Anna Hunter has a passion for connecting people with local food and clothing production. In 2016 she and her husband Luke started Long Way Homestead, a 140-acre fiber farm and wool mill near Winnipeg that operates as a sustainable closed-loop system raising Shetland sheep. Long Way’s mission is “to work regeneratively with the land and with our animals to produce sustainable soil-to-soil textiles and yarn” as it seeks to fill a void in the Canadian-grown wool infrastructure. Long Way takes its own wool and that of other sheep farmers across the prairies and processes it into yarn, fiber and other textile products. Anna prioritizes the transparency and traceability of the wool supply chain and explains how she interacts with the farmers from whom she buys wool: “Farmers in Canada don’t make a good rate on their wool. Typically, it doesn’t even cover the cost of raising those animals. So, I have prioritized doubling or tripling the price that farmers get through the wool growers … I go to those farms, I meet with those farmers, I see their operations, I see how they interact with their land base or with their animals. And then they know they’re valued because I pay them a rate that is honouring how hard they work for that wool.” Along with its fiber products, the farm also promotes connection to the land, to the animals, and to regenerative agriculture processes that contribute to improving ecosystems. For example, Long Way’s SponsorSHEEP program allows someone to sponsor a sheep for a year, name it, receive its wool at the end of the year, and thereby become more educated and aware. Long Way’s farmland is a biodiverse, circular system, and Anna notes that wool is a significant carbon sink since it’s made up of almost 50% carbon: “the more wool that we’re growing, the more carbon we’re sucking out of the atmosphere, so I feel like it’s a direct connection to fighting climate change.” Long Way Homestead’s approach to management is firmly aligned with the SET management approach. Anna explicitly views growth from a sustainable rather than financial perspective, sees the farm as a vehicle for change, and hopes that it will grow in order to add social, environmental and economic resilience to the local rural community. This sense of community includes other wool mills, whom Anna refuses to see as competitors because the market is large enough for everyone to have enough. A truly unique and inspiring organization, Long Way Homestead is a pertinent example of a SET-managed firm. *This short blog post on Long Way Homestead—one of dozens of SET firms being studied by a research team at the Asper School of Business—was written by Master’s student Savanna Vagianos. For more information, visit https://www.longwayhomestead.com
2 Comments
1/4/2023 06:52:25 am
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2/20/2023 07:14:26 pm
It helped when you said that knitting supplies are connected with regenerative agriculture products from our environment. My aunt mentioned yesterday that she was finding knitting supplies such as knitting sewing and needles for her holiday knitting project she was working. I like this instructive knitting article. I'll tell her we can consult trusted knitting supplies online shop as they can provide information about their materials.
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Bruno DyckBruno is an organizational theorist at the University of Manitoba. He loves being a management professor, scholar and teacher. Archives
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