Sheep farmers in Virginia have a problem. They raise sheep for meat, but they still have to sheer them every year, which means a lot of wool.
Researchers and farmers in Southwest Virginia are trying to figure out how this wool could be used to insulate houses.
In the mountains of Appalachia, farmers often don’t have access to large fields for cows to graze. But, the topography in Southwest Virginia is great for raising smaller animals, like sheep.
Unfortunately, the wool industry isn’t as lucrative as it once was, as textile companies have moved overseas. Today, most of the sheep farmers in Virginia raise their animals for meat. But their wool is still useful—there just isn’t a great market for it.
“We’re not really into wanting to make money off of wool,” said Cecil King, a sheep farmer in Pulaski County. “If we could just come close to break even.”
King keeps 130 female sheep, and many graze on solar farms. Others birth lambs each spring. They’re a species of sheep that’s sold for meat and their wool is courser than wool sheep, but he still pays to have them sheered every year so their coats stay healthy.
Like most sheep farmers he loses money paying them.
He’s been working on a project to change that, with the help of another farmer named Daniel Banker, who’s also an architect.
“I came to this from the construction side of things,” Banker said.
Banker notes the construction industry is looking for new ways to insulate homes, because there are some studies that indicate exposure to fiberglass insulation may be harmful to our health.
“So having an alternative to fiberglass insulation seems like a no brainer to me,” Banker said.
There used to be a thriving textile industry in Southwest Virginia. Banker and King started brainstorming, and they asked each other if someone here help them turn wool into home insulation? They connected with researchers at Virginia Tech who study sustainable biomaterials, including Dan Hindman.
“And the challenge is right now in Virginia there’s really not a market for a lot of this wool,” Hindman said. “Many of the farmers I talk to say they just throw it away.”
Wool is being tossed into landfills, or sometimes sheep farmers simply bury it in their gardens because it provides a nice soil additive. A very few like Cecil King ship it out of state to companies that use it for blankets and outerwear, but they don’t make much money that way.
Hindman and his team set up a lab to test what it would take to process and produce home insulation from their wool.
“So these are some of the samples of the wool insulation we’ve made so far,” Hindman explained, holding up small fuzzy squares of wool.
The Virginia Tech lab only has small carding machines, nothing like it would take to scale up at an industrial level, but it’s a start.
“Just kind of like a loose fluffy,” Hindman described. “It’s not like a sweater. It’s much looser. Kind of similar to the insulation you put into your wall. The fiberglass or something like that.”
Hindman is looking to another company out West for inspiration and comparison who already uses wool for insulation.
“And there is a company in Nevada called Havelock insulation, that does produce this. They get their wool from New Zealand.
New Zealand has a slightly different climate, and their sheep have wool that works really well for manufacturing. They also have robust infrastructure to process wool there. Hindman said he thinks American sheep could supply companies too if they can find someone to process the wool, and a company that wants to use it.
“This is not a Southwest Virginia problem. This is nationwide, of what do we do with wool?” Hindman said. “What do we do with our materials?”
He estimates that it would take about 230 sheep to insulate a home, including the walls and ceiling. There are about 77,000 sheep in Virginia according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which could insulate over 300 homes.
“So I think that it shows that there’s a lot of potential ag products that we could be reusing,” Hindman said. “We could be using better. So we’ll keep looking for that.”
And if there’s a better market for wool, that may help entice more farmers to begin raising sheep in Appalachia and be able to make a profit.
