Mohair

The Angora goat is named after Ankara, the capital city of Turkey. Their fleece came to be known as mohair from the Arabic mukhayyar (mukhaya) meaning "cloth of bright hair from a goat". [NOTE: Only Angora rabbits produce Angora fur] The Angoran people once attributed the beauty of mohair to the power of a holy man named Hadji Bayram Veli, and wove the fleece into silk-like cloth that was worn by the sultans of Turkey. From the 1849 importation of the original flock of seven does and two bucks, the United States has developed into one of the three largest mohair producing nations worldwide, with annual production in excess of ten million pounds. The two other principal mohair producing countries are South Africa and Turkey.

The state of Texas, with an estimated herd of over 1,100,000 goats, is the primary mohair region of the United States, producing about 90% of the total domestic fleece. The main region is on the Edwards Plateau in southwest Texas, where the climate and terrain is well suited for raising Angora goats due to its similarity to the dry mountains of their origin. Angora goats are sheared twice a year, before breeding in the fall and before kidding in the spring. The mohair grows at a rate of about 3/4 inch a month, making the fleece of an adult Angora goat displaying fibers 4 to 6 inches long at shearing time. The spring shearing usually yields 25 to 35 per cent more mohair than does the fall. Including kids, the average Angora goat in the United States produces about 5.3 pounds of mohair per shearing. Since Angora goats are sheared twice a year, this averages about 10.6 pounds of mohair fleece per goat per year. An adult Angora goat will produce 8 to 16 pounds of mohair a year, while the finer kid mohair may yield 3 to 5 pounds per year.

The mohair yarn is so fine that it takes the annual fiber production of about four goats to make one scarf. It is estimated that it requires a length of 1 mile (1.6 Km) of yarn to make even a small mohair scarf!