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AGRICULTURE in Europe is too successful. Surpluses of meat, butter and
milk have prompted farmers to consider alternative uses for their land.
One attractive possibility is the commercial production of cashmere and
mohair fibre from goats. But this is not as simple as it sounds. To breed
the right sort of goats, farmers need to use the latest techniques in reproductive
technology, and competition between countries is hotting up.

Most domestic goats have a double coat – a hairy outer layer covering
short, fine underwool or down. Their wild ancestors would have grown one
very similar. The thick ‘guard’ hairs of the outer coat protect the animals
while the underwool keeps them warm. This underwool is known as cashmere
and takes its name from the old spelling of Kashmir, where, in the 1700s,
Europeans first saw the fibre woven into shawls. Cashmere goats are usually
white and are native to northern China, Tibet, Mongolia and parts of the
Soviet Union. People have probably collected the fibre since prehistoric
times and some still collect fibre shed by wild goats in mountainous regions.

Of the world production of cashmere – 5000 tonnes – about two-thirds
comes from China. Chinese cashmere is famous for its fineness. The average
fibre is 15 micrometres in diameter, compared with the 18 or 19 micrometres
produced in Afghanistan, Iran and the Soviet Union. Sheep’s wool is rarely
finer than 20 micrometres. Chinese cashmere goats also grow more underwool
than other double-coated goats and are more likely to be white. White cashmere
fetches the highest price, and white goats have apparently been bred selectively.
The denser underwool probably came about by natural selection in a cold
environment before people bred the animals selectively to increase the amount
of wool. Some Chinese believe that it is impossible to produce cashmere
in warmer climates, at altitudes below 1000 metres or further south than
36 degrees, but genetic factors are probably more important than the goat’s
environment. In China, each cashmere goat produces between 100 and 500 grams
of fibre a year. Although this is a small amount compared with the fleeces
of sheep, cashmere is worth 10 to 20 times as much as wool.

The Chinese collect the fibre by combing the goat during the spring
moult. Textile manufacturers then use a mechanised process based on a woollen
carding machine to separate the hair from the down. Old Kashmir shawls contain
amazingly little hair, apparently because women removed the hair by hand.
William Moorcroft, a traveller in Kashmir in the 1820s, said it took each
woman two hours to de-hair less than 60 grams of fibre.

Supplies of raw fibre from China have declined in recent years as the
Chinese textile industry has begun to produce garments for export. The Chinese
knitwear industry uses 1000 tonnes of fibre each year and is itself short
of raw material. In response, other countries have begun to produce theirown
cashmere. Most double-coated breeds grow cashmeredown; the problem is how
to make them as productive as theChinese goats.

Australia was the first country outside Asia to develop a cashmere industry.
In the past 15 years, it has built up a herd of several hundred thousand
goats producing 20 tonnes of fibre a year. Australia aims to increase its
stock to 10 million goats, and production to 1000 tonnes. The Australians
built up their herd from feral goats – domesticated animals that have gone
wild – which they selectively bred to enhance their coat. In New Zealand,
feral goats were already more productive and by 1985, 150 000 cashmere goats
were producing about 10 tonnes of fibre (including hair). Fibre from goats
has supplemented the incomes of New Zealand farmers at a time when the demand
from Europe for traditional butter and lamb is falling. Now some farmers
are even supplying their British counterparts with cashmere and Angora animals.

Cashmere production in Britain began as an extension to the practice
of grazing goats with sheep to keep hill pastures free from weeds. Researchers
at the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute (formerly the Hill Farming Research
Organisation) in Scotland found that goats prefer coarser vegetation and
eat the weeds in a pasture first, leaving the better grass for the sheep.
A large flock where 1 in 6 animals is a goat is about the right proportion
to keep down the weeds, especially in pastures that have been improved by
reseeding. These hill goats could also provide a source of milk – difficult
on hilly terrain – or meat, but cashmere, which sells at Pounds sterling
80 a kilogram, would be a more lucrative by-product.

Further research at the Macaulay showed that British dairy goats often
produce fibre with a diameter of less than 14 micrometres – fine enough
to be classed as cashmere – but they do not produce much of it. The researchers
introduced feral animals into the initial trials because they produce more
fibre and are hardier than dairy goats. There are few of these ‘wild’ goats
left in Britain, but they are a vital genetic resource. One of the primitive
features of British feral goats is that they have a dense underwool of cashmere
quality. By selectively breeding from the most productive goats, the researchers
produced offspring that grew a lot more cashmere.

Another problem with feral goats is that they are very small. The researchers
tried cross-breeding feral goats which produced a lot of wool with the larger
dairy goats. To exploit the maternal effect, in which a larger mother tends
to produce a larger fetus over and above the genetic influence of body size,
the researchers crossed feral, preferably white, males with large females
from the Toggenburg breed – the breed found to grow the most down. (This
approach has the added advantage of conserving valuable feral females to
produce new feral generations.)

The offspring have more down than a typical dairy goatand are larger
than the feral ones. Offspring from the first cross are also white, as white
is dominant to colour in crosses. Eventually, breeding raised the production
of fibre to 100 grams from the 50 grams reached by the original Toggenburgs.
Researchers at the Macaulay aim to double this amount, which would mean
that cashmere from one goat would be worth four times the fleece of a British
hill sheep. To achieve such an increase breeders have imported semen, embryos
and even goats from highly productive strains in Australia, New Zealand
and the Soviet Union. But progress is slow. Britain’s cashmere harvest in
spring 1989 was six times that of 1988,but the overall quality of the fibre
is poorer.

Cultivating cashmere

The team at the Macaulay also discovered the exact seasonal cycle of
coat growth. They found that the coat grows most between midsummer and midwinter,
then rests until the spring moult. This sort of information is important
if the researchers are to increase production by giving the goats more to
eat. Extra food will make no difference if the coat is resting. Breeders
also need to know exactly when regrowth begins in the spring – harvesting
can only be done properly if the fibres have been released from the skin.

While the cashmere industry in Britain awaits the full development of
a suitable animal, farmers can already import goats that produce mohair
from New Zealand and North America (see Box overleaf). All double-coated
goats produce fine down that could be upgraded to cashmere quality, but
mohair is grown by a specific breed, the Angora, which has a single coat.
(The luxury fibre marketed in Britain as ‘angora’ comes from rabbits.) In
1981, 23 Angora goats were imported into Britain. Now there are more than
5000, with even more cross-bred animals being ‘graded up’. Farmers in New
Zealand took the initiative by marketing fibre from their cross-bred animals
as ‘Cashgora’, which brought them more income than either sheep or cattle
on the same land.

Breeders of both kinds of goat have one problem in common – how to increase
their herds as fast as possible. The difficulty of importing animals, and
the shortage of stock in Britain, has led to the rapid development of methods
such as artificial insemination (AI) and embryo transfer to improve stock
and increase the numbers of both cashmere and Angora goats. Several firms
in Britain already provide these services for British breeders using techniques
developed in Australasia. Until recently, AI and embryo transfer were used
in Britain mainly for cattle.

Artificial insemination has many advantages. It is much cheaper and
easier to import frozen semen than animals, although quarantine regulations
are just as strict. Using AI, breeders can spread the influence of males
that are good producers of fibre over a greater number of females and can
choose from a wide selection of males. Not all breeders need to keep males,
and semen can be stored for use even after a superior male has died.

About three-quarters of the females artificially inseminated conceive,
with slightly fewer live births. In the attempt to improve these figures,
breeders are refining the technology. One example is the laparoscope, a
fibreglass cable developed by gynaecologists. Researchers at the University
of New South Wales and the New South Wales Department of Agriculture have
used laparoscopy to introduce sperm into the uterus of the female via a
small incision in her flank.

Embryo transfer is a much newer technique, which is now widely used
in cattle. Farmers can introduce a high-quality embryo into a poor-quality
female, who acts as a surrogate mother. Breeders in Australia and New Zealand
increased their stock of cashmere-breeding goats using this technique. Breeders
give a donor female hormones to cause her to ‘superovulate’ so that the
ovary produces several eggs at once. After she is mated with a superior
male they remove the embryos from the donor and implant them into several
surrogate mothers.

In February 1988, Angus Russel and three other researchers from the
Macaulay visited southern Siberia to collect and freeze 200 embryos from
native goats. These Altai mountain goats have thick coats with reasonably
fine cashmere fibres and are extremely hardy. When the embryos arrived in
Britain in autumn 1988, the researchers transferred them immediately to
surrogate mothers. The experiment produced 100 kids, all of them with black
coats, which are now spread over farms involved in the breeding programme,
including the Macaulay’s research station at Sourhope in Scotland. Russel
and his team are delighted with the progress of the kids. Now they aim to
cross the best of these kids with Scottish feral goats that already have
coats of fine cashmere. Although the Altai kids were born black, they had
grey underwool, so the researchers will be able to crossbreed them selectively
to change their colour to white after a few generations.

If the breeding programme continues to be successful, the farm animal
long regarded as a joke in British agricultural circles could become the
source of new wealth.

* * *

Mohair and the famous goat of Angora

MOHAIR comes from a single breed of goat, the Angora, which is named
after a Turkish province. Like cashmere goats, most Angora goats are white,
but are unique in having a coat made entirely of long, lustrous and curly
fibres without any coarse hair. The coat appears to have mutated, resulting
in a fleece like that of lustre-longwoolled sheep. No one knows how it evolved
in either sheep or goats, but this unique ‘underwool’ is dominant in crossbred
animals.

The origin of the breed is also something of a mystery. It emerged in
Turkey after the Middle Ages, although the word mohair derives from Makhayar,
which is Arabic, not Turkish. The first European record of the Angora was
in 1554 and the fibre reached Europe a century later when wigmakers appreciated
its qualities. Because Turkey prohibited its export except in spun yarn,
the first raw mohair did not reach Europe until 1820. Throughout the 19th
century, demand increased dramatically and Angoras were crossed with native
goats to meet it.

Individual mohair fibres, with a diameter of 30 micrometres, are about
twice the thickness of cashmere. Angora goats do not moult, so farmers harvest
mohair by shearing twice a year. Although less valuable than cashmere, the
greater weight of mohair grown means that each animal generates more profit
for the farmers.

The first Angora goats to leave Turkey went to South Africa in 1838,
and Angoras arrived in the US 10 years later. South Africa now has a near-monopoly
of the mohair market while Turkey’s is in decline; production in the US
is fairly constant. Australia and New Zealand have now entered the fray,
using the latest techniques of embryo transfer.

Dr Michael L Ryder is a former researched on hair and wool growth at
the Macaulay Land use Research Institute who is now an author and consultant
on textile fibres.

Further reading Wool Growth by M L Ryder and S K Stephenson, Academic
Press, 1968; Sheep and Man by M L Ryder, Duckworth, 1983; Cashmere, Mohair
and Other Luxury Animal Fibres for the Breeder and Spinner by M L Ryder,
available from the author.