What is LocalFiber – Part 2: Identifying Needs in the Local Fiber Community

Small flock fiber farmers throughout the northeast face numerous hurdles in getting their fiber to market. One of the primary goals of LocalFiber is to bring the Finger Lakes and CNY fiber farming community together to collectively address their fiber supply chain challenges. The first step in addressing challenges is to identify them. Leading to the question: What are the needs of utmost importance to fiber farmers in the Finger Lakes and CNY?

Identifying Fiber Farm Needs

Before LocalFiber existed, while doing a spinning-mill feasibility study, I sent out a needs assessment questionnaire to the Cornell small ruminant listserve.* The questionnaire was fairly open-ended, asking fiber farmers to list the challenges they face in their fiber supply chain. The results from this survey have since served as a baseline in determining this community’s needs.

Approximately 100 small flock fiber farmers from throughout the northeast responded to the questionnaire. As I went through the responses, I immediately noticed themes, and sub-themes. While the specifics from farmer to farmer varied the themes remained the same. The primary themes were education, marketing, and processing. With sub-themes including decreasing the cost of shipping, consistency in processing, access to markets, need for mentoring… the list goes on.

Honing in on Local Fiber Needs

This list was great BUT it was large in both size and scope. Identifying the specific problems important to the local fiber community was key to LocalFiber’s journey. To do this we talked, we discussed, we brainstormed, and we filled out another questionnaire.

This questionnaire had no open-ended answers, instead, each farmer in the LocalFiber community was asked to rank the identified needs on a scale from 1-5 (1 being ‘low need’ and 5 being ‘high need’). The needs in this survey came from the previous questionnaire and our discussion and brainstorming sessions. At this point, the needs had been grouped together under the themes of education, marketing, and processing. (The importance of grouping becomes apparent when the results are considered).

A surveying software, Qualtrics**, was used to send out the questionnaire. The choice to use an online survey was deliberate, it enabled farmers who couldn’t make it to the LocalFiber Quarterly meetings to have a voice. The argument is this: The more voices that could take part in identifying the needs the greater the impact in finding solutions.

The Results Are In

After a specified period of time the questionnaire was closed (but not before reminding folks that it would close soon, and their voice is important). Over the next few days, I collated the data, calculated the rankings, and listed the highest ranked needs under each theme. It was beautiful; after so many conversations, discussions, and brainstorming sessions, we had identified the key needs in our local fiber community. Now we had to come up with solutions… (to be continued)

What We’d Do Differently:

This is a learning process, and we are learning so, as with most new experiences, there are a few things that we’ll do differently next time around.

1. Better define needs:  some needs were too loosely defined and made them hard to rank.
2. Increase response rate: the questionnaires response rate was low (though still acceptable)

*Cornell is the Land Grant institution of New York State and has quite a few agricultural resources. Look for a land grant institution in your state. American Sheep Industry also has a great resource list of state sheep organizations.  The Alpaca Owners Association also has a list of regional alpaca organizations.

** We used Qualtrics because of our association with Cornell we can use this software with no costs to ourselves. There are other survey tools out there such as SurveyMonkey or Google Forms (I do recommend that you look closely at how Google Forms works before using that platform).