but I hear that if they only used local wool, they could only run their mill a few days of the year, so they import a lot of wool!  The yarn is some of the most affordable in Canada and one of my favourites for knitting or weaving.  It's not baby-skin soft by any means, but boy oh boy is it durable, warm, and commfy.  

Again, I think they buy the raw wool and sell the yarn.  No custom milling.



What other business models are out there for successful and not so successful wool mills?

For the first style to work well, it would need a lot of customer education.  I know so many sheep farmers that don't even know what skirting wool is.  They send the shit to the mill as well as the wool, then get shocked that they are charged extra for removing it (and charged extra shipping for it).

Imagine a bakery where you bring your own ingredients.

If you bring rancid flour, sour milk, and rotten eggs, it's going to be really difficult to bake a delicious cookie.

These are skills shepherds needed to know in the past, back when there was a reason to know this stuff.  But if one is getting pennies on the pound for wool - no matter the condition, there's no incentive to know this stuff.

At one point I tripped over a company in Nova Scotia that's making small batch processing machinery. Bigger than "hobby sized" but not by much. It was designed to be more efficient than processing completely by hand.

People are so used to cheap products produced off-shore by people forced to work for pennies/day. I've said for a long time that we need an entire new economic system that doesn't reward "big". The Industrial Revolution rewarded "big" and we're paying the price in all sorts of ways, small farms and small businesses being only two of them.

This might have been it: https://tapindustries.ca/   However, they specifically have flax processing equipment, not wool - I had a friend interested in growing flax, so I suspect my memory is the issue

This is larger than what I saw before: https://minimills.net/   But this is for wool.

While looking, I tripped over this: https://www.yukonfood.com/FibreMillReport.pdf
It's from 2007 - have you read it?

I've been working my way through the document from the Yukon. The review of different animal fibres and their benefits/characteristics was interesting.

However, the following two quotes caught my eye:

Other Mini-Mills across Canada process a variety of fibres to varying extents and all of the mills are working at maximum capacity in terms of demand.
These mills are limited by low processing capacity, the low price for this processing and the high initial cost of the machinery and related infrastructure.

Unsurprisingly, affordability and accessibility are issues!

The continental US has seen a surge in the use of Mini-Mill equipment for onfarm processing of fibre, but time will tell how well they survive.

It would be great to see an update in those statistics. It sounds like an effort to diversify farms, and produce "value added" products, but if your love is for "farming", is this a value-added direction that gives someone involved in the farm a sense of accomplishment?

That said, if many farmers bought equipment and then gave up on it, might it be available at a lower cost than new, making it more affordable to whomever wants to try to get a local product off the ground? From some of the pictures I've seen, it seems the machinery is too heavy and complex to try the "on farm processing" that has been tried in some places for meat processing. Have a big trailer that gets hauled from farm to farm and processing happens on site. (Actually, I recall there was someone doing that for cider in the BC interior at one point - maybe still!)

For most of the small mills on these islands, the limiting factors seem to be labour (the people running it could only do 20 hours a week) and the time it takes to adjust the machine between different batches.

The mill that closed most recently didn't have these issues so much in that they hired labour (which came with a whole kettle of fish with Worksafe requirements) and they organized the batches to be by colour so the farmers would say beforehand what fibre they had and finished product they wanted, and they would be given a drop-off week so the mill didn't have a backlog of fibre waiting for the next calibration.  They only had the fibre on hand they were to process in the next couple of months.  

This greatly increased processing capasity.  

Other mills had backlogs of 6months to 3 years.

But life got messy for them.

And these are all doing the service style of business model.  Small batches.  Farmer drops off the fibre and gets back the processed roving or whatever.  

There is this totally awesome mill in Guatemala, called the New Denim Project.
https://www.thenewdenimproject.com/about
Their family owned cotton milling business was going belly up after three  generations of hard slog. One of the younger generation had the thought to source recycled fiber from jeans, using post industrial waste, knowing that we love denim, it is used throughout the world, and is deservedly loved for it's durability under even the most trying conditions of wear.
They did such a good job of completely revamping their business model, sourcing waste from unsold and defective items, and used jeans.... and marketing their unique and beautiful product, that they are known for it world wide.
You can even buy fabric in Auckland New Zealand, not everywhere, but at the place where designers go to source unique and high quality fabrics AT REASONABLE PRICES!
Yes, such places do exist!
The fabric is to die for.Because it is woven from post industrial waste, there are flecks and slight colour variations that give the fabric the look of hand spun.
I mean, really.....Really? ...Yup, really.
They have done something pretty unique both as a business model, and as a product.
It can be done. People are finding new ways to do things.
Thank you for this post. This is something we really need to be thinking about.
Milling is deeply imbedded in the fashion industry,
There is a dark underbelly to fashion...... Destruction beyond belief. Pristine environments destroyed, folkways and lives destroyed. It is pretty much the most destructive industry on the planet, other then, maybe, oil.
We need to get smarter to be more compassionate, and to revamp our expectations that cheaper is better.
Yup, this is the place for doing that.
Hugshugs from Autumn New Zealand where this morning I am candying lemon and orange peels from our abundant windfall citrus crop.
I think vegan lemon curd will be the next project.... Oh, and a partially hand constructed denim based jacked from the beautiful Guatemala Denim Project fabrics, and perhaps a piece or two of vintage kimono ramie.

Sandi from Sheepishly Me on yt sends some wool to a small mill in Canada. We her viewers encouraged her to do stuff with the wool and it's been good to use up what she essentially has a VAP since her flock is for meat production. Her shearer usually takes the wool, but the price has (just like everywhere else) dropped out. She's had this little mill making fun yarn, hats and wool balls. It's been awesome to see her grow that especially since she too was frustrated at the lack of the sustainability of wool.

I continue to read the Yukon Fibre Mill Report as time allows.

Document pgs 44 to 46 have a chart of the machinery, Supplier/s, and cost, then moving on to things like water, sewage, maintenance with a 'monthly' cost estimate.  Even if someone decided to look elsewhere, the chart would help someone stay on task.

The water needed to process fiber is something that I'd noted in the past. Water is fairly plentiful here in the winter, but depending on the year, we can have months of drought. Having ways of recapturing, cleaning, and reusing that water ( would it have to be potable grade?) would be a concern in my environment.

Prior to that they had a discussion about various models for running a mill such as Sole Proprietor vs Coop vs other models. The machinery costs are so great, I suspect there would be great pressure to have all the equipment being used to capacity. They've touched on that issue, but actually accomplishing it would be a struggle I expect. If managing the mill is your full time job, you won't be producing fiber, managing your homestead, or using the fiber you produce - or at least not at the scale of before you started the mill.