There is plenty of challenge around growing healthy, local food organically and regeneratively: You have fewer ‘tools in your toolbox’ by adhering to organic certification. You have concerns over and above yield such as how to ensure that you are considering biodiversity and connection to local communities while growing food? However, you know that you are not alone. There are plenty of other farms working on the same challenges. Whether it is rearing cows in a genuine pastured system or ways of reducing external inputs in a layer chicken set-up, you know that there is a community out there with passionate, extremely knowledgeable people who are very generous with their time and experience.
The same cannot be said of regenerative fibre. Fibre used to be a key reason we farmed. Flax for linen shirts, sheep wool for keeping warm and leather for keeping dry. Industrialised food farming was a revolution with unintended environmental and social impacts that led to the sidelining of growing food in harmony with nature but this impact pales when compared to the decimation of the fibre industry. Technological innovations ultimately resulted in clothes made of plastic. Everything from the elastic in your underpants to the Gore-Tex in your activewear. The clothing was lighter, more effective and in many cases cheaper. But it is derived from fossil fuels and is hard to recycle. This true cost of synthetic clothing is rarely taken into account.
Companies like Patagonia realised decades ago that they needed to take more responsibility for the impact of their sourcing choices. As such, they pioneered the organic cotton movement – certainly a step in the right direction.
We first started thinking about fibre when Michelle started growing her trial plots of linseed on the farm as part of her masters dissertation. She is keenly aware of the lost opportunity of a dual purpose linseed variety that could produce both seed and oil for human consumption and fibres for making into clothing. She is also now well aware of the challenges involved in small scale production, making price a key barrier to mass market acceptance.
We then started considering our cows and wondering what happened to the hides. It was unclear initially what happened and turned out to be a function of demand which was, unsurprisingly, a function of our relationship with the rest of the world. When we take our cows to the abattoir, we receive back, at a minimum, the quartered carcass that we send to the butcher to be processed into familiar cuts: burgers, mince, steaks etc. We also request back the bones so that they can be made into a delicious and nutritious broth. But the hide isn’t returned and in fact we need to register in order to be legally able to accept hides back. If we don’t request it, the abattoir is able to sell the hide to a fellmonger. Prices aren’t always disclosed and have been as low as zero (effectively a waste product, after Brexit made it nigh on impossible to export them) but is often a nice little earner for the abattoirs.
To understand the process and challenges more deeply, we are currently working with the inspiring British Pasture Leather duo, Sara Grady and Alice Robinson. They have collaborated with Pasture for Life farmers (of which we are one) to develop a system that enables traceability all the way from the abattoir through the entire leather production process. And that is not an easy feat. Keeping track of a single hide that passes through many hands, many facilities and many companies, that changes shape and appearance during the processes, requires a lot of planning as well as negotiations with very traditional companies that had to be convinced it was worth their while to adapt to an alternative process. The resulting workflow involves collection from the abattoir, salting, stamping and initial tanning in Bristol followed by finishing in Northampton over the course of close to 6 months.
We are due to receive the first hide back and will soon need to determine what best to do with it. You could argue that we should have done this a while ago but, in our defence, it is hard to know the quality and quantity of leather you will get back. The thickness and consistency of hide will determine whether it can be split to also allow for suede and, ultimately, what uses are appropriate. If you are a keen leather worker or know someone who is, please do get in touch.
Eric Walters.
If you would like to learn more about regenerative fibre, here are some inspiring links:
British Pasture Leather: https://www.britishpastureleather.com/
Range revolution: https://rangerevolution.com/
Fibreshed SW: https://www.southeastenglandfibreshed.org/
Photo credits: Leather drying (header image) and Thomas Ware tannery, Jason Lowe.
