BABY STEPS

THE NORTH AMERICAN LINEN ASSOCIATION AIMS TO REVIVE THE REGION’S COMMERCIAL FIBER FLAX AGRICULTURE.

Flax fiber and linen, in general, is selling for more than it ever has which is not good for the market, according to Shannon Welsh, executive director of the North American Linen Association (NALA). “There’s a lot of demand for it. There’s just not enough fiber to support the demand right now,” she said.

Part of that increase is the changing climate and it being mostly grown in Europe. “Belgium, Netherlands and France are a pretty small area so there’s less and less of the fiber available and that’s really driving the prices up,” Welsh said. “That’s why having North America and different regions throughout Europe coming on to grow it is needed because it's hard for people to incorporate linen right now.”

North America, Ireland, England and Scotland are among the regions around that are world that are trying to revitalize the growing of flax because their industries died out after WWII.

The mission of NALA is to promote commercial fiber flax agriculture, bast fiber processing infrastructure, and textile manufacturing. NALA brings together interest groups from all stages of the supply chain to share in infrastructure development, networking, best practices, and marketing campaigns to advance the North American fiber flax to linen industry.

“The more we support these emerging areas like North America and parts of Europe in growing and processing the first stage to get to fiber, the more we’ll have,” Welsh said.

Efforts in the U.S. are at trial scale. “There are many reasons why we have we don’t have much access to fiber flax seed because we haven’t been growing this crop since World War II. So, seed development has been happening for many years now and we’re starting to scale that up,” she said. There’s less seeds available worldwide, in general, because of climate issues, which makes importing seeds challenging.

“Also, we don’t have any infrastructure or equipment for specialized harvesting for the fields. And we also don’t have any of that first stage processing that actually gets the fiber into a usable state so that you could send it to spinning,” she said.

“Everyone is slowly scaling up and really learning how to grow this crop well, but those other missing pieces are holding it back. That’s why we created NALA in hope to start really filling these gaps and helping to support growers so that we can the region on the map,” she said.