Regenerative bast fibres at Groundswell.
The UK + Ireland have a history of growing bast fibres for domestic use. And that’s for both fibre and food. But with industrialisation and globalisation (aka capitalism and continued colonialism) the bast fibre industries disappeared from these islands. How today can farmers and fashion collaborate to reintegrate bast fibres as economically and environmentally viable?
Groundswell is an annual regenerative agriculture festival in Hertfordshire that provides a forum for farmers, growers, or anyone interested in food production and the environment to learn about the theory and practical applications of regenerative farming systems.
This is the fourth in a series exploring fashion and its connection to agriculture, using the discussions from Groundswell as starting points for some thoughts.
This one considers bast fibres.
Bast fibres.
What are bast fibres?
To begin with, I think it useful to explain what bast fibres are. If you’re not into textiles, it’s unlikely you’ve come across this term before.
Textiles fibres tend to be split into the categories of animal (protein) and vegetable (plant). Within each of these you have a variety of fibres — for instance, the most well-known animal fibres are vastly different in their wool, leather, silk characteristics. Plant fibres are generally cellulosic, which means that the fibre comes from the strands made by a plant cell’s structure. This can be from a cotton plant’s fluffy boll, or from the hair-like inner part of a flax plant’s stem.
Bast fibres are a category of plant fibres that are taken specifically from either the inner bark (also known as the phloem) or from the bast (outer core of a stem) of a plant in the dicotyledon group of flowering plants. This grouping is important, because dicotyledons are soft and flexible, while plants from the other group — monocotyledon — are hard and stiff. The ability to separate this soft bark from a plant and process it to break down its xylem (woody core) is how we’re able to arrive at a range of strong plant fibres.
The common cultivated bast fibres are flax (linen), hemp and ramie (a type of nettle), with jute and kenaf following as semi-cultivated, though wild plants have been used for their fibre since textiles were first engineered, such as stinging nettle, oak, linden (lime), willow and mulberry. In the UK and Ireland, it was flax and hemp that were most commonly and economically grown and processed. Wisdom was passed on that these were relatively low input crops, taking only a few months to grow so land could recover or be used for another crop, while providing a multitude of ecological benefits before you even got the healthy foods, useful oils and utilitarian fibres.
Images: 1. Bialbrzeskie hemp variety grown for fibre [Credit: Polish Hemp Seeds]; 2. Linum usitatissimum varieties of linseed and flaxseed [Credit: Flaxland]; 3. The ramie plant ‘Boehmeria nivea’ [Credit: The Fruit Forest].
How are bast fibres processed?
However, things changed. To understand how a scaled bast industry declined, not just in the UK and Ireland but globally too, you need to recognise that they simply take a lot longer to process in comparison to cotton, and then in more recent times in comparison to synthetic fibres. I don’t want to use this space to go into technicalities as that’s a thing of its own, but do need to stipulate that in the scenario of bast fibre production, time is money.
It’s not even necessarily a conversation around public demand, but rather mill owners (whether for cotton or synthetics) marketing to you that these fibres were what you needed instead. Quicker, cheaper, more applications. Of course it’s not as simplistic as that, though without a need to grow flax or hemp to process and produce into rope or tents or soldier uniforms, land here would have better economical viability by being used to grow arable food crops instead.
The traditional methods used to process bast fibres, primarily the retting stage where the plant’s cell structure is broken down, and the relatively slow stages of breaking the straw, scutching (cleaning), ‘hackling’ the fibre (combing) and then spinning all weren’t needed, because there was no fibre onshore to process. Machinery was disposed of, wisdom didn’t need to be passed on, land was converted to solely food crops and livestock.
Images: 1. Water retting of flax straw in Ireland [Credit: unknown]; 2. Breaking flax straw using a wooden piece of equipment [Credit: Flaxland]; 3. Cutting and retting jute [Credit: Textile Apex]; 4. Stinging nettle processed into fibre, yarn and cordage [Credit: Brigitte Kaltenbacher]
So what happened then?
Here in the UK and Ireland the fibre industry died. Ireland held it up for our isles by continuing to grow flax, though infrastructure had been dismantled and all straw was shipped to the continent (mainly France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Lithuania) for processing in large, swift mills. Some of it returned for the weaving, some of it stayed there. Hemp came under licensing, so you had to apply to grow it, though the same processing barriers continued regardless. Other countries kept up their small production quantities of fibres and cloth, but competition with cotton and synthetics was difficult.
However, there is a resurgence in awareness that globalisation — with all its exploitation, destruction, lack of transparency, speed and need for growth — is incongruous to our survival. Debates ensue as to whether onshoring is really just xenophobia, and not dealing directly with the impact of colonisation. The story is all about job creation, and this is necessary to regenerate economies that can sustain themselves — particularly apparent as required when Covid-19 disrupted supply chains.
Though for those working in the space of reintroducing bast fibre growing and processing to the UK and Ireland, it’s about community rather than just employment; it’s about land restoration and improvements to the water, nutrient and carbon cycles; it’s about improving biodiversity; it’s about increasing and establishing resilience economically and environmentally; it’s about avoiding exploitation and improving transparency, it’s about traceability and awareness of provenance; it’s indeed about decentralisation, localism and shortening supply chains, but it’s also about the bigger picture. The benefits all can have globally by us in the UK and Ireland implementing bast fibres into crop rotations, building mills, sharing ancient skills, switching from a dependence on fossil fuels, and refusing to exploit those overseas.
Groundswell discussion 1 — Hemp processing demo.
Kitty Wilson Brown + Claire O’Sullivan (Contemporary Hempery), Tom Woodcock (Hempen) and Julian Thompson.
From what I see, people (public) are intrigued by hemp, perhaps because it’s slightly rebellious. So whenever there’s a hemp thing, there’s a crowd. This was a demo about food, fibre and construction: Contemporary Hempery, two women who’ve taken over a plot of land on a farm in Suffolk to grow, process and weave hemp in order to improve perception of the fibre; Tom Woodcock from Hempen, a not-for-profit worker’s co-operative in Oxfordshire that grow hemp to process into seed, oil, flour, cosmetics and CBD products; and Julian Thompson to highlight hemp in construction.
I made it to the processing demo half way through the 30 minute session so only just caught the backend of Kitty and Claire (Contemporary Hempery) explaining the history of hemp before going on to show how to process the straw into fibre with traditional equipment. I’m unsure if Julian Thompson (presumably the one of iFarm) was there as advertised in the programme sharing developments in hemp construction, but Tom Woodcock of Hempen was there answering questions.
Or rather, there was such a hubbub around the hemp processing that any questions directed at Tom were lost, including one legitimate one from a farmer on what it actually costs to implement and run a hemp site. So the audience instead gathered around a table of hemp seed oil and bread. I guess you can’t cover much in half an hour, especially when a practical is involved, so I only hope the inquisitive farmer did go to the next day session on ‘practicalities and markets for British hemp’.
I think realistically this type of “cottage” demo isn’t going to win over farmers as to how economically viable the growing of hemp could be, and perhaps this would’ve been useful to include in the above-mentioned talk. It may intrigue folk who then go to talk about the magic of transforming a plant into a fibre or oil, so shifting things up that way with grassroots education, but we were at an agriculture festival to discuss larger-scale operations, not small-scale homemade production that would only touch the surface of what’s needed. Again, thirty minutes isn’t anything at all, but I was hoping to see some oil processing and hemp construction panel creation in action.
Images: 1. Claire and Kitty on the hemp plot at Wakelyns Farm with their first harvest (2022) [Credit: Instagram]; 2. A hemp plant with seeds forming at Hempen [Credit: Instagram].
Groundswell discussion 2 — Practicalities and markets for British hemp.
Nathaniel Loxley (British Hemp Alliance + Vitality Hemp), Nick Voase (East Yorkshire Hemp), Andrew Jones (Fibra), Sam Baumber (IndiNature), Hadleigh Hobbs (Wellspring Property and Investments) and Stephen Glover (The British Hemp Co).
I’d decided to sit in for half of another session on ‘The Diet of the Future’ before hometime, subsequently missing half of this talk. It was set to highlight viable opportunities for a growing British hemp market, with a panel made up of guys (literally six white British males) growing and processing hemp for products from health-based to medical to construction. Note, nothing on fibre for fashion textiles.
My key takeaways:
Hemp is a robust crop once going, but does take some establishment commitment.
There are different varieties of seed for different applications (Contemporary Hempery stated they used the Futura (?) variety for fibre, which grows 2.6cm a day and 2.5 months before harvest time).
Crops need to be developed that can withstand the climate (presumably meaning to trial and iterate, not GM).
Hemp can be thought of as a cereal crop in terms of how it sits in a farm rotation, though requires less inputs. It can also be used as a break crop (when you’re resting the land between cereals).
Land is limited in the UK, so what is available shouldn’t be used for timber for housing. However, as hemp grows quickly and highly in four months, it can be readily used in construction (such as insulation panels or as a ‘wood’).
By using hemp instead of timber, you’re “locking carbon” into a house. One panellist was referring to housing construction and a house having “locked up 9 tons of carbon”. Carbon cycles, so this doesn’t seem correct to say, but guess the point is that hemp may be more carbon positive in use than timber.
Infrastructure is required for processing, whether that’s shiv (bits of straw) for construction, or oil for health products, or fibre for textiles. But this is costly, so instead a central processing unit could be collectively purchased with farmers trained within a region on how to use it. Tech can also be shared.
There is commitment and interest from industries wanting and willing to use hemp, however there isn’t yet the capacity available to provide them enough raw material i.e. more land and growers are needed for that supply.
Images: 1. East Yorkshire Hemp use all of the crop to make products, including HempLogz from the fine dust, short fibres and small pieces of hemp shiv off the processing line; 2. Margent Farm’s Flat House using Hempcrete wall infill and a structure of corrugated material made of a compressed mixture of hemp fibres and bio-resin.
Images: 1. Nebraska’s BastCore hemp processing mill and decortication machinery that breaks retted straw into its fibre constituent; 2. The IndiNature mill in the Scottish Borders that produces a thermal insulating batting from UK-grown hemp.
Groundswell discussion 3 — Landscape scale regeneration - Connecting ecology, community and culture.
Abby Rose (moderator), Donal Sheehan (The BRIDE Project), Sarah Prosser (Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective) and Pieter Ploeg (Commonland Foundation + Terranu).
How can people work together and think about land restoration beyond just their own farm? This discussion brought together three initiatives that demonstrate farm collaboration in action, who are able to collectivise with the support of Commonland facilitating those tricky scenarios faced by small family farms.
This was an unexpectedly delightful discussion. I like the way anyway that Abby Rose moderates (as one host of the Farmerama podcast) but the panellists were surprising in their stories, and how the narrative brought up topics of textiles and fashion though that wasn’t what I went along for. The main focus was on the landscape of County Waterford, Republic of Ireland, that relies on farming and fishing to survive. But most conversations around regeneration put environment front and centre, missing an opportunity to consider regeneration of communities and culture too, which creates a long term impact and stymies other issues causing harm to the landscape.
The BRIDE Project.
Donal Sheehan is a dairy farmer in the Bride Valley area of County Cork, Ireland. He initiated the BRIDE Project (Biodiversity Regeneration In a Dairying Environment) to establish templates and a place for knowledge transfer for the wider agricultural community. Working with a network of local farmers, he then developed a concept called ‘Farming with Nature’ designed to connect individual farmers to food consumers at point of purchase. In his bit he explained why he felt the landscape around dairy farming needed to be shifted and required future frameworks.
Dairy milk quotas were removed in 2010, but he didn’t want to follow the expansion. This removal meant the combining or moving of farms, which he didn’t want to play a part in. Instead he kept a small herd of 55 cows.
In an ideal world, agriculture schemes involve the communities around farms. As each farmer works differently with different land types and different outputs, an agri-environmental scheme to support small farms would need to be landscape scale, rather than farm scale. For instance, one farm can’t implement all the biodiversity measures (capacity and cost), but a patchwork of farms could.
With this in mind, Donal achieved five-year funding via the European Union and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine through the European Innovation Partnership (EIP) funding initiative. The BRIDE project was established to run 2018-2023 with €1,1 million in funding.
In 2018, at the beginning of the BRIDE Project, farms were assessed for biodiversity and habitat scorecards designed to accurately reflect their ecological quality. These farms were also mapped to estimate their Space For Nature (SFN) and in averaging out the scores on each farm, a Farmland Biodiversity Index (FBI) was created to reflect the quantity and quality of biodiversity on each farm.
Farmers in a given area were encouraged to implement a range of habitat improvement measures (particularly up to 10% space for nature), for which a results-based payment scheme was implemented where farmers had each habitat on their farm further assessed and scored, with higher quality habitats gaining higher payments.
Due to the limitations of the funding, and desire to be fair, out of the 60 farmers that showed interest, 33 were chosen to be involved in the project (should’ve been less than that, but they all chose to take lesser payments to accommodate the additional farms).
Additional funding of €150,000 in 2021 allowed Donal to develop the Farming with Nature side project where a web portal and app was created to index data from each farm on biodiversity metrics. Farmers scoring highly could then have their products “certified” as Farmed With Nature, providing customers assurance.
Bioregional Weaving Labs.
I pricked up when Sarah introduced herself as a weaver, but in fact it was more to do with the weaving of stories or actions than physical textile weaving. Nevertheless, we did get to discuss textiles a little when I asked a question at the end. Sarah is a “weaver” as part of the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective initiated by Ashoka, co-led by Commonland and OpEPA to bring together 25+ international organisations, funders and impact investors to test systemic, regenerative innovations and practices across Europe.
Each lab hosts 40-60 key local stakeholders (farmers, fishermen, landowners, investors, corporate leaders, shareholders, policymakers, educators, community members, etc.) who come together to “reimagine a future for their bioregions in which they live in harmony with their environment”. They’re known as ‘influential changemakers’ and BWL want 1 million of these across their various labs. So Sarah essentially acts as a facilitator, figuring out what those local stakeholders want and then taking this to whomever needs to see it in order for change to occur.
The BWL process is designed around proven methodologies and frameworks developed by members of the collective: ‘Theory U’ (Presencing Institute), ‘Weaving’ (The Weaving Lab), ‘Changemaking’ (Ashoka), and the ‘4Returns Framework’ (Commonland).
Based in Ireland, Sarah huddled 40 stakeholders together to discuss what systems changes are needed for the vision of “nature, economic, social and inspiration capital”, specifically for that bioregion. A manifest was co-wrote and then recorded and taken to policymakers in Brussels. We were able to listen to the manifest during the talk and it was enlivening and emotional [hear that at 17:55 in the video link below] but here is a couple of lines from it:
“Food is not a luxury, food is a basic social need. Through food we become aware of ourselves and of each other. Food is a common good. Food is revolutionary. / We want our children and grandchildren to know the taste of wild salmon and the foods those of us before enjoyed. We want to be good guardians of the soil and of our traditions. We want to become good ancestors.”
As Sarah was talking about bioregions and weaving together communities, I was thinking about the Fibershed movement, so I asked Sarah for her take on the role of connecting food and fibre. She said that no one in the bioregion of Ireland was yet doing anything fibre-related (though there is Fibreshed Ireland), so perhaps it’s about considering the ‘four returns’ framework established by Commonland to establish new markets for e.g. wool.
Commonland.
Pieter Ploeg is a Design Strategist and Facilitator at the Commonland Foundation, who work with partners in 20 countries to restore land. Recognising agriculture as a “key land user”, they work with farmers to improve that agricultural land, as well as make returns in other ways using their ‘Four Returns Framework’.
Return of inspiration: Giving people hope and a sense of purpose
Social return: Bringing back jobs, education and social connections
Natural return: Restoring biodiversity and soils for healthy and resilient landscapes
Financial return: Realising long-term sustainable income for communities
Understanding that each landscape varies, they consider what restoration looks like across those four returns for each particular place. One of the regions is County Waterford, Ireland where they identified challenges as depleted land, soils, water and food quality; loss of species, habitats and ecosystems; poor mental and physical health, local economy and housing pressures. The insights from the Bioregional Weaving Labs and from projects like BRIDE can inform others.
An audience question regarded how Commonland is funded. Having existed for 10 years, but acknowledging that landscape restoration can take a minimum of 20 years, their funding injection has varied though Pieter says it’s currently from ‘unrestricted’ sources. Co-operatives can secure somewhat resilient revenue, but philanthropists come and go so there does need to be a patchwork of sources. I think this is the talk where it was mentioned about the Church of England releasing land to restoration projects, so this is providing some support for organisations like Commonland (as rent wouldn’t then need to be paid).
You can watch the full hour-long discussion on Landscape Scale Regeneration: Connecting Ecology, Community and Culture on Groundswell’s YouTube Channel here. Listen to my question at 47:30.
Images: 1. County Waterford, Republic of Ireland [Credit: Commonland]; 2. A collective discussion around landscape action [Credit: film still from Bioregional Weaving Lab Collective]; 3. Natural elements like ponds provide safe havens for local biodiversity and encourage a resilient farming system [Credit: Tom Lovett via Commonland].
Takeaways.
Ultimately hemp was pride of place at Groundswell, though it isn’t the only crop available to shifting fibre production in the UK and Ireland, especially considering Ireland do still have a strong-enough flax-growing industry. Though it is trendy, and trends can help investment. Probably because hemp has been proven more readily to work in construction, and you’ve got the CBD market, hemp does win in terms of economic viability.
Flax has seed and oil too, but there’s a challenge with growing a variety that has both high nutritional value and high fibre quality (so you’d need additional land and seed). Hemp also has different varieties for different applications, but I wonder if because it’s a taller and hardier crop, you have more product markets (over flax) regardless of what you’re growing it for i.e. you still get the shiv from the fibre variety for use in construction (and with the seed variety, you still likely get fibre just a poorer quality).
Though Kitty and Claire are wanting to modernise the perception of hemp in textiles for the UK (the USA is a little ahead of us), they’re still in their infancy. Without the onshore facilities suitable for fibre processing, all fibre hemp will continue to be a cottage industry (being spun, and woven or knitted by hand). And capacity doesn’t exist in the UK currently, which is potentially why they’re blending the hemp with wool (or maybe this is to make it more palatable).
Nettle wasn’t mentioned at all, and it’s probably because it still has a perception of weediness. Nettles grow readily, and so are sort of a free resource for any farm, but don’t fit into an industrial system because they choose where to grow. The implementation of decortication machinery for hemp could provide a way to speed up nettle processing (they’re more similar in structure and processing than with flax), so that nettle becomes a more viable fibre especially to those processing on a small scale. Though I reckon actually, those processing by hand want it to remain a decentralised and hyperlocal craft.
History of the fibres, markets for all the possible products, ecological benefits, and some social benefits such as community harvests were all mentioned. Key to the conversation is consumer awareness, education and acceptance; though there was chat about products to market, there wasn’t much covered about consumer access. It was mentioned that supply needed to increase for machinery to increase, but what about demand? Bast fibres will continue to be inaccessible to most due to the higher price point. This likely won’t shift until the cotton production system is improved and realistic value is placed on that crop, and then there can be comparable pricing. And of course, synthetics need to do one. If consumers aren’t aware of the reality of the full scope of textile production, how can they make informed choices? Without them, is there enough demand to warrant the supply? Do we need to be forced to only have natural fibres as the option?
Some additional resources for interest:
Flaxland for seeds, processing guidance and workshops.
How jute is cultivated [Textile Apex].
Nettles for Textiles processing videos and publications.
Homegrown Homespun project growing flax and indigo to make jeans.
Rosie Bristow aka Straw Into Gold on building a UK flax infrastructure.
Homegrown Fashion feasability study [South West England Fibreshed].
Thank you for reading. Feed back by commenting or emailing if you have anything to say or share.
An Additional article for this series considering soil health and biodiversity (and its relation to the fashion system) will follow. But subscribe to my newsletter to receive links to these articles in your inbox once a month.
Read four other articles of a similar topic:
Regenerative Fashion book review.