Tour Our Wool Mill
The Long Way Homestead Wool mill opened in July of 2018 in eastern Manitoba. Anna’s early vision was to fill the gap of wool & fibre processing in Manitoba.
The mill is a Belfast Mini-Mill from Prince Edward Island. The mill is a vertically integrated operation meaning we can go from raw wool all the way to finished yarn in house.
Luke joined the mill team full time in 2020 and now runs all the operations in the mill. Although the mill is considered ‘mini’ the Long Way Homestead team runs approximately 5000lbs dirty wool through it every year.
Watch this Video of our mill process
Learn more about the history of our wool mill
Read the story of our wool mill arriving and our early days of wool processing and learning how to make yarn.
Read the full story HERE
In 2023 we celebrated 5 years of wool processing and I took the time to reflect on how local wool mills can have a bigger impact on our industry.
5-Year Wool Mill Reflection: One of the biggest things I’ve learned in the last 5 years is the many ways in which access to fibre processing can be beneficial to community (fibre arts, farming, textile, fashion communities). The goal when we opened the mill was to ‘meet a need’ among other sheep and wool producers - I had no idea how important this need was and how having access to a fibre processor can ignite a small-scale textile economy in a region.
This isn’t to promote our mill specifically - but to highlight the importance and need for mills in ALL communities. It creates an opportunity for farmers to get their product to market and the ripples within a community are far-reaching. Here is a brief look at the impact the mill has had in our community in the last 5 years:
Processed 2954.29lbs of wool and other fibres for 68 farmers or sheep producers
Processed 274.26lbs of wool and other fibres for 26 fibre artists in our Province.
Provided 5 indy dyers with 270.69lbs of yarn for test batches and future supply.
Worked with 6 small-scale wool brokers producing 213.55lbs of wool
Spun 186.64lbs of wool for in-house yarn for 3 community based yarn stores.
In total that is 3890.43 lbs of wool that we have transformed into marketable products for 108 individual farmers/businesses. When farmers, wool brokers, indy-dyers, yarn stores and fibre artists have access to local processing we see an increase in local fibres, yarn and other products in our fibre/textile industry.
In addition to our custom processing we have purchased more than 8000lbs of raw wool from local Canadian farmers for our own line of yarn. This supported local farmers and put locally grown yarn in your hands!
Now, if I add it all up it’s a fairly small amount (nearly 12,000lbs) of wool - it’s a drop in the bucket when we think of the nearly 3 million pounds of wool grown in Canada every year.
But without local mills then that wool/fibre isn’t processed at all - or its shipped far and wide for processing. Our small drop in the bucket can lead to an even bigger ripple.
On a cozy day in October 2023 we hosted a farm to table dinner to celebrate our mill and to look towards the future of wool processing in Manitoba. You can see a full recap of that day HERE.
