Bringing Back the (Flax) Fields of Gold

On a humid summer day in southeastern PA, farmers have traveled hours to Pasture Song Farm to see flax in the field. Farmer Jeremy Dunphy stands next to his four-acre test plot, brimming with flax as a cover crop, sharing what he’s learned with a crowd of 20 farmers, textile artists, designers, and educators. While he calls it the easiest plant he has grown, he knows there are hesitations.

Dunphy is part of the PA Flax Project, founded in 2020. The group aims to reshore the flax industry in North America, and they’ve received a three-year, $1.7 million USDA Agricultural Marketing Service Organic Marketing Development Grant (OMDG) to grow flax for linen on 12,000 acres, using a cooperative model where farmers would share in the profits. The PA Department of Agriculture recently designated flax as a specialty crop, opening up grant funding for farmers and allowing them to get crop insurance. Growers hope other states will follow with that designation.

Farmers can grow flax. What they need is a supply chain and market that can handle the harvest.

Participants learn about flax at the PA Flax Project event. Photography by Zoe Schaeffer.

Home grown

Although US farmers don’t grow flax much anymore, that was not always the case.

Flax has been cultivated since ancient Egypt, and in the US since colonial times, when European settlers brought seeds to places such as Philadelphia, where it was mostly hand-processed and spun. During World War II, the Works Progress Administration, built three processing mills to get the industry going and put farmers back to work after the Depression. At one time, 18,000 acres of flax were grown in Oregon, with 14 processing mills, spinning and weaving throughout the Willamette Valley. They sold fiber straight to the war efforts, but those contracts dried up around the same time synthetics became popular with the American consumer. In early American history, flax had been less economically competitive than cotton, which was able to exploit slave labor, and it made use of the cotton gin, which made its production faster and cheaper.

Flax. Photography via Kathleen Webber.

Now, as the textile industry looks at sustainable alternatives to popular petroleum-based fabrics, low-impact linen, made from flax, is in the spotlight. Organic flax requires little irrigation, and it can remediate soil and promote biodiversity. While most flax fiber is made into linen for clothing and home goods, it is also being used for biocomposites for automotive interiors, sporting goods, and decorative home goods. Other parts of the crop are used for rope, paper, mulch, and animal bedding.

Flax takes about 100 days to go from seed to harvest, and once planted, it needs little tending. It is, however, labor-intensive to extract and prepare the fiber for spinning. At maturity, a puller machine grabs the crop’s stalk at the root to get it out of the ground. It is laid down in windrows in the field and then retted, a controlled process of loosening the long fibers from the stalk. Retting can be done in tanks or pools, or in the field where dew and rain do the work. After retting, the stalks are ready for scutching at a mill. Scutching takes the flax straw and separates the short fibers, long fibers, shives, and seeds, through mechanical crushing and threshing. After scutching, the fiber can be sold to send a spinner to be made into yarn and woven or knit into linen textiles. The issue is the lack of infrastructure. Right now, mid- to large-scale scutching mills are non-existent in North America, because there is not enough flax being grown to support an industry.

Transporting large amounts of flax straw long distances to be processed is costly and environmentally damaging. Grower Shannon Welsh, co-founder of Fibrevolution in Alsea, OR and executive director of the North American Linen Association (NALA), would like to see at least a few processing facilities in strategic growing regions—on the two coasts and in the Midwest—to service existing growers.

“Not having [a scutching mill] is impeding the scaling of flax for fiber production here and why many farmers only grow flax on a smaller scale,” says Welsh. Each mill would require a $5-million to $10-million investment. If a mill is getting quality fiber, her model shows it could turn a profit in three years. “What flax fiber sells for in comparison to other fibers is quite high if the quality is good,” says Welsh. “In Europe, scutching mills are not subsidized and are self-sufficient.”

Where it all started

Because flax has not been grown at a commercial scale here since the mid-twentieth century, many growers make the pilgrimage to Europe to learn how to farm it and use the specialized equipment (pullers, balers, and turners). Robin Maynard Seaver of Green Mountain Linen in South Royalton, VT took her team to Belgium this summer to do that and to learn about how to use the puller she recently purchased. “There’s so much art to getting good fiber out of linen, because it’s not hard to grow, but you want the valuable long fiber.”

Patricia Bishop of TapRoot Farms started growing flax on her family vegetable farm in Port Williams, Nova Scotia, and processes up to 70 pounds a day. When she could not find smaller-scale equipment in Western Europe (where three quarters of all flax is grown), she enlisted an engineer friend to make braking, scutching, and hackling machines to clean and prep the flax fiber for spinning. Because the fibers are longer and need to be extracted from the flax stalk (which is about three feet tall), equipment is more mechanized than the kind used for cotton or wool, she explains.

Much of the flaxseed in the world comes from France or the Netherlands and is licensed like software. Domestic growers will buy seed from European growers with the agreement they won’t replant it. Farmers can grow flax for fiber or flax for seeds. Welsh has grown and sold their seeds for years at Fibrevolution. “There are multiple groups working on scaling up seed production in North America, because without more seed, we won’t be able to grow very much flax, and we don’t want to build mills if we are dependent on European seed.”

Seven years ago, Fibrevolution began working with Jennifer Kling, a professor at Oregon State University specializing in seed breeding. It has assisted in seed trials to breed new varieties of fiber flax for the North American market. “It takes seven to nine years to release a new variety and we’re almost at that mark,” says Welsh. It has also acquired seed from the OSU seed bank, for a variety developed in the 1960s during the last gasp of the linen industry in Oregon.

Heidi Barr, co-founder of the PA Flax Project. Photography by Zoe Schaeffer.

Heidi Barr, co-founder of the PA Flax Project, is wrapping up a trip to Europe to learn more about flax growing. “Flax farmers and scutchers have been in the trade for three to four generations,” she says. “We have much to learn and there is much potential for a long future of flax for linen in Pennsylvania and North America. “

Flax in demand

Welsh says NALA is contacted regularly by European spinners looking for more fiber to spin. “Demand is high and they are excited about us starting to grow and anxious for us to get to the point where we can sell fiber. There are also groups here exploring and working towards getting wet spinning, for finer yarns [dry spinning is for things such as rope], here in North America.”

Four acres of flax at Pasture Song Farm. Photography via author.

In 2024, global production currently totals 444,789 acres. Building a North American industry could help meet global demand. “If North America has operational scutching mills, fiber could be sold in the global marketplace, but it will take investment for the long haul,” says Bishop. She says if there’s more flax available to make into linen, consumers will choose natural fibers over synthetics.

“Growing and processing flax is our vision for the future for our farm and our community.”

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