weighing the bale
It takes lots of steps to get wool from the back of a sheep to a nice woolen garment to warm your back. The sheep does most of the work, putting a year of her life into growing beautiful strong natural fiber. The shearers do the highly skilled work of removing those fleeces from the original owners, and the ground crew gathers up the raw wool, sorts them by type, and packs them into 400 pound bales.Once the bales are sheltered in our shed, it still needs to be graded before it can be sold and started on it journey to be scoured, made into top, and ultimatley spun and woven into fabric.
Many years, we send the bales on to a commercial wool warehouse, where cores are drilled in each bales. The cores then go to one of the two wool laboratories in the world (one in New Zealand and one in Texas) to be graded. The lab looks at fiber diameter (fineness), color, cleanness and all the factors that affect the final product. We have our own shed, and we’ve kept the wool waiting for the commodity price to rise. In order to market it, the bales must be cored. We have our own manual coring drill, which requires real strengh. Luckily our intrepid crew has both brains AND brawn.
Juan marking the bale
Pushing in the drill
pushing the wool out of the corer\
taking the bale to be stacked
Ladder Ranch
