Speaker: Boost the Soil with Wool
Published: Friday, October 11, 2024
This past Saturday, the Indiana Sheep Association held its annual Hoosier Sheep Symposium at Huntington University, treating about 50 sheep producer guests to five sessions covering pertinent industry topics.
Among the speakers were Whitney Schlegel, sheep producer and owner of Marble Hill Farm in Bloomington, (Ind.) where she and her husband have invested in a unique diversification and use for the extra or 'waste' wool produced by their flock of wool breed sheep. Though her flock produces fine wool suitable for clothing, yarn and other products, there is always a part of the fleece on a sheep's body which cannot always be used, particularly belly wool which tends to be matted.
"Not all wool is suitable for clothing or even rugs," Schlegel explained. "Tons and tons of wool each year goes into compost or is burned because it cannot be sold in its unprocessed form."
Wool from meat breed sheep, especially, tends to be short, coarse or generally of low quality. While fine wool shepherds can usually sell their wool to be made into a variety of products, shepherds with only low-quality wool to sell cannot find a buyer who deems it worth buying, paying to have it cleaned and processed into something usable. As a result, it costs more for a sheep producer to get their sheep sheared than to sell the wool. Schlegel is one of the pioneers of a relatively new process for wool to turn it into sellable product: wool pelleting.
"On our farm, we feed waste wool by hand into a wool shredder which chops it up to a consistency which can then be funneled into our pelleting machine," she said. "The pelleter heats the fiber up, compresses it into a die mold and turns it into pellets slightly bigger than most livestock feed pellets."
How can raw wool compressed into a pellet form be useful and even sellable? Schlegel sells her wool pellets to home gardeners, small-scale specialty croppers and even the average Jane growing houseplants. Adding wool pellets around a seed or small plant acts as a soil amendment, encouraging organic matter, retaining moisture and even contributing nutrients.
"Wool can hold 25% of its weight in water, providing drought resistance and reducing watering needs," Schlegel said. "It is also 50% carbon by weight, increasing soil organic carbon and sequestration in the soil."
Because the waste wool in the pellet is unwashed, it keeps the dung tags, lanolin, bits of vegetative matter and anything else a sheep is likely to pick up in a field, adding nutrients. What puts it above usual organic soil amendments such as chicken manure, is that it retains water and even acts as a physical barrier to pests.
"Wool pellets is a cool idea, and does solve a problem for us sheep producers," Schlegel said, "But it needs to do more—it needs to solve bigger problems. I believe the "green" properties of the pellets such as carbon sequestration, soil enrichment and being an organic alternative makes them a solution to these larger environmental problems."
Schlegel mentioned that she and the Indiana Sheep Assn. are striving to put in place a state-wide pelleting infrastructure that could serve sheep producers and organic and other growers across the state.
Another speaker at the event, Dr. Luiz Brito, is an associate professor and researcher at Purdue University. He specializes in livestock quantitative genomics and he is the co-director of the Sheep GEMS project. GEMS, which is supported by the National Sheep Improvement Program as well as the American Sheep Industry Assn.,
is a research effort spread across multiple universities across the country.
As part of this initiative, Brito's team and collaborators are developing the background knowledge and tools needed for successful implementation of genomic selection for robustness and climatic resilience in the dominant breeds in major U.S. sheep breed-types. He spoke on the most recent results of the GEMS research, the applications to the U.S. sheep industry, and ongoing activities and opportunities to get involved in the project.
"GEMS tackles a variety of aspects of raising sheep," He said. "These are represented by the acronym: Genomics, Environment, Management and Socioeconomics."
Sheep producers realize that genetics are a big part of decoding what factors exactly in raising sheep contribute to their bottom line. But it's more than just genetics, the GEMS project is tracking management practices, the environments sheep are raised in, and how these and genetic factors contribute to the resilience of an animal.
"We are collecting information on ewes mostly, from 3,000 animals, primarily Katahdins, Rambouillets, Polypays and Suffolks—these are among the most popular commercial breeds in the country," Brito said.
One of the biggest GEMS research questions is "What do we need to understand to make ewes more resilient?" In other words, what makes a sheep live longer productively and produce more and healthier lambs without complications that drain the American sheep producer's wallet? To answer that, GEMS is also asking "what, makes a ewe get culled prematurely and what makes a lamb die before reaching market condition?"
As sheep producers know, a ewe could be culled for anything from mastitis to birth complications to poor parasite resistance to an inability to produce healthy lambs. But in order to connect the dots and find the cause of these problems or trends, producers need to be collecting data and keeping tight records. But collecting several data points in their flock may not occur to a producer concerned with maintaining the bottom line year-to-year, especially when such collection uses up time and labor that may not seem worth it in the short run. However, Brito pointed out that producers cannot breed toward what they are not recording.
"In order to calculate EBVs—that is, Estimated Breeding Values—we need accurate data such as ewe weight throughout their pregnancy and breeding, along with body conditions scores—these data points are the best way to compare genomic information with performance data."
On the socioeconomic front, Brito said the goal is to report findings of the project to U.S. producers so they can be aware of the need for collecting these data points.
"We are committed to working with producers and making it as simple and cost-effective as possible to collect the data we need stop the industry from incurring needless losses, and showing return on investment." he said.
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