Fiber Farmers? Why Not!

Two weeks ago after a particularly difficult week at work for the both of us, my mother said, "You have to figure out something else for us, some way that we can make money doing what we love." Thus began the journey.

When I was growing up my family raised Lincoln sheep, a curly longwool breed with beautiful luster. We showed this sheep at many shows and attempted to market the fiber, but with limited success. I was too young to really get into the business side of the operation, and my parents weren't computer savvy. We made a few brief connections, but nothing that lasted, and we were essentially raising a large flock of pets. When my brother and I went off to college my parents sold the sheep, as we weren't making any money and my parents had lost their help. The journey into fiber farming was seemingly over.

Two summers ago I started crocheting, completely by chance. I was going to grad school and needed something to keep me busy after I was done with my homework at night. My mother handed me a "teach yourself crochet" book that she'd picked up somewhere, and I've been crocheting ever since. Shortly after this she began knitting, and we both began to immerse ourselves in the fiber arts.

After our conversation about finding something to do that we loved, I thought hard about how we could make money from our crafting obsessions, and I thought about the past experience we had. An idea popped into my head, let's try to fiber farm again!! I have the interest and the computer savvy to market our product, and my mother and I both love animals and wouldn't mind farming again. We debated what to get; our past experience was with sheep, but we could also raise cashmere or angora goats, alpacas, anything. Then I thought about angora rabbits. They're much smaller in size than the other livestock we were considering, and would have less of a start-up cost.

Fast forward to today. There was a rabbit show in my town today that an angora rabbit breeder I'd been emailing was showing at, so my mom and I went to check it out. We had a chance to discuss rabbits with the breeder, plus we checked out some rabbit equipment that was for sale and took some pictures. The breeder didn't have the information we were really hoping to get, but investigating the rabbit equipment paid off. There were some fantastic looking cages there, but we're hoping to make the cages ourselves. After examining the cages carefully we went to the local farm store and found some reels of cage wire for $20 as well as the clamps that hold the bars together and some "urine guards", or metal pieces that attach to the inside of the cage to keep the bunny from accidentally spraying outside the cage. I think we can make several cages out of the materials we found for much less than the purchase price of the options we found today. We didn't purchase cage materials, as we're still in the research phase of our budding business, but we did purchase a book on rabbits and a book about starting a small, craft-based business.

We're hoping to market raw fleece, spun yarn, and knit or crochet crafts made out of our angora fiber, with the idea that we may someday expand to include other fiber-growing livestock. This blog will be a way to record our journey from dabblers to owners of a (hopefully!) successful fiber farming and crafting business.

Valuable lesson of the week: If your first contact doesn't turn out to be what you were looking for, don't give up! Go find other contacts that may prove helpful. You have to slog through a lot of information before you find what you're looking for.