How do they harvest wool?

Wool is primarily harvested through a meticulous process called shearing, where the fleece is carefully removed from sheep, followed by crucial initial preparation steps like skirting to ensure quality.

The Art of Wool Harvesting

The journey of wool from the sheep's back to a usable fiber involves several well-defined stages, focusing on efficiency, animal welfare, and maintaining the integrity of the valuable fleece.

Shearing: The Initial Cut

Shearing is the first and most recognizable step in wool harvesting. It involves removing the entire woolly fleece from a sheep, typically performed once a year, often in warmer months or specific times adjusted to the sheep's breeding cycle and wool growth.

• Process: Experienced shearers use specialized electric shears (or traditional blade shears) to carefully remove the fleece in as few pieces as possible, ideally in one whole "blanket." This requires skill to avoid injuring the animal and to maximize the value of the fleece.
• Animal Welfare: Modern shearing practices emphasize humane treatment, ensuring sheep are handled calmly and efficiently to minimize stress.
• Yield: A single sheep can produce anywhere from 2 to 30 pounds (around 1 to 14 kg) of raw wool per year, depending on the breed, health, and environmental factors.

Skirting: Hand-Picking for Quality

Once shorn, the raw fleece undergoes an essential preliminary cleaning process called skirting. This is a critical step that significantly impacts the quality and value of the final wool product.

• Manual Precision: As part of this crucial process, wool skirters pick through every single fleece by hand. This labor-intensive task is performed on a specialized skirting table, which typically has a mesh top, allowing short, undesirable fibers to fall through.
• Contaminant Removal: The primary goal of skirting is removing all contaminating elements that would otherwise degrade the wool's quality, increase processing costs, or lead to defects in finished textiles. These elements include:
  • Tags: These are sections of wool, usually from around the tail and bottom side of the fleece, that are stained with fecal matter. They are removed to prevent contamination of the clean wool and because they are of very low quality.
  • Bellies: This refers to the very short, often coarser, fiber right around the belly of the sheep. Belly wool is typically less desirable due to its shorter staple length and often higher vegetable matter content.
  • Environmental Debris: Any foreign materials picked up by the sheep from its environment, such as twigs, burrs, straw, dirt, dust, and other vegetable matter, are meticulously removed.

Skirting ensures that only the best quality, relatively clean wool proceeds to further processing, optimizing the efficiency of subsequent stages like washing and spinning.

Subsequent Steps in Wool Preparation

After shearing and skirting, the wool undergoes further preparation before it can be used for textiles:

• Sorting and Classing: The remaining high-quality fleece is then sorted or "classed" based on various characteristics like fiber diameter (fineness), staple length, color, and strength. This ensures consistency for different end products.
• Baling: The sorted wool is compressed into large bales for efficient storage and transport to wool mills.
• Scouring (Washing): At the mill, the raw wool is thoroughly washed using water, soap, and alkalis to remove remaining grease (lanolin), dirt, and other impurities.

The table below summarizes the primary stages of wool harvesting and initial preparation:

This comprehensive approach ensures that the harvested wool meets the high standards required for textile production worldwide.