Australian Cashmere Goats
The skin of a goat contains primary and secondary follicles.
The primary follicles of a cashmere goat produce coarse fibres termed guard hairs, and the secondary follicles a fine down known as cashmere.
In order to separate the down during processing from the guard hairs, it is essential that there be a clear-cut width difference between them.
The amount of cashmere an individual animal will produce is determined by:
1) the genetic ability of that animal
to produce cashmere;
2) the hormonal effect (e.g. other things being equal, males produce more than females); and
3) surface skin area (size of the goat) and density of down-producing follicles.
Nutrition:
There is some dispute about the effect of nutritional levels on cashmere production, but basically it appears that good nutrition of the kid produces secondary follicle activity, while the level of subsequent feeding may increase down production per follicle, but will not increase the number of productive follicles.
In this country cashmere is harvested from feral goats, but the amount of cashmere a feral may produce can vary greatly. Some ferals simply do not have the genetic capability to produce cashmere and no amount of good feeding will alter that.
Production:
Different Colour Fibers
At the same time it needs to be recognised that gauging the amount of cashmere on a live feral goat by eye- appraisal is almost impossible.
There are in New Zealand rare individual animals that produce 300g of cashmere annually, and in Australia a few that produce over 400g.
At this stage of the industry’s development, however, any goat that produces 100g of cashmere is well above average, and thus worth selecting for breeding.
The objective set by the Cashmere Producers Association for the industry is only 200g for better producers.
Although at this stage goats are only shorn once a year for cashmere, high- producing animals are likely in future to be shorn twice annually.
The fineness of the down which is ac-ceptable for inclusion in the cashmere category, is determined by the buyers.
When Dawsons International set about promoting the industry in Australia, they agreed to accept, as cashmere, down that was between 13 and 19 microns mean fibre diameter (MFD).
More recently Dawsons announced their intention to reduce the upper limit to 18 microns MFD in 1987, and it appears they are pressuring authorities to limit the use of the cashmere label to products made from fibre of that fineness.
Splitting Guard hairs and cashmere down:
When the fleece is taken from a cashmere goat, it contains both guard hairs and cashmere down. These two are separated by the processor before being spun into yarn. The proportion of down to guard hair in the fleece is referred to as the ‘yield’, and 25-30 percent is average.
Hand dyed, Australia Cashmere Skeins
A high yield may be due to short guard hairs and not necessarily to a high level of cashmere from that animal.Actual payment is made on the basis of weight of cashmere down, which is arrived at by multiplying fleece weight by yield.
Cashmere Fiber:
Cashmere is described as being “a soft, luxurious, hard-wearing fibre whose main characteristics are soft handle, lightness and warmth”.
The yarn is spun on the woollen system, because the fiber is short and because carded yarns have more fiber ends on their surface, and so give ‘fluf¬fier “handle’ to the garment than worsted yarns.
It takes about 250-300g of cashmere to make a pullover.
Grading of cashmere:
The other characteristic of cashmere down apart from fineness, which is important, is colour, but it should be noted that the colour of the guard hair is not always an indication of the colour of the down. White down may be found on a coloured goat.
In mid-1985 a colour grading system for cashmere as introduced. (see Table 3A).
Under the new system the emphasis is placed to a greater extent than previously on the colour of the guard hair. In the past, for instance, a fleece containing black guard hair and very light down would have graded `grey’; today it grades as ‘brown’.
White colouration is a dominant gene in the Angora breed, and one of the benefits of using an Angora buck over cashmere does is that most of the progeny will be white, although the gene, present in both ferals and Angoras, that produces ginger coloration, is not as easily eliminated as other colours.
It has been found overseas that day length has considerable influence on cashmere production and is the trigger which starts the annual growth cycle. Goats treated with continuous light produced 70 percent more cashmere than goats under natural day-length conditions. No reports have been received of this practice being adopted commercially.
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