“How Western Sheep Producers Are Using Waste Wool to Save Water”
By Ilana Newman, The Daily Wander
Article excerpt published by LOR Foundation, March 2025
“…The wool from sheep on Cottonwood Creek Ranch doesn’t fetch much on the open market because its fibers are not ideal for socks and other fleece products. The last time the Ruxs sold blackface wool, it was worth 15 cents a pound, or about $1.50 per animal (premium wools, like Merino, are significantly more valuable). It costs three times that amount just to shear one animal, which meant the wool piling up on the Rux’s property had a negative value. “We hated to see wool go to waste,” Alicia says. “And we knew other sheep producers had the same issue. I started thinking: ‘What do we do with all this wool that has no market?’” Rux found one answer to her question at a sheep-producing event where she met Albert Wilde, a Utah farmer who was making pellets out of waste wool and adding them to plant soil at Wild Valley Farms. The theory was that because wool retains water so well—it can hold up to 30 percent of its weight in water—and because it contains high levels of nitrogen, the pellets could act as both a water-savings tool and a substitute for synthetic fertilizer when injected into the soil. Wilde, likely the first person in the United States to use wool pellets this way, was marketing his product to gardeners and commercial greenhouse growers.
Wilde’s pioneering wool work was backed by research, too. In 2019, the University of Vermont (UVM) conducted a study using pellets from Wild Valley Farm to determine the efficacy of wool as a fertilizer substitute. The UVM researchers determined that the pellets had ideal levels of nitrogen, small amounts of potassium, and almost no phosphorous—making it an effective and environmentally-friendly option compared to commercial fertilizers that rely on high quantities of phosphorus, which pollutes waterways and creates blue-green algae blooms…”
Read more at https://lorfoundation.org/stories/how-western-sheep-producers-are-using-waste-wool-to-save-water/
