On a cool, cloudy day in June, I tagged along with Janell Wysock to visit the flax she’d planted around the city of Philadelphia.
As Director of Education for the PA Flax Project, Wysock runs the Square Yard Project, an outreach program that aims to educate the public about flax, which grows well in this region and can be used to make long-fiber linen. To demonstrate how easily flax grows, the Project invites anyone interested to plant flax seeds in their garden and then keep a journal of the crop’s progress.
Every three weeks over the growing season, Wysock would check on the flax growing at Awbury Arboretum and Rittenhouse Town in Germantown, and at Colonial Pennsylvania Farmstead at Ridley Creek State Park. The plot at Awbury Arboretum was doing well, little blue flowers decorating the tops of the green stalks that had grown to nearly 3 feet—without fertilizer, pesticides, or irrigation.
That this easy-growing plant can be used as raw material for linen—a high-quality, durable, biodegradable textile—is great news. The global linen market is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 11.2% over the next few years, from about $1 billion in 2024 to $2.31 billion by 2032.
The PA Flax Project wants to position Pennsylvania farmers to benefit from this growth.
Whereas the target audience for the Square Yard Project is the general public and tends to attract people interested in gardening, sustainability, and fiber arts, the PA Flax Project’s primary goal is to encourage and support local farmers who might be interested in incorporating long-fiber flax into their crop rotation. Some flax varieties are already grown in the U.S. for seed or for short-fiber flax material, but local production of the long-fiber varieties could be part of the solution to the growing environmental problem posed by the garment industry.
Much of this environmental impact is due to the rise of polyester, which accounts for more than half of global fiber production. The lifecycle of polyester starts with fossil fuel extraction and generally ends in a landfill where the nonbiodegradable garments virtually never break down. Even after its water-wasting and -polluting production is complete, polyester sheds microplastics every time it’s washed.
Although cotton comes from a plant and doesn’t shed microplastics, its cultivation requires huge quantities of water and pesticides—much, much more than flax requires. A single cotton t-shirt requires 2700 liters of water to produce, whereas a linen shirt requires only 6.4. This reflects the inherent sustainability of the flax plant that, in the right climate, grows well with very little intervention.
Flax cultivation has other selling points that could appeal to farmers. Bill Schick, the PA Flax Project’s Director of Agriculture, explained how flax’s frost resistance allows for overwintering, which is when a crop is planted in late autumn and goes dormant over the winter.
“It’ll grow probably anywhere from a couple inches up to five inches and then just stop growing because the soil will be too cold, the days will be too short,” Schick said. “And the idea is that it’ll survive the winter between two and five inches tall, and then it’ll be ready to take off in the spring. And because it has a root system already established… it’ll be a month or two ahead of what we’re seeding.”
There are some variables that affect whether overwintering produces a usable crop, but the flexibility of when to plant and harvest can be very helpful.
“It’s a window that flax doesn’t have to compete with other cash crops like corn or soybeans,” Schick explained. “So it just gives farmers more options for crop rotation… I think farmers are almost more excited about overwintering than spring and summer growing because it’s just a window that’s hard to fill.”
Another perk is that flax is harvested by pulling the plant vertically out of the soil, roots and all, which leaves the bed clean for the next crop.
However, harvesting does pose some challenges that the PA Flax Project has worked hard to solve. At an event for growers held in May, CEO and Founder Heidi Barr explained that harvesting one acre of flax by hand requires five skilled laborers for three 8-hour days (120 work-hours total). Acknowledging that this reduces the crop’s appeal to farmers, Barr set out to acquire a harvester, which will be owned by the flaw growers’ co-op that the PA Flax Project is setting up.
“In 2022,” she said, “we started thinking about what kind of harvester we would need, what size of harvester we would need, and try to figure out how the heck we were going to come up with it because we realized that we weren’t really ever going to be able to plant more than half an acre of flax without some kind of mechanized harvesting equipment.”
This introduced complications, she explained, “most of which really boiled down to who could you get in touch with, who was willing to work with you, who was going to have the best potential for follow-up for service because you know we don’t build them here, so we don’t service them here either… But there’s going to have to be some kind of willingness to communicate internationally about how to make this happen.”
Earlier this year, the networking Barr had been doing paid off in spades when a contact in Quebec got in touch.
“He told me that he had identified a harvesting set,” Barr said, “but he wasn’t sure if he was going to import it this year because his seed order was delayed, so he wasn’t sure if he needed it for harvest… And I said, ‘Well, not that I want your seed order to hang you up, but if you do choose not to go with it, we’ll buy it.’ And so that’s how we got it.”
This was just the beginning. As the sale was being finalized, the inspection determined there was dust in the engine, which mechanics agreed would best be replaced. Though the seller agreed to split the cost of the repair, this put the PA Flax Project over budget and behind schedule. But that wasn’t all.
“So the second issue,” Barr said, “was that there’s no United States EPA certification on the engine in this puller… Because there’s no North American market for the equipment. Why would [the manufacturer] pay the EPA for a sticker that says it’s certified, right? I submitted a 73-page document in Dutch of all of the environmental tests and benchmarks that it meets to the EPA, but they were like, ‘Nope, it’s not certified.’ Which is funny because I’m sure those rules are stricter than ours by probably a margin. But without that certification, you can’t import it. So we were still going to squeak, get it for harvest, but because of that sticker, it was a 21-day delay…”
When I spoke to her in September, Barr was sanguine about all these setbacks, but missing the harvest was surely a disappointment. The 4-acre flax plot at Pasture Song Farms in Kutztown, PA, had produced very well.
“We were able to get in pretty early,” Schick remarked. “We got rain at the right time. And it was just able to get established and more or less beat the weeds. But we also understand that that might not always be the case. And there’s always a certain amount of luck involved with farming.”
Due to razor-thin profit margins, many farmers would rather avoid the vagaries of luck whenever they can. At a small flax processing event in September, Barr mentioned that some of the established flax growers she met in Belgium laughed when she asked about growing it organically. She relayed the conversation without any defensiveness, outrage, or judgment, pointing out that a potato crop will typically need to be sprayed about eight times over the course of a season, whereas a flax crop will typically be sprayed only two or three times. One appealing aspect of the PA Flax Project’s approach it that it doesn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good; even conventionally grown flax is much easier on the environment than other fibers are.
Still, the PA Flax Project is working from the ground up, so they’re in a position to introduce sustainable methods before more efficient but more damaging habits take root.
For example, Schick explained that stale seed bedding “is common with vegetable production and grain production, especially for organic farmers. Where you might cultivate the land, let it sit for a week or two, and the rain falls, and the sun is shining, and a lot of times weeds will pop up very quickly. And then immediately before seeding, you come through and do one last pass with cultivation, so the idea is to flush some of the weeds out and then put the flax in.”
Another important part of growing flax for long-fiber linen is retting. This is when the harvested flax plant is laid on the ground where it was grown to gently rot. This breaks down the pectins, allowing the outer part of the stalk, made up of long fibers, to separate from the shive, which is the inner pulp that looks kind of like tiny wood chips.
Part of the elegant simplicity of the Square Yard Project is that one square yard is small enough to weed and harvest by hand, and just large enough to ret the harvested flax, which grows to be about 3 feet tall, in place.
“Right where it grew,” Wysock explained. “I plucked it. I pulled it out of the ground, and then I laid it right back in the same spot like horizontally.”
For most participants whose plot is at home, this works well. But Wysock’s plots, scattered all over town, were much more difficult to monitor.
“I’m still learning about when is it ready,” she said. “I probably left it on the ground too long and then, sadly… all of them, I over-retted. So it was a crop loss. After all that loving and tending.”
Next year, she said, she’ll take the harvest from the different plots and then ret it all in one place, closer to her home in the Northern Liberties. She’ll also pay more attention to soil drainage and how densely she’s planting the seed. The plots at Rittenhouse Town that had poor drainage and were densely sewn didn’t grow as tall or sturdy as the flax at Awbury Arboretum and the Pennsylvania Colonial Homestead. Bill also confirmed that the crops on larger farms grew much better on well-drained soil; next year he’ll avoid planting on the poorly draining sites.
Regarding Wysock’s crop, was it really a loss?
“I’m going to probably make paper out of it. I’m pretty sure it’ll work for paper.”
This is the first in a series of articles that comprised my applied research project, Local Linen, for the Digital Journalism and Design master’s program at the University of South Florida.