Midwest Linen Revival

Leslie Schroeder: Once upon a time in a land far away.

Host: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Taproot Project. We are not telling fairy tales today, but we are exploring a fiber heavily featured in a number of Northern European fairy tales, from Rumpelstiltskin to Sleeping Beauty. We are talking about flax. This is the plant that can be processed into linen and has historically been used to make all kinds of textiles, from clothing to bed sheets to rope. Flax does not have a significant footprint in United States agriculture today, but a growing number of people are reclaiming flax from the old fairy tales and advocating for it as a crop that could support farm sustainability, ecosystem resilience, and an ethical clothing industry. Leslie Schroeder is the founder and the one person team behind Midwest Linen Revival. She spends her time growing and testing flax, teaching people how to process it by hand, and coordinating with industry leaders to establish a viable flax market. After my conversation with Leslie, I got online and ordered some fiber flax seeds. So be warned, there is some contagious enthusiasm in this episode. I hope you enjoy.

Leslie Schroeder: The flax plant has an ancient relationship with human beings. The oldest scrap of flax fiber that has been found was 34,000 years old in a cave in the Republic of Georgia. Yeah, um, so people have been using this, um, high quality fiber for a really long time. Um, and so the flax plant is an annual flower, dicot, cute little blue flower. Um, and it is a bast fiber plant. So that means that the fiber is

Host: coming from the stem versus something like cotton, where it's coming from the.

Leslie Schroeder: Yeah, the flowering packet or the bowl of the cotton plant is where the fiber is.

Host: Do you remember the first time you were introduced to flax?

Leslie Schroeder: Yeah, I grew up in, um, Waukesha, which is, um, just west of Milwaukee. And in Waukesha county there is, um, Old World Wisconsin. And it's relocated immigrant, um, farmsteads from all over. Early settlement of European immigration to Wisconsin. So there's a farm that's a German farm, there's a Polish farm. And the buildings are all different. And they have these, um, folks there being the live interpreters. They're dressed up as though they're the residents and they're doing the things that one would do in those homes at the time that they were built. And one of them is the Pomeranian farm and they grow and process flax there. And I remember being in the barn and they were doing those things I was describing to you earlier. The break, the scutch, the hackle. And I was like, are you kidding? Me. Who hasn't told me about this before?

Host: I could be sketching this whole time.

Leslie Schroeder: I was like, there's magic hiding in this plant and it's been hiding there right in front of my eyes this whole time. Um, so that was actually the first time I ever saw flax process. But what really, really clicked everything together for me was when I was introduced to w forage cordage. So, you know, like I said, they had this journey of learning how to, um, sew and then knit and then weave. And, you know, it's just, you know, it's just curiosity digging deeper into something. So, you know, as I became an adult and I learned cooking from some friends of mine, I learned how to cook. And then I wanted to have a garden. And then of course, as one does, I wanted to learn how to forage. So I've got like, basic mushroom, um, identification skills. And so I was out and about with this group and someone was like, well, there's all these plants out here that are best fibers. Um, milkweed, nettle and, you know, hemp, dogbane. And they were like, look, you can just, you know, make a little piece of cordage or rope. And they showed us by hand, you know, get the fibers out of the stem. And I thought, I have never felt more connected to humans through history than right then, because people have been doing that for tens and tens of thousands of years. And fiber is so important to us. It's so useful.

Host: What does the Midwest Linen Revival Network do?

Leslie Schroeder: So I have been out and about doing things like podcast interviews and, um, lectures and workshops. So sharing people how to hand process flax, which is just an inspiring, um, experience of unlocking that fiber from the stem of the plant. Um, and then I've been working on promoting this at a larger scale. I've gotten flax listed on the UW Extension's emerging crops accelerator program. So now flax is considered an emerging crop in Wisconsin. Um, so engaging with curious, um, farmers and then working on m, trialing different things out, like, um, you know, making sure that we've got great seeds that are working here and then, you know, working through the seed, um, selection and increase project for the long game of having a domestically sourced, high quality fiber seed. Um, and then also working on now, uh, promoting bioplastic composites that could be using flax. So as an alternative to fiberglass or carbon fiber. Um, so all over the place where flax could be useful to us.

Host: What is the history of this plant? Where did it come from? Where, where is it now? Um, and Also, why, why don't we, why don't we have a flax market right now?

Leslie Schroeder: Yeah. So, um, so the human relationship with the flax plant is ancient. Um, it's a plant that's come out of somewhere in like the, you know, Middle Eastern, you know, that Fertile crescent. That's where the plant originated, but spread all the way around to, um, people growing in India and all over Europe. And that's something that I, as a descendant of Europeans into the United States, um, like to talk about with this long relationship. Like there's, um, fairy tales and folklores that have flax plant in it because people have been using this plant for so long. Um, so why do we not have an established, um, flax, uh, plant, you know, supply chain in the United States right now. Um, so it's twofold. I mean, currently flax is just a very modest, um, market share of global textiles. And it's. Everything has lost out to synthetics to our profound detriment because of the, you know, extractive nature of producing synthetics, all petroleum products like, um, nylons and polyesters, to the wearing of these synthetic garments and them shedding microplastics into our water at a really significant am 30% of microplastics and water just coming from us, laundering our synthetic garments, um, into the end game of synthetics, which there is no end game. Um, there'll just be, um, existing for, you know, I don't know, untold period of time or something else bad happens like they're incinerated. So, um, they've got this problem right now where all global textiles are being dominated by synthetics. Those nanofibers, the microplastics are shedding into water. They're all over the place. Right? They're in rainwater, they're in breast milk. The truth is, we don't really know what the health implications are for us. Um, yeah, okay, that's the sad story. So I got this other sad story as to why there are not. Why we do not have, um. Flax is currently established in. So most of the world's flax right now is grown in Normandy, France or Belgium and um, the Netherlands. So flax used to be grown more all over Europe, all over Russia, China. Um, and you know, again, a lot of these have, um, retreated and retracted, shrunk down because of, um, you know, just not the global demand for linen. Hasn't been there in the last number of decades, but back to the United States. Why we never really, really had a well established, um, flax to linen textile Industry here is just actually, um, cheap cotton, slave labor. So cotton dominated. Um, Flax is a laborious, um, plant to process, to fiber. And if you pay people well, you could not economically compensate them to make it, um, the same price point as cheap cotton. Um, so it. It did actually, um, have a.

Host: More.

Leslie Schroeder: A good foothold flax, um, to linen in the east coast and on the west coast of the United States. But where I am here in the Midwest, um, the number of years that we did have, um, flax really growing well and have a number of mills was actually during the Civil War. And it's because that cheap cotton became unavail, um, so we can grow it and we have had mills. Um, so it's just. It's the, um, economics, um, that we're, um, unable to be supporting the flax industry here. And, um, you know, at what price. Obviously, you know, cheap cotton at a horrific price to humanity on the, uh.

Host: I mean, this is what I've also again, heard you talk about as the traumatic history of textiles. And I think you just touched on the ways that textile, especially United States, has a really traumatic history rooted in slavery, um, but also even continuing today with the kind of trauma that's happening upon the environment in synthetic textiles. Um, so what. I imagine part of your enthusiasm about linen or flax is that you see a way forward out of that mess. Can you tell me about the hope that you see in flax?

Leslie Schroeder: Yeah, um, to me, it's all about relationships. So the clothes that I'm wearing right now here in this interview, actually, I made this vest, so I know who made this vest. Um, but, you know, so much of our wardrobes are anonymous boast that we have no idea who sewed the garments, but we have no idea where the fibers from the garments came from. And so it's easier to not take good care and understanding that whole journey if you're not aware of it. You're just not able to invest in.

Host: Um.

Leslie Schroeder: So when you think about our textile history in the United States, and I think that we're terribly proud of our worker rights history with, you know, we get the Triangle shirtwaist factory. And it was just this horrific thing. There was lots of reform and, you know, better care then. Um, but it's just gone, you know, to other countries where there are terrible, um, worker rights abuses. Like this Rana plaza disaster in 2013 in Bangladesh at a garment factory. The building collapsed, and they knew that the building was not okay. And way more people died in, um, that tragedy than did in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. And it's just, but it's not, it's not being seen right now in the United States. Um, so I think about that, you know, building collapse in um, Bangladesh. And I think, did I, do I have a shirt or pants that maybe somebody just died going to work? Um, so this is unacceptable, entirely unacceptable to me to be wearing a garment that somebody suffered, uh, to make. And um, so I want to take good care. And so when we can see the plants growing, when we can know our, you know, cousins and our neighbors that are working in manufacturing the clothes, just bringing it closer to us. And then again at the same time there's incredible possible benefits for flax as an agricultural crop. Um, one being it works really well in a lot of small grain rotations. Um, and because it's so very different from our, uh, most largely grown commodity crops like corn and soy, it's just a very, very different plant. Um, it can help break pest cycles and it's also mycorrhizal friendly, it's pollinator friendly because cute little blue flower. It can just be a really good um, thing for us for a lot of reasons.

Host: What do you wish every, every farmer knew about flax in the Midwest?

Leslie Schroeder: That's a good question. I'd say. I, um, think that another thing to know is that it's a really tolerant plant. It doesn't need your most AM soil, it doesn't need irrigation, it actually doesn't need pesticides at all. So it's a plant that's growing um, you know, relatively easily, sustainably, organically without even you know, trying. Um, the biggest challenge around flax is weeds. Um, it's not a plant that competes well early with weeds. Um, but once a stand is established and it's planted so densely that it can shade out other plants, um, so it does require um, a good um, you know, clean field preparation before planting the, the flax plant. Also, um, like I said, it works um, you know, well into a bunch of different rotations because it's only a 90 day crop. So you can have a crop following it. And that's what the, I think um, the magic of organic farmers is. They're almost, they're orchestrating a lot of different crops. They've got like this big puzzle of what works, what's going to follow next. And flax can just be part of that concert, um, a really good part of it. There's actually a couple different aspects to the word sustainable. Um, and right now our farming economy is not actually sustainable for farmers. Um, they're being pinched by um, you know, high prices of inputs, by expensive implements, um, by low prices of their product or fluctuating, um, uncertain prices. And when you've got all of your crop being um, you know, just in one thing, corn or soy or you know, very little diversity, you are very susceptible to um, destabilization by any fluctuations within that. So just looking at that economically, sustainably, um, that farmers need another crop or would really benefit from another crop, um, something else that all tangles up in there is um, who we think of ourselves as with you know, Midwestern agriculturalists. Um, you know we're all familiar with what corn and soil look like. You can be you know, blasting down like expressway at 70 miles an hour and recognize corn. Right? Um, so we recognize ourselves in the Midwest as a corn growing region. Um, and in Wisconsin in particular, um, we recognize ourselves as the dairy state. You know, we um, cheeseheads and you know I like cheese a lot. So um, but you know, Wisconsin wasn't always the dairy state. Actually Wisconsin was growing a lot of wheat crops. But then at one point um, the wheat crops were not doing so well because the soil was exhausted because we weren't taking good care of it. And then there was a cinch bug in fellow station. And at the same time um, Wisconsin was getting a bunch of um, immigrants from countries who knew about cheese and cheese production. Again, I love cheese. Thank you. Um, and so then the Wisconsin Dairymen's association developed and became um, you know, advocates and um, the for dairy. So then we became the dairy state. But right now like how's that going for us? Like we're losing dairy and then we've got you know, this problem with uh, consolidated feeding operations that are you know, impacting the soil and water. Um, so we've got all these, you know, concentrated problems around our current agricultural industry and this flax plant, um, could help us diversify, could help break um, pest cycles, um, can um, you know, potentially provide another income stream for farmers. So it's, it's not just like I guess environmental sustainability but and again we've got this massive problem with our current textile industry. We need to do something else. Um, so there's all these different aspects to it and economic stability is um, just, or economic sustainability is just as just important.

Host: Today most flax is grown in western and northern Europe with France, Belgium and the Netherlands as leading producers. Between 2014 and 2024, the amount of land in flax production in the EU more than doubled. This is partially due to increasing demand for flax products. But it's made possible by policies that ensure the kind of economic sustainability that Leslie is talking about. Farmers in the EU receive payments through an income support program. And these payments are mandatory and issued by each nation in the EU to qualified farmers based on the amount of land they have in production. According to the European Commission, these payments are meant to, quote, function as a safety net and make farming more profitable, guarantee food security in Europe, assist farmers in the production of safe, healthy and affordable food, and reward farmers for delivering public goods not normally paid for by markets, such as taking care of the countryside and the environment. So thanks Europe, uh, for again showing us a different way of doing things.

Host: Can you tell me more about your personal setup and farming experience with this? I mean it sounds like you're doing a decent amount of research just on your own. Um, where are you growing? And um. Yeah, what does your operation look like?

Leslie Schroeder: So I've only been growing small plots. Um, in 2024, I got really ambitious and planted about a quarter acre, which was just too much. Um, I had a whole team of friends out there helping me harvest it. And a lot of it's still just, just neatly, um, in storage and waiting. It's been, I've been using that through, um, workshops and presentations and stuff. Um, but right now it's all hand processed. So there's not much of an incentive to grow a, um, great deal of it. So small plots, getting to know the plant, um, and, and I want to say that, um, I kind of wanted just an opportunity. Something that you said made me want to say that, um, bring up the North American Linen Association. So that's an organization that's been drawing people together through FLEX from across North America and sharing information. And so there's a couple organizations that are much farther ahead of Midwest Linen revival right now and do have some mechanized harvesters. But there is yet to be mechanized processing in North America. So that's the next step of investment.

Host: One of the, um, places where you've been sharing the good word about, about, uh, flax is at the Wisconsin Farmers Union. And I was reviewing their um, policy brief on fiber sheds and there's a big block quote from you that actually starts the whole, the whole brief I'll just read. It says, quote, fiber sheds can play a critical role in tying together all the elements of a regionally scaled textile supply chain. We can have experts in raising flaxseed and incredible farmers putting out great fiber crops, but all of their good work comes to nothing if we don't have a Path to market. So can you say more about what is the block to having flax be a marketable crop right now?

Leslie Schroeder: Yeah, it's simply money. Um, it's just the money to build the processing facility and then, you know, there's time to site the mill, there's time to construct it, um, to, you know, purchase that equipment, to train on it. So it's a years out, um, in the meanwhile, and that's at the field scale. It's like agricultural, you know, many, many acres that we could process through, uh, that kind of, um, facility. In the meanwhile, I've just established, um, Badger State Mills, which is going to be tabletop processing. So this will be modestly scaled, but it is, um, going to be modeled after Fantasy Fibers in Scotland after their equipment. So that'll be the next step.

Host: I had never heard of Fantasy Fiber Mill, but I looked them up after this conversation. They are a mill, an education center and a fiber system laboratory. My own words. And they develop open source textile processing machinery to enable the emergence of a local, decentralized and community owned textile economy. I think a trip to Scotland is in my future anyway. I wanted to actually go through the steps of hand processing flax together so that we can all get to know this plant a little bit better and also understand why processing machinery is actually essential to this being a viable crop in the U.S. fantasy Fiber Mill gave me permission to use audio from one of their instructional videos, which you can find in full linked in the show notes. So here is Leslie and Rosie Bristow of Fantasy Fibermill walking us through flax growing and hand processing.

Leslie Schroeder: Yeah, so starting, um, we're just going to start at planting. Um, flax goes in early in the spring. Um, my flax has been very happy in southern Wisconsin going in April 15th.

Speaker D: And that is 12 grams of flax seeds per meter squared, uh, of space in the garden.

Leslie Schroeder: Um, and then it's a 90 day crop for fiber. So we're harvesting it and then as you said, first laying it in the field to retain. So rutting is a slight decomposition of the plant and that's letting the fibers go from the stiff inner woody part of the plant, which is called shive,

Speaker D: because if you try to just pick flax and process it straight away, all of the pectins and lignins, which are the sort of parts of the cell that all like glue the plant together and it would be completely impossible.

Leslie Schroeder: So, so Redding could take it depends on the weather. If you're laying in the field, um, it could take, um, you Know, a week and a half, we'll say two and a half. It just depends on the weather somewhere. And, um, this needs to be attended to and done well. So this needs somebody checking on it that has an understanding of assessing the ret. Because if it is not well enough retted, um, you will break your fibers trying to get that shive away. And if it is over retted, then you will have compromised the structure of your fibers and everything will be breaking apart.

Speaker D: It's a sort of difficult process to get right. So it can take between two and six weeks to ret, depending on the weather. And advice that I got from some experienced French, uh, flax farmers was you want to wait for about 30 millilitres of rain and then flip it over and then wait for another 30ml of rain on the other side.

Leslie Schroeder: Um, so then after you've got it, well, read it, you need to find some way to pull those seeds off. That's called rippling. Um, and then the names for the hand processing of the flax is, um, breaking, scutching, and hackling. So the break is this, what looks like a very big wooden, um, paper cutter, where you're actually breaking, um, the flax, um, plant. And it's at a really particular angle that the plant, um, is. Because you can't just crush it. Crushing it doesn't get that shive to move away from it. It's really breaking. So it's at a, um, pretty significant angle.

Speaker D: But even if you don't have any specialist equipment, you can just use a block of wood, um, on a table and start snapping up the flax like this, and just using the wood as, like a hard edge to break the flax against it. And you can really hear the nice, crispy, crunchy sounds of the, um, inner core, like, snapping and coming out. There's a bit of it there.

Leslie Schroeder: Uh, and then sketching, um, always by hand seems like it's the least satisfying step. It is actually like beating the fibers with a big wooden paddle.

Speaker D: And what you want to do is very firmly hold your bundle of flax, um, about three quarters the way along and then scrape out from the middle.

Leslie Schroeder: And then next is heckling. It's like a bed of nails that are increasingly close together. So you start with ones that are a little farther apart and closer and closer. And it's like brushing your hair, um,

Speaker D: and, um, just like with combing out knotty hair, you want to start at the edge, start the ends and go

Leslie Schroeder: towards the middle so you're, you're softening the fiber. You're getting the last of the shive out and you're breaking apart the ribbons of fibers.

Speaker D: I think this is my favorite step in the process because you can really see it, um, becoming hair, like. And it really reminds me of the Rumpelstiltskin story of spinning straw into gold. And you see all of the straw falling away and this lovely shiny fibre being left behind.

Leslie Schroeder: So it's a lot like brushing your hair. Some of it comes broken out. You know, the little pieces that are in the top or the bottom, they're a little stiffer, um, or weaker. And so then that is called toe. Those little shorter broken fibers, but still useful. Um, you could, for example, spin them into a tow rope. A tow rope? Yes, that's the origin of the word. Right. Awesome. But then you've got your longline, um, flax fiber, and you've got your shive cleaned out. And, um, those all have, you know, different product potentials. But that's the process by hand and m. Then you'd move to spinning. So hand spinners would dress that flax on what's called a distaff, which is a tall stick. And it's dressed in this very particular way so that when you're pulling the fibers out, you can pull them out continuously to be spun. Um, and so that is a step that we also don't have. Although in the Midwest and, you know, across North America, we still have small but functioning woolen economy with wool mills that are, um, combing and spinning those wool fibers. We don't have any long line wet spinning for flax. So flax is a long staple fiber. Even the longest staple wool, um, is much shorter than the flax plant, which might be around, like, it's 20, 20 plus inches of a long line.

Host: Oh, wow. So the existing wool mills cannot be used to process wax.

Leslie Schroeder: Uh, correct. We can put toe in a wool mill. If you can convince somebody who has a wool mill to bring toe in, which they're not excited about, because they try very hard to not have plant material in their wool mill. So you come along with all this, like, messy fiber and they're like, hey, what? But you actually can spin, spin. Uh, you can, um, card toe through a, um, like, you know, um, what taproot fibers in Nova Scotia has is a Belfast mini mill. And so they are processing flax and then spinning it, but it's 100% toe fibers.

Host: Wow. And so is that the closest existing mill that could process linen in North America?

Leslie Schroeder: That is the one commercial 100% flax yarn available. There's also, um, Golden State Linen in California. And they're doing a flax wool blend. It's a 5050 blend. That's the two.

Host: I see kind of like two areas that you've been, um, talking to people in. You've been getting the maybe smaller scale farmers and, and fiber folks together and like getting, garnering interest there. But also you've mentioned, um, the ways that you're talking to manufacturers about how this could be an addition to their process. Can you talk more about that side of the potential for Fiberflex? Yep.

Leslie Schroeder: So that is a work in progress. So I have not yet connected or reached out to manufacturers, but I'm working my way into it by creating a document that is like the one pager. Um, I've assembled that and then been assembling a list of, um, organizations that I think would be good to reach out to. Um, the aim being, you know, some getting a better understanding of what manufacturers would need to know in order to consider flax in their products. So it could be, you know, as simple as paper. Right. There's a lot of actual paper manufacturers in Wisconsin. Um, but what I'm hoping for in the bioplastic composites area is existing manufacturers using fiberglass or carbon fiber. So anytime you hear that word fiber, you could use a different fiber. And flax has different characteristics from either of them. Um, flax is actually a lot lighter weight than fiberglass. So actually organizations that have done this, um, work, you know, much farther ahead, um, in Europe, have taken hundreds of pounds off of vehicles by using flax components in interior and exterior of automotive, um, components. Um, and then flax has better, ah, vibration dissipation characteristics than carbon fiber. So. Or companies that are in sporting goods manufacture like bicycles or um, the world's best tennis player right now has flax and his racket. So things where, um, athletes are experiencing, you know, a lot of repeated blows, um, or vibration. So flax is actually better at dissipating, um, vibrations than carbon fiber. Um, those are just some, some of the possibilities, um, of flax working into our existing manufacturing products.

Host: Great. Yeah. Have you convinced any other farmers to grow some flax?

Leslie Schroeder: So I've actually. I tell farmers to not grow flax. Not yet. I say please wait for it. Please wait until somebody like me will offer you a growing contract because there is a guaranteed path to market for you. So I encourage people to grow flax in a small plot to get to know the plant. But for now, not yet. Not, not, uh, not thinking field scale, we're going to do m. Hopefully a couple trials. If there's one, one grant we just applied be, um, you know, working with oilseed varieties in that secondary fiber market because there is a current market for the seed. So, you know, figuring out how to, you know, harvest and retain the quality of that fiber, um, within that. That's something that we'd like to explore further. But as far as high quality fiber crops, the seed price right now is way too high to grow at a field scale and then wait for it. Not yet.

Host: What do you hope to see in 20 years for flax?

Leslie Schroeder: Oh, thanks for giving me 20 years. Um, thanks for being patient and not saying like, oh, yeah, I'm just five years. Oh, 20 years from now, I think that the Midwest will have some of that processing, uh, facilities at least one, um, 20 years from now. I know that there are smart, ambitious, curious farmers will have become familiar with this plant and be able to turn out really high quality crops. Yeah, in 20 years, we can do this.

Host: Thank you to Leslie for her time and many thanks to Rosie Bristow at Fantasy Fiber Mill and Matt Tatwood for the flax processing audio. The Taproot project is produced by me, Kate Cowie Haskell. Music for this episode includes Chasin it by Jason Shaw, Are We Loose Yet? By Blue Dot Sessions, and Butterfly by Kate Cody. The Taproot project is an initiative of the Midwest Transition to Organic Partnership Program, a project funded by the USDA National Organic Program to support transitioning and organic producers with mentorship and technical assistance and to grow the greater organic community. Learn more@organictransition.org.