My next stop on this 2,167-mile journey is Portland, where I had dinner with a clothing-designer friend of mine, Nancy. She specializes in organic fabrics and just had a show at the Bonaroo Music Festival.  Here are a few of her designs.

In creating these beautiful items, she found it quite difficult sourcing organic, sustainably produced cloth. At the same time, I’m talking with farmers raising heirloom animals that are trimmed every year for their fleece. These include sheep, alpacas, and goat fleeces. Yet they can’t sell them because so few mills are turning the fleece into cloth. We have supply and we have demand, but we are missing the small manufacturers crucial to filling in the puzzle.

This type of problem is endemic throughout the growing sustainable-farming community. This is why we are working on a project to create the Port Susan Food & Farming Center which will provide a way for farmers to create value-added products from the produce they grow. In other words, they can grow berries for a few weeks in early summer, process them into jam, and be able to sell that throughout the year. With the proper facilities, produce can be frozen, canned, pickled, cooked or preserved into all the fun things we like to have on-hand for year-round cooking.

So, my question to you is this: do you know of small mills where we can do the same thing for fleece? It would be great to bring producers and designers together, and what we need is the manufacturer who can do this.