Farmers Are Using Wool To Save Water in the Drought-Ridden West

There are some life lessons that can only be learned from living on a ranch—like the fact that keeping livestock fed means there’s no difference between weekdays and weekends, or how to create a budget when there’s only one payday a year. Or, in Albert Wilde’s case, that when a sheep takes a swim in a river, she comes out twice as heavy as she is when she’s dry. “Her wool takes on water,” says the sixth generation Utah sheep rancher, “and holds it.”

Although this tidbit of agricultural acumen might not seem especially useful on its face, knowing that wool retains moisture helped Wilde solve a domestic problem: His wife’s potted plants were dying due to lack of watering while the family was on vacation. “I had a lot of waste wool lying around,” Wilde says, referring to the low-quality wool from a sheep’s belly or hindquarters that textile companies refuse and that often ends up in landfills, “so I put clumps of it around my wife’s plants, soaked them, and even after vacation her plants still looked great.”

The potted plant experiment gave Wilde the idea that incorporating unused wool—which can hold up to 35% of its weight in H₂O—into his compost pile might keep the product moist. What he wasn’t sure about, however, was if the wool would improve or degrade the compost’s nutritional value. An initial Google search didn’t yield much, but Wilde ultimately happened upon a 2012 study out of Germany that suggested wool—which is high in nitrogen, nearly devoid of phosphorus, and low in potassium—was an effective fertilizer for tomatoes. Suddenly, Wilde was less interested in compost and more intrigued by waste wool’s potential to be a water-saving, plant-feeding, synthetic-fertilizer-replacing gamechanger for a drought-ravaged West.

That lightbulb moment flickered on roughly a decade ago. Since then, 47-year-old Wilde has been on a mission to educate sheep ranchers about a potentially lucrative market for their otherwise valueless waste wool. He’s also working to explain to home gardeners and commercial farmers alike what wool can bring to their soils—namely, a holy trinity of organic nutrients, water-holding abilities, and oxygen-promoting porosity that outperforms traditional organic fertilizers for days-to-harvest and delivers nutrients longer than environment-damaging synthetic fertilizers do. To help deploy this solution, Wilde has spent his time figuring out how to fashion waste wool into easily distributable pellets and working with universities and government agencies to study wool’s benefits, limitations, and best practices for using it. His efforts have inspired other U.S. ranchers to pelletize their waste wool, and he landed his $13.98 eight-ounce bags of Wild Valley Farms Wool Pellets on Amazon in 2016 and on Lowes.com in 2023.

Approximately 10 years in, though, the crusade to expand the use of waste wool in the U.S. in a way that might have a noticeable impact has yet to hit a critical mass. “Marketing is not my forte,” says Alicia Rux, 45, co-owner of Wyoming’s Cottonwood Creek Livestock, which has been selling its pelletized wool under the name Cottonwood Creek Wool since 2022. “No one knows wool is a natural, renewable fertilizer,” she says. “It’s about getting people to know.” And according to her husband and business partner Ben Rux, 45, it’s also about the research. “It’s hard to market without the science,” he says. But, he adds, “we are starting to see interest from the research side.”

Although Wilde has collaborated with folks at Utah State University, the University of Vermont, Montana State University, and the Idaho Transportation Department on various research projects with results that indicate wool’s efficacy, more in-depth research is necessary to prove that wool can outclass—or at least hold its own against—carbon-footprint-heavy synthetic fertilizers and reduce water usage outside a greenhouse setting. Currently, the budding wool pellet market has appealed mostly to home gardeners, smaller organic farmers, and commercial greenhouse businesses—notably the cannabis industry—but large-scale farming operations have been slow to adopt wool as a fertilizer and soil amendment. “Folks in agriculture are usually pretty based in tradition,” says Robert J. Andrews, Jr., 54, a Colorado sheep rancher who has been selling his wool pellets under the name New Liberty Wool Pellets since early 2024. “What worked before will work again,” he says, describing the predominant thinking among the agricultural set. “We need a shift in legacy producers, but a shift takes understanding, and the proof must be in the pudding.”

Several entities are eager to provide that evidence. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced its Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, a program that began infusing more than $3 billion into pilot projects, including those looking at how wool producers can employ better climate-smart land practices that build drought resilience and improve soil health. In 2023, the Colorado-based LOR Foundation, a supporter of community-led ideas that improve quality of life in the rural Mountain West, debuted its Field Work program, which provided more than $500,000 in funding to western farmers and ranchers—including Rux and Andrews—working on solutions to the West’s water crisis. In early 2024, Montana State University applied for a grant from the USDA-funded Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program to execute a multi-year study with a handful of large-scale Montana farms to determine if wool pellets can increase crop production and water retention in the state’s silty, low-organic-matter soil, which, in some areas, only sees between 11 and 14 inches of annual precipitation. “We didn’t set out to fund waste-wool projects,” says LOR’s chief business development officer Alex Dunlop, “but the wool-related projects were some of the most innovative and showed promise as creative solutions to how water is used in the Mountain West. They also have the potential to scale: According to the American Sheep Industry Association, there are more than five million sheep being raised on nearly 90,000 farms and ranches across the United States.”

Waste wool offers promise in realms beyond crop production and water usage as well. “We’ve really just scratched the surface of wool’s uses,” says Brent Roeder, 53, extension sheep and wool specialist with Montana State University. He and others say that wool—pelletized, woven into mats that encourage the growth of soil-stabilizing plants, or even made into pillows that reduce stream bank failure—can likely help with land reclamation in former mining areas, assist with roadside revegetation projects, invigorate grazing lands, promote vegetation growth in terrain devastated by wildfire, and be used to stem erosion. “All of these things are a big deal, too,” Wilde says, “especially as we talk more and more about climate change.”