A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
The push to eat local has grown for more than three decades, encouraging people to eat food from nearby farms and food producers. One woman in Appalachian Ohio hopes to do the same with clothes by building a regional textile economy. Here's Amanda Pirani from member station WOUB.
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AMANDA PIRANI, BYLINE: Sweat drips down Gavyn Shumard's forehead as he leans over a large sheep at the Hocking Hills Garment Center, a local textile manufacturing facility in Ohio. He does his best to keep the animal calm, despite the razor moving around its body.
GAVYN SHUMARD: Sheep shearing's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.
PIRANI: He works for Altitude Shearing, one of about 400 shearing companies nationwide, and Shumard is in high demand as older shearers age out.
SHUMARD: One year, I sheared around 13,000.
PIRANI: In Ohio, the shearing business typically takes place in the northern area of the state, where there are more farms. Artist Lisa Heinz in southeast Appalachian Ohio uses local wool for her yarn and embroidery floss. Farms there are smaller and more spread out, so she says Shumard's company was a rare find.
LISA HEINZ: Those established shearers from the North don't generally come down here.
PIRANI: It's one of many problems Heinz hopes to solve in her quest to make clothes local again. She's the founder of the Southeast Ohio Fibershed. The organization helps tackle systemic challenges for textile production in the region.
HEINZ: We're supposed to help identify what our resources are, find the gaps and fill those gaps.
PIRANI: More than half of the material used in clothes today, including polyester and nylon, comes from plastic and often ends up in landfills after only a few years. And Heinz, who sells locally sourced yarn, says there is a demand for something more durable and sustainable - a demand that could be met by cultivating sources for local fiber, like wool. She says most farms in Ohio raise sheep for meat, and they're throwing away fleece that could be worth saving.
HEINZ: There's use for this wool. It's just - it's an education piece of how to take care of your field so that the fleece remains good enough to do something with.
PIRANI: Over time, Heinz has built relationships with farmers who sell her their fleece, but there's another supply chain problem to grapple with - a shortage of fiber mills that process wool into yarn. Lots of local mills shut down as a result of the pandemic. Now waitlists can stretch one to two years. So Heinz put some of her wool to other uses. In her home, a machine the size of a table uses hundreds of needles to compress the fleece into sheets she can use for products like pot scrubbers or boot liners.
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HEINZ: And then there's these rollers. Let's see.
PIRANI: In her dream scenario, the Fibershed will own its own mill one day and help farmers grow natural fibers like flax or hemp. For now, Heinz is focused on making connections. The organization recently held its first meetup earlier this year. Coral Wedel, a local fashion designer, attended. She says there's a growing interest in producing clothes locally.
CORAL WEDEL: I think it is a movement, and I think people are interested in getting back to the community and back to the roots and really understanding how things work.
PIRANI: A movement that she hopes will inspire future textile makers to use natural fabrics that come from animals or plants closer to home.
For NPR News, I'm Amanda Pirani in southeast Ohio.
(SOUNDBITE OF HOW TO COUNT ONE TO TEN'S "PARALLEL") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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