Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff. I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. And if you were to ask Windy Paia, a goat farmer in bread and Maine, to name what she likes most about her work, she'll tell you it's the individual personalities of the goats for which she cares. She said, I think of the word capacious, that comes from the word caprine, which is Latin for goat. They're like that. They'll jump and dance, and they'll climb on anything.
They're affectionate, pious. Particular type of goats, forty to eighty of them, depending on the year, are also some of the providers of a valuable product for humans, kashmere. Yes, in case you didn't know, your favorite, softest and probably most expensive sweater comes from the fur of the kashmere goat. And once you know what's involved in making a kashmere sweater, the price might not seem so exorbitant. The goats are one of at least eleven wool producing animals. The list
also includes sheep, rabbits, and lama. There are several varieties of kashmere goat goats, and a number of farms, factories, and conglomerates around the world using various production methods to make kashmere. The first goats purported to be used by humans to produce fabric to keep warm are said to be the Pashima goats. They're found in the super high altitude regions of western and northern Tibet. The goats soft and dense under fur is built to withstand extreme temperatures
as low as negative forty degrees fahrenheit or celsius. The wolf from these bucks and Nanni's, favored by British Royalty, eventually came to be processed in Kashmir in northern India, hence the name. Various bloodlines of Kashmir goats have, with human help, spread around the world. Australia has a particular breed that provides luxuriously soft threads, and North American kashmere goats are found in the colder regions of the U s and Canada. North America is where Paya and her
husband Peter Gough come in. They have run Springtide Farm since n Pia eleven goats for his birthday, in part to help clear their farmland. It has a learning experience since then. Pia estimates that Springtide is one of two hundred to three hundred kashmere goat farms in North America.
Most cashmere goat farms in the US are small in size, less than sixty goats, says Paya, who is also the president of the Kashmere Goat Association, a nonprofit whose website claims it brings together breeders, fiber artists, and others interested in these charming animals and the fiber they grow in March and April. You know, early spring is when the goats start to naturally shed their winter wool and when
production begins on the farms. A few US farms share these kashmere goats, though because of production loss and the high cost to weed out the valuable downy undercoat. Instead, most facilities hand comb the wool. That means workers often the farm owners themselves, set with each animal and slowly tease out the fur that creates the fine wool for cashmere with a dog rake up to an hour and a half per goat. Paia explained, when you look at these goats, you see the long draping fur that's the
guard hair. The cashmere hair is under that. The crimp in cashmere is three dimensional, and that's part of what makes cashmir so incredibly soft. An average goat provides just three to four ounces of cashmere that's about grams. That means it typically takes about six goats to make enough fiber for just one cashmere sweater. Once the kashmere fur is separated, samples of it are sent for quality testing to one of two labs in the US, one in Texas,
one in Colorado. Most legitimate US cashmere farmers have made a commitment to provide only high quality fiber, outlined in the Kashmir Goat Association standards and backed by organizations like the Kashmere and Camel Hair Manufacturers Institute. That means consistency or uniformity in the fiber. Each follicle should be at least one point to five inches that's three point two centimeters in length and its relaxed or unstretched state, and
no bigger than nineteen microns in diameter. If wearing wool make you itch, that's actually because the wolf fibers have an uneven thickness. The standard thickness of wool is twenty eight microns. Cashmere is much finer that standard, of less than nineteen microns, is why kashmere can feel less scratchy. Cashmere that fails to beat these standards inevitably creates quality problems like pilling in the final product, and there are
plenty of examples of bad cashmere out there. While the Federal Trade Commission enforces the Wool Product Labeling Act in the United States, it gets murky on the international market. Even the FTC says quote routine testing of fiber contents by a qualified, independent testing lab is the best way to assure accurate labels, and that means it's hard for consumers to determine where the cashmere they're buying comes from and specifically how the goats are treated. Kashmere demand is
one of the problems. It reportedly far exceeds how much goats can produce every year. That means that less scrupulous producers may turn to inhumane methods to produce more wool for lesser operating costs. The organization PET has accused Chinese conglomerates of shearing the goats midwinter, when the animals need
the fur to keep warm. A pious says that some farms, to save production costs, have even experimented with restricting goats diets, But aside from compromising the animal's health, it also directly affects the quality of the cashmere. She said, if you starve your animals, the hair will get finer and shorter and more brittle. You can't spin it. They call it hunger fine. So if you wear cashmere, Paia recommends buying
directly from the source or choosing very carefully. Cash Beer will consist of about one percent of a goats total woolf production for apparel, so the fabric and those sweaters should have a price to reflect this scarcity. But even for farmers like Paia, who sells her cashmere online and at fairs and festivals, it's difficult to tell if it's the real deal. Paya herself has been fooled. She recalls a time when she found a cashmere sweater at a store for less than a hundred dollars. She bought it.
It turned out to be a crylic. Another time, she and her husband were visited by a group of people who said they were interested in getting into the Kashmir industry. They brought with them samples of Kashmir they had bought a trade shows in Italy. Pia recalls they had this one shawl. It was shiny, and Kashmir isn't shiny, so we had to say to them, you know, this is really nice. I don't know what it is, but it's
not Kashmir. Today's episode was written by Jamie Allen and produced by Tyler Clang for iHeart Media and How Stuff Works. To learn more about Kashmir with a K, check out our patriot podcast Dressed the History of Fashion. They've got an episode all about it called Kashmir with a K, The Controversial History of a Shawl, And of course from more on this and lots of other fine topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com