How Western Sheep Producers Are Using Waste Wool to Save Water

Nestled on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation, Cottonwood Creek Ranch was born nearly a decade ago from an unexpected gift: Alicia and Ben Rux, first-generation ranchers received two bummer lambs (animals that were rejected by their mother after birth) for their kids to raise and take to fairs. Those two lambs turned into four and then 10 and then hundreds, and today Cottonwood Creek Ranch is a full-on lambing operation that raises and sells lambs primarily for consumption.

Roughly 400 sheep—including blackface and other crossbred lambs and ewes—graze Cottonwood Creek Ranch’s 600 acres of private and leased land. But as the number of livestock have grown, so too have the dirty piles of wool behind the barn, a byproduct of the shearing that must be done at least once a year to keep the flock healthy. Those piles of wool—not unlike the bummer lambs they started out with—are worth very little. Worse, they don’t break down naturally.

The wool from sheep on Cottonwood Creek Ranch doesn’t fetch much on the open market because its fibers are not ideal for socks and other fleece products. The last time the Ruxs sold blackface wool, it was worth 15 cents a pound, or about $1.50 per animal (premium wools, like Merino, are significantly more valuable). It costs three times that amount just to shear one animal, which meant the wool piling up on the Rux’s property had a negative value. “We hated to see wool go to waste,” Alicia says. “And we knew other sheep producers had the same issue. I started thinking: ‘What do we do with all this wool that has no market?’” 

A Wilde Solution

Rux found one answer to her question at a sheep-producing event where she met Albert Wilde, a Utah farmer who was making pellets out of waste wool and adding them to plant soil at Wild Valley Farms. The theory was that because wool retains water so well—it can hold up to 30 percent of its weight in water—and because it contains high levels of nitrogen, the pellets could act as both a water-savings tool and a substitute for synthetic fertilizer when injected into the soil. Wilde, likely the first person in the United States to use wool pellets this way, was marketing his product to gardeners and commercial greenhouse growers. 

Wilde’s pioneering wool work was backed by research, too. In 2019, the University of Vermont (UVM) conducted a study using pellets from Wild Valley Farm to determine the efficacy of wool as a fertilizer substitute. The UVM researchers determined that the pellets had ideal levels of nitrogen, small amounts of potassium, and almost no phosphorous—making it an effective and environmentally-friendly option compared to commercial fertilizers that rely on high quantities of phosphorus, which pollutes waterways and creates blue-green algae blooms. 

When Rux returned to Crowheart, she began thinking wool pellets might be the solution to her waste problem. She also wondered if they could improve the productivity of rangeland—a previously untested application. In 2023, using funding from the LOR Foundation’s Field Work effort, in which more than 60 ranchers in the Mountain West implemented water-focused innovations on their land, Rux purchased supplies (fencing materials, rain gauges, etc.) that would allow her to test the use of wool pellets in a rangeland setting rather than a garden plot. Using a Buskirk Engineering PM810 pellet mill, Rux began making wool pellets, and then tested her a hypothesis: She reasoned the plots of land where wool pellets were applied would grow stronger and use less water than their untreated counterparts. 

She and Ben built four 16-by-16-foot test plots, three of which were on non-irrigated rangeland and one that sat on an irrigated plot of oats. They divided each plot into four squares. The first square had no wool pellets added, the second square had one pound of pellets applied on the surface, the third had three pounds applied, and the fourth had six pounds. Over the course of the summer, they observed the height and density of the plant life in each plot. “Through our experiment, just applying them to the surface of the ground made a huge impact,” Alicia says. “The most striking test plot was the oats. There was easily a two-fold increase in height with the oats that had the most pellets compared to the square that had none.” They saw encouraging results on rangeland, too, where soil with wool pellets grew thicker and greener grasses than those left untreated.  

Convinced that wool pellets were an effective soil additive, Alicia and Ben began feeding more of their waste wool into the pellet mill and launched an online business called Cottonwood Creek Wool. “Being a small operation, we need to add value anywhere we can,” Alicia says. “If we can sell these pellets, that helps. And we hope we get to the point where we can buy wool from others and pelletize it, which would be a benefit for those producers.” 

Scaling the Solution

Alicia and Ben are not alone. Robert Andrews in Mack, Colorado, jokes that he “accidentally started a sheep ranch” about a decade ago, too, when his neighbor gave him a few bummer lambs. As he grew to 300 sheep—some of which he raises for fleece, others for consumption—one of the problems he encountered was finding someone willing to shear small flocks, so he organized group weekends at his property where several producers would get together and make it worth the shearer’s time. 

Before long he was swimming in waste wool, which attracted rodents. Andrews went looking for a solution. “I also wondered how we could help the small producer gain monetary value for junk wool,” he says. “And how could we turn it into a value-added product for the general public?” 

Andrews had also learned of the success of the wool pellets at Wild Valley Farm, so he began buying additional wool with the intent of purchasing a commercial shredder and pellet mill himself and solving a waste wool problem at a regional level. With funding from LOR’s Field Work initiative, he got his equipment running in late 2023. By the summer of 2024, he had 20,000 pounds of wool at his property (one sheep produces between five and 30 pounds annually) and had plans to acquire another 100,000 pounds. “We’ve unofficially become wool brokers,” he says. 

While Andrews agrees there’s a bigger market for wool pellets among small-scale gardeners right now, he sees opportunity in larger agricultural and natural resource applications. Based on anecdotal testing he has done on his property, he thinks using wool pellets could reduce an operation’s water consumption by 30 percent due to their ability to hold water and slowly release it into the soil over time. Moreover, he notes, wool is a cleaner alternative to commercial fertilizers—something he expects to attract a new generation of agricultural producers. 

“We have younger farmers getting into agriculture who are more willing to try new things,” he says. “They’re also looking for things that are more sustainable and regenerative. Wool is that.”

From Pellets to Pillows

Pelletizing could grow into a major industry, but it’s not the only application for waste wool right now. In Montana, sheep producers are making wool mats and using the byproduct to improve the hydrology of streams on their properties. Linda Poole in Malta, Montana, and Becky Weed in Belgrade, both have creeks cutting through their land that have grown deeper due to soil erosion. The consequence is that these waterways run fast during the spring, take soil downstream, and no longer effectively hold water on the land. This process, often called “channel incision,” has led to fewer plants, insects, and birds—an overall less biodiverse landscape.  

Up in Malta, about 50 miles from the Canadian border, Poole is mimicking the efforts of one nature’s most hydro-concerned creatures: beavers. She created wool mats and installed them in her creek with fallen trees to create “Beaver Dam Analog Structures” (BDAs), theorizing that these structures would slow the pace of water, keep soil in place, and help new plants emerge—all of which would protect the banks of the creek from erosion. And she was right: After installing the BDAs, she’s noticed more water sticking around. “It used to be that if I got a one-inch rainfall, most of it would run off,” Poole says. “Now, I can get a four-inch rainfall and all of it goes into the land.” 

Weed is using similar methods in Belgrade, just outside of Bozeman, where she’s implementing a more natural way of improving hydrology. “Lots of people have been working on stream restoration tools across the West, but I’m always slightly alarmed when I hear about backhoes, logs, and rocks getting moved. Those mean big investments and huge disturbances,” she says. “Wool is a low-tech, low-cost technique.” 

With funding from LOR’s Field Work initiative, she created Wool Pillow Filters (WPFs), which she stakes to the bottom of her creek with pieces of wood. Once installed, the wool serves two purposes: It’s a structural tool that slows the flow of water, and because of wool’s high concentration of proteins, amino acids, and nitrogen, it serves as a time-release fertilizer when the creek is dry, prompting plant growth even during dry stretches. “At a small scale,” she says, “it’s been very successful.” 

And small-scale success—be it from pillows or pellets—is a critical first step to demonstrating how waste wool can improve agriculture and how we use water in the West.