Goat Coats

Cashmere fibre for cashmere clothing. A field day was held on-farm at Clinton on Saturday 24 August and we decided to go. We’d been in Roxburgh overnight so drove home and only had 15mins before it was time to drive to Clinton. The goats are an integral part of a 400ha beef and sheep farm.

The farm starts with feral goats and uses specially selected bucks to maximise fine white cashmere fibre in the following generations. New Zealand Cashmere has big plans and an excellent website with heaps of information – they want other NZ farmers to join with them in farming goats for cashmere.

Here’s their ‘cashmere’ website page, a good place to start for background info:

Link:    Cashmere

We spent 2-3 hours in the farm woolshed where we saw a good number of goats waiting to be shorn and David Shaw, the farmer, talked to us about farming goats and about cashmere fibre and the market for it.. high-end fashion. We also saw him shear a couple of goats, very different to seeing a sheep shorn.

This is the pen for the farm’s pet goats. I’m extremely focussed on getting my cellphone camera into action and trying to get a decent photo of the energetic, restless, inquisitive animals (photo taken by Nigel).

Aren’t they lovely?

Here’s my best photo from the pet pen.

The farm is focussed on breeding goats for very fine, white, cashmere fibre. (Liz)

The feral goat pen. The only black-and-white goat in the pen was no shrinking violet.. she has attitude! (Liz)

I was happy that Nigel took three photos of the goat with attitude … here they are in the same order that he took them. I love these goofy looks!

Cashmere fibre is fine, very light-weight, soft and warm. It’s ever so gentle, like froth sitting on the hand.

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Text by Liz, photos by Liz and Nigel; Exploring Colour (2019)
keywords: fibre, fiber, cashmere, kashmir, South Otago, New Zealand