cover image courtesy of Junction Fiber Mill

Scribbled in the back of my knitting notebook are dozens of unusual names—not of people, but of rare breeds of sheep. There’s Gulf Coast, Icelandic, Cormo, Corriedale, Bluefaced Leicester, Orkney Boreray. In a digital album, I have even more: Barbados Blackbelly, Karakul, Shetland, Dorset Horn. I track these names because each breed offers a distinctive wool profile, and an equally distinctive history.

I first discovered heritage sheep breeds through The Livestock Conservancy’s “Shave ‘Em to Save ‘Em” program, launched in 2019 to encourage artists and craftspeople to work with wool from more than 20 breeds that are at-risk for extinction. As a fun incentive, participants receive a “passport” when they sign up for the program; they also earn a sticker every time they try a yarn from a new breed. More than 4,000 passports have been sent out to participants so far, registered to more than 1,600 fiber sellers. My own passport became much more than a fun knitting project: It led me on a fascinating journey into the history of rare breeds.

The Sheep

For millennia, as human populations spread across continents and climates, sheep traveled along with us, evolving through both husbandry and environmental pressures into a remarkable range of breeds. Together, they formed a textile vocabulary as varied as the landscapes that shaped them. Then, beginning in the 19th century, agricultural industrialization greatly narrowed that vocabulary. The result was efficiency—but also loss. Sheep diversity declined, and with it, the nuanced range of wool that was once available.

Today, a movement is underway to restore that diversity—not merely for nostalgia, but as a practical and resilient system for growing and selling natural fiber. By seeking out breed-specific yarns, especially from rare and heritage sheep, textile artists and craftspeople are helping revive a decentralized economy that can sustain heritage-breed shepherds, regional mills, and local yarn shops.

Humans first domesticated sheep around 10,000 years ago, probably from the wild Asiatic mouflon, and raised them for meat, milk, and, eventually, wool. Over such a lengthy span of time, each population of sheep evolved to suit local conditions. In some regions, farmers bred for certain traits; in others, looser husbandry allowed natural selection to prevail. Florida Cracker sheep, for example, survived for generations with minimal human input. As a result, this breed tolerates heat, humidity, poor forage, and drought—while also resisting parasites, and lambing with relative ease, according to The Livestock Conservancy.

This interplay of human intent and environmental pressures produced the more than 1,000 distinct sheep breeds that are still in existence today. Over the past century, however, as human populations have grown and consolidated, farmlands, pasture, and livestock populations gradually consolidated as well. In the United States alone, the number of family farms has dropped sharply—from more than 6 million in 1930 to less than 2 million today. Today, just four breeds—Suffolk, Dorset, Hampshire, and Rambouillet—account for 75 percent of purebred sheep registrations in the U.S. As other breeds decline, or disappear altogether, so do their distinctive wool properties.

“There’s a fiber for every purpose, and that’s why we celebrate diversity,” says Sherry Mitchell, the founder of Mitchell Wool Co. in Michigan. “I wouldn’t choose my 19-micron Cormo, Targhee, or Rambouillet to make socks. I’d choose our Michigan-grown, Bluefaced Leicester for its longer staple length and strength. For making an outer layer, like an Aran cardigan that I planned to wear with my overalls in the rain, I’d select something much coarser.”

The Shepherds

As small farms declined in the U.S., mills closed and consolidated, making wool processing more expensive and difficult to access. Global wool prices are generally set by mega-exporters like New Zealand, and for many shepherds, the cost and hassle of shipping fleece to be processed at far-away mills outweigh its value. The few mills that still exist in the United States often require a minimum wool poundage that small producers cannot meet. Bringing single-breed yarns of rare or heritage sheep to market can be such a logistical challenge that sheep farmers sometimes just throw the wool away.

That’s where new ventures have stepped in. Mitchell Wool, for one, aggregates wool from farmers across the country. By combining various wool lots to reach the mills’ processing thresholds, the company makes enough to pay sheep farmers a fair price. Mitchell then sells these specialty yarns for higher prices than what you’d find in a typical craft shop. This approach has allowed shepherds of smaller flocks, and less common breeds, to enter the market.

Intrigued by these offerings, I bought a skein of charcoal-hued Rambouillet yarn from Mitchell’s American Fiber line last year. Its natural color is too dark to dye, so it might have gone to waste if Mitchell Wool Co. hadn’t intervened and turned it into a supple, versatile yarn that was lovely to work with—I have since recommended it widely. (Mitchell carries many other breed-specific yarns—a wool shop’s version of single-source chocolate, or single-barrel whiskey.) I can also attest to the company’s high standards. Mitchell only carries wool from farms that demonstrate proper animal care and environmental stewardship.

“As farmers ourselves, we truly understand the commitment and cost of raising livestock ethically, and we compensate all parts of our procurement and production lines fairly,” Mitchell says. Demand, she adds, is growing.

Small Mills, Big Impact

Peggy Allen and Amanda Kievet bought the former Hampton Fiber Mill in Vermont in 2021, intending to fill the market gap in custom wool processing for small farms. Their company, Junction Fiber Mill, initially focused on custom wool processing for small farms, but gradually they shifted to producing their own yarns, buying locally whenever they could. Allen also keeps a flock of 34 Corriedale sheep that yield roughly 230 pounds of raw wool each year. That cleans down to 190 pounds of usable fiber, which eventually becomes more than 800 skeins of single-breed yarn that I’ve found to be both springy and soft—a great all-purpose yarn.

When I knitted a cowl using Junction Fiber’s multi-hued yarns, I could almost feel the effort they put into sourcing. Apparently others do, too. A recently released yarn that blended Angora rabbit fleece with Corriedale and Merino wool sold out in just 17 minutes.

Neighborhood Yarn Shops

Until recently, says Cadence Kidwell at the Fuzzy Goat yarn store in Thomasville, Georgia, “we might have had one question a year about sheep breeds.” Now it comes up all the time.

Sourcing decisions still hinge on overall quality—softness, color, durability—but Kidwell says provenance increasingly matters to customers. When a yarn meets all those standards, and carries a good story to boot (Kidwell and her team love a good story), it stands out. It also shows that yarn shops can be more than points of sale. They become places of community and education, where textile enthusiasts trade tips and tales, and where fiber connects back to farm and flock. (In my case, for eample, I first encountered Mitchell Wool Co. in Kidwell’s store, where I also learned about Junction Fiber Mill and another great source, Queen City Yarns.)

Before long, I had filled my “passport” with 20-plus sheep breed stickers (yes, that was my Covid-19 project). In a little over a year, I spent about $20 per breed on “roving” (wool that’s been cleaned and brushed, and is ready to spin on a wheel or a drop spindle), finished yarn, or raw fleece—adding up to more than $400 dollars’ worth of heritage breed sheep products. If each of the 1,000 people who completed the program were to spend as much as I did, that would generate $400,000 in economic impact for the artisan wool market.