A year ago, my wife and I decided to stay in Rhode Island and build our roots here, despite the cost. I had come to believe I needed to stop running in search of the perfect place and instead stay and create the change I so desired: a family enterprise we were all invested in, our children growing up watching and participating as we built something meaningful, useful, beautiful, good, and eternal. That’s when I noticed the wool shawl sweater on me; the chickens and children running around outside; the chicken coop and run that I built; the plentiful grassy yard around my house.
I looked at the tag to see what the sweater was made of, and where:
“80% recycled wool, 20% nylon. Made in Vietnam.”
I wondered if I could make this here, in America, maybe even in New England.
In short order I realized it wasn’t remotely simple to do in New England, let alone America. Live sheep existed, but nothing like they used to: the American flock peaked at 56 million head in 1942 and stands near five million today, much of it now hair sheep raised for lamb, not wool breeds at all. The mills followed; roughly 650 textile plants closed between 1997 and 2009 alone. But sheep and mills are only the endpoints of the whole chain that turns fiber into fashion. Lose your sheep, or your mills, or both, and all the parts in the middle, the shearers, scouring plants, spinning mills, and dyehouses, become lost as well. Though in truth, as I learned, we’re most hampered by the loss of the knitting and finishing, for the machinery, the engineers, and the technical skills – the most expensive parts on the way from fiber to sweater – have disappeared, and even if we patch together the missing middle, we still don’t have the machinery to make the final product.
When I started calling around to see if anyone could actually knit my sweater, I found practically zero- or at least zero who wanted to return my calls. So I decided to get my own sheep and build the whole thing myself, with any partners who want to be a part of it.
Two months after our Corriedale sheep arrived, I watched their fleeces fall to the earth as our shearer worked them free. Seeing that simple, yet profound conversion was mesmerizing. And it will happen every year, for as long as the animal lives, which is also why so much American wool is discarded. Medium wool commonly fetches around 20 cents a pound, less than the shearing costs, and even where a buyer exists, transport eats whatever the clip might bring in return. So fleeces get burned, buried, or dumped in ditches across the country.
That’s when I realized I was dealing less with a wool problem and more with a land problem. All around me I see pastures but no sheep, and in fact, no animals at all. On the smaller pastures around us, sheep would be ideal, but when the wool becomes worthless, the sheep earn less, and the pasture loses its viability as a productive landscape. Soon, though it may take a generation or two, the family views it as nothing more than a parcel to be sold to some developer. The American Farmland Trust has recorded roughly 11 million acres of agricultural land converted to development between 2001 and 2016. I would wager that on a good share of those acres, the working economy died years earlier, when the buyers of what that land produced went away. We all groan when the machinery appears to prepare a field for development, but this is just the final act of a series of events set in motion when the mill in town closed many years prior. We were too ignorant to notice, or worse, took it for a sign of advancement.
Now, what I am about to say comes from a friend of conservation. Every easement in New England is a good thing, and wilderness set aside for its own sake- our parks and refuges and deep woods- needs no economic defense from me, an avid upland and deer hunter of those lands. But for working land, the easement is only half the battle. It may preserve the ground to pasture sheep on, yet it cannot preserve the thing that makes the fleece worth shearing.
A meadow kept open with nothing produced on it and no one making a living from it, mowed once a year to keep up appearances, is preserved, not conserved.
That distinction is what I’ve come to call the working landscape, whose conservation comes less through preservation than through productivity. On the land you have the woods, pastures, and meadows, and the farmers, shepherds, ranchers, and hunters who tend them; in town you have the shops, mills, and factories, and the trades who work within them. The two are more connected than one realizes, for the town needs the land just as much as the land needs the town. And this working landscape is as important as the natural landscape spread through it, and must be conserved as carefully, for the two were never really separate to begin with.
The artifacts of such a time stand right in front of our faces through much of New England: stone walls running through secondary-growth forest that was once sheep pasture; the abandoned or repurposed mill in the connecting town. The Blackstone River Valley, not far from my home, is where America went from farm to factory, when Samuel Slater set the nation’s first water-powered cotton spinning to work in Pawtucket in 1790 (the practices in those early mills were far from good, though that is hardly a reason not to run them better now). Farm and mill rose together, and when the mills left, the farms did not flourish without them. Soon enough they thinned out too, along with all the pieces in between, really the supply chain itself. As the mills with their workers go, so go our meadows with their animals and their stewards.
What can conservationists do? First, land trusts that work to preserve farmland should also look at nearby markets for what the farm produces, and count that production as part of their mission. Second, historic preservationists, who have saved so many of our mills, though converted to offices, museums, and apartments, might weigh whether an operating mill, producing goods of value to land and town, is a higher form of preservation. Third, our schools should take seriously the teaching and apprenticing of the trades the whole chain depends on: shearers, machinists, technicians, textile workers. And fourth, perhaps most important, buyers, institutions, and customers both must not only come to appreciate but also accept that a wool sweater made locally, with local sheep, local hands, and local machines, will not be cheap, though it will outlast every cheap thing they own. We don’t need to recreate Sturbridge Villages all over New England to make this possible (though it would be cool). We have modern machines, interstate freight, and the internet to sell over. As long as the value comes back to the land, the town, the people who grew it, and the people who made it, we will know this is good.
At the end of the day, my sheep are still here growing their wool, just as they did last year and will next. That wool will have to be sheared, whether I do it or not. And ideally it becomes something, and on its way to becoming something, every hand it touches finds further meaning in the work. A productivity that gives purpose. Because as long as the wool comes every year, those hands will remain productive. Or they should, if we do the hard and proper work to help conserve it.
Greg Cello is a husband, father of four, U.S. Army veteran, and writer living on a small homestead in rural Rhode Island and building his sheep farm, Cello Acres. He writes about family, land, industry, and the recovery of rooted life at Kinward and on X at @gregcello.
