For the Diné, sheep are a part of their history. The animals are in their creation myths, and when the Spanish colonists first brought churro sheep, which are now called Navajo Churro sheep, to the Southwest, the animals soon became a part of the Diné economy and culture.
But the days of sheep camps and flocks roaming the plains and valleys in the Nation are long gone. On two separate occasions the Navajo Churro sheep came close to full extinction. Counting over one million head at one time, there were reportedly less than 500 left in the world by 1977.
A CHANGING INDUSTRY
As someone who works closely with ranchers who bring in their wool to sell, Dudley Byerley is concerned about the future of the Navajo Churro sheep and the wool industry in general.
Byerley and his wife own Cowtown Feed & Livestock. They’ve been buying wool from ranchers for 40 years, but now he’s seeing a change in the industry. He hasn’t bought wool from anybody this year, and that’s partly due to a loss of quality.
Wool clothing is often thought of as high quality. Wool is durable and long-lasting, and makes up fine clothing such as suits, slacks, blouses, and socks. But when the raw product itself isn’t high quality, manufacturers aren’t interested in buying it.
“When you buy a wool shirt or make a wool shirt, it’s got to be the number one fine white wool,” Byerley said. “If you make it out of any of those other wools it’s scratchy, it’s coarse, it’s itchy. We used to be able to send those bad wools to Pakistan or Indonesia and they’d make throw rugs out of it, but they won’t even take it anymore.”
Nowadays, Byerley says people aren’t very interested in wool that comes from a Navajo reservation. When he tells people from other countries that the wool came from New Mexico, they say they don’t want it.
“It’s a hard deal, and I really hate it for our people because they’ve done this forever,” Byerley said.
Another person who understands how difficult it is to sell wool that comes from the Southwest is Mike Corn, the owner of Roswell Wool.
Corn grew up in the sheep industry. He’d always been around ranches, and when he turned 30, he decided to go into business with his two brothers, two of his cousins, his uncle, and one of his uncle’s friends.
At the time, there were two wool warehouses in Roswell, New Mexico. The men decided to buy one of the warehouses, then a couple years later they bought the other one too. Thus, Roswell Wool was born.
The men’s main goal was to market New Mexico wool to the rest of the world. Now, over 30 years later, Corn is the sole owner of the business. And he’s definitely seen a decrease in business.
Less than 100,000 pounds of wool was produced in southeastern New Mexico this past year. That’s down from the 3.5 million pounds Roswell Wool saw when they first started their company. Now, Corn relies mostly on wool from California from his main warehouse in Bakersfield. The California side of the business produces about 2.5 million pounds of wool a year.
“Production here in southeastern New Mexico has gotten smaller and smaller,” Coin said. “Labor shortages and droughts have contributed to people just getting out [of the sheep industry], and it’s mostly these family-operated ranches. It’s the dad who’s still at the ranch and then most of the kids have not come back to the ranch, they’ve taken jobs and are doing something else as a career. So, the old man’s having to do a lot more of the work and it’s just difficult for him to find help.”
LACK OF PRECISION, KNOWLEDGE
Byerley said part of the problem comes from people of the younger generation not knowing how to shear wool properly.
He remembered a recent encounter where an older woman came into his store and told him that her family had just sheared their sheep. He asked who sheared the animals, and she said her nephews did it. Byerley’s heart sank. He asked if anyone had been supervising when the young boys sheared the sheep, and the woman said no one else had been around.
“Those kids don’t know, so they just mixed it all up,” Byerley said. “It just makes the wool useless.”
Sheep shearing is something that requires methodical and precise work. Professional shearers use a wooden board so that they don’t get manure, hay, twine, dirt, or other unwanted materials into the wool.
In an interview with the Sun, the American Sheep Association’s Executive Director Peter Orwick said that there are sheep shearing courses across the U.S. These classes are often put together by a university’s Extension and Outreach program. The Association doesn’t sponsor the classes, but they will provide educational materials when a program reaches out.
“[Shearing is] very physical, you have to be in shape to do it,” Orwick explained. “You have to do a lot of sheep in a day, and there’s definitely a technique to it. Every stroke that [shearers] make on a sheep is a pattern they do over and over again, day in and day out because it works. If you can take that wool off in one clip versus two or three, your wool is going to be much more uniform in length, and in the textile mills where the clothing is made, that’s important.”
After the strenuous work of shearing, shearers then must sort out the wool into different bags in a process which is called tagging the wool. The wool from a sheep’s head, neck, belly, legs, and back end is often coarse and rather hairy instead of the softer wool that’s used to make clothing, and thus unusable.
NEW TOOLS & MARKET
But things are changing. Now, instead of shearing by hand, many ranchers are turning to machines. The machines don’t necessarily catch the coarse hair, and can lead to a lower quality product. But it’s still faster than doing it by hand.
Corn said the change is affecting farmers in a major way, and even running some people who aren’t using machines out of business.
“In the past people who had sheep had clippers and they sheared their own sheep and it was hand clipping, which is more difficult than mechanical,” he explained. “But as time’s gone on there’s fewer and fewer people using the hand clippers and [they instead] rely on guys with electrical. It seems like every year we lose another person who was trying to make a good living shearing sheep for people.”
Corn said the shearing problem is nothing new, he estimated it’s probably been going on for the past 10 to 15 years. But a more recent factor that hit the wool industry hard was, of course, COVID.
Many textile mills in China that use wool from the U.S. shut their doors almost right away in 2020, resulting in a loss of profit.
Corn said changes in consumers’ behavior has also played a role. Economic changes and hardships have made people more conscientious about what they’re buying and spending money on.
“When people are conservative, they just go buy a cheap polyester or cotton shirt and don’t purchase wool,” Corn said. “Wool is known as something that is durable and will last a long time, which is something that usually demands a higher price.”
Despite all the challenges, Corn said he has no plans of hanging up his hat yet.
“It’s in my blood,” he said. “As long as there’s wool to be sold, I think I’ll stick around.”
By Molly Ann Howell
Managing Editor
