Archive for June, 2011

14 June, 2011 | No comments

Making yarn in America: We travel west to tour Brown Sheep

There’s an American yarn being spun out on the high plains of western Nebraska, and Cheryl and I recently got a close-up look.

We toured the Brown Sheep yarn mill in Mitchell, Neb., just west of Scottsbluff and due east of Cheyenne, Wyo. Our guide was Peggy Jo Wells, who runs the company with her husband, Robert. Her father, Harlan Brown, founded Brown Sheep in 1980 on the farm that was purchased by his grandfather, E.W. Brown, over 100 years ago.

Peggy is proud of the fact that Brown Sheep is bucking industry trends by being an economically viable U.S. producer of yarn, paying employees above-minimum wages, providing benefits and following all government regulations. She’s a firm believer that the country’s continued prosperity is dependent on domestic manufacturing. “The United States can do it,” she declares. “I’m determined to beat the imports.” About 90 percent of the wool used by Brown Sheep is from the United States, mostly from Rambouillet and Columbia sheep from northern Colorado. Mohair and cotton, however, must be imported.

Brown Sheep is probably the largest U.S. yarn mill to carry out so much of the production under one roof. The one part of the process that Brown Sheep can’t do for itself is scouring, carding and combing, which is done in Jamestown, S.C. Peggy notes that scouring requires a great deal of water, something normally—this has been an unusually wet year—not found in abundance in western Nebraska. Everything else—twisting, spinning, dyeing, packaging, labeling and shipping—is done in Mitchell.

Harlan Brown began Brown Sheep with used equipment that became available when the textile industry began dying out in the southern U.S. Peggy and Robert replaced most of the old machines with new equipment from France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland between 2004 and 2010. Peggy is especially proud of the program that Robert developed in recent years to reuse 70 to 80 percent of the plant’s daily waste water, turning Brown Sheep green in a significant way.

She says that while she and Robert didn’t originally set out to run the family business—she had a career in business and Robert was a cancer researcher with a Ph.D. in radiation biology—they haven’t looked back since moving from Fort Collins, Colo., to Mitchell in the late 1990s. Peggy hopes her son, now in his late teens, will eventually take over the yarn mill as well as a 1,000-acre family farm.

Peggy says she no longer gives tours to members of the general public, but visitors are welcome in the company store, located in the mill building. It offers seconds and unique experimental skeins at excellent prices.

Following our visit, we stopped in downtown Scottsbluff for a runza, a dish native to Nebraska by way of Russia that consists of a rectangular bun enclosing seasoned beef, cheese, onions and cabbage. It makes for a satisfying quick lunch. Then we headed back to the Denver airport for the flight home.