This past week was both the Carolina Fiber Festival and Quilt Show. The major two cash crops being shown were: wool and cotton. Weirdly, dyed wool and garments both do well in NC though there doesn’t seem to be much goat cashmere which is odd given all our dairy goats. Goat cashmere is the undercoat which the animals lose in the spring and harvested by simply brushing so it’s surprising that someone hasn’t tried to contract for it since dairy goats already visit a milking stand twice a day and are dried off in early spring so you have a gap in revenue and animals that are accustomed to being handled in milking parlors. There is also a specific breed, but that's not required. Seems like a robotics project for NC State agriculture and engineering students to partner coding by building a collection booth to auto-brush the goats daily for the 2-4 weeks a year that they go through the winter shed and then sell the roughly 2-4 lbs/goat at a profit. Let's say the average goat herd is 500 goats so 1,000-2,000 lbs. per farm at $20-200/lb means $20,000-400,000/extra a year per farm? Modified solar milking stalls? Goats and cashmere are both incredibly popular worldwide so it has export potential where the booths get dropped off with farmers in early spring and then picked up a few weeks later similar to spring sheep shearing in a rental system? Maybe some engineer will get interested in this blue ocean technology.
Flax/linen was a single booth dedicated to planting and harvesting in the mountains and Pennsylvania so not sure about that. Back to the cashmere goats. Some fiber fashion people with extra free time need to go hit up the national dairy goat register out near Greensboro, NC and see about collecting spring cashmere for sale. If you like the idea, it’s yours. Have a great week.
Note: If this was an investor pitch, you'd probably start with 3.9+ million goats in the US annually or x thousands of dairy farms on the East Coast. Those are billion dollar numbers, but you can do your own research. Just thought it was an interesting automation system someone could build.