Pastures and the Future: Grazing, Land, and the Sustainable Fibre Alliance

Mongolia's grasslands are under more pressure than at any point in living memory, and cashmere goats are part of the reason why. This is not a footnote to the industry's story but a central fact of it, worth stating without euphemism, alongside what is actually being done about it.

A herd that outgrew its pasture

Mongolia's national livestock count has grown enormously in three decades, from roughly 25 million head in the early 1990s to over 70 million by recent counts, with goats accounting for an increasingly large share of that total as global cashmere demand rose. Goats present a particular challenge for grassland health: unlike sheep, which crop grass, goats often pull vegetation up by the root and will browse shrubs and woody plants when grass is scarce, damaging the root systems that allow pasture to regenerate after a dry season. Mongolian government and UN-affiliated surveys have estimated that as much as 70 percent of the country's pastureland shows some degree of degradation, ranging from reduced plant diversity to, in the most affected areas, visible desertification.

Why this is a herding problem before it is a fashion problem

It is worth being precise about where responsibility sits. The pressure on Mongolia's pastures stems primarily from herd sizes that have grown faster than traditional land-management practices could accommodate, driven by a global market that rewards volume without, historically, pricing in the land cost of producing it. A herder deciding whether to keep an extra fifty goats this year is responding to fibre prices set an ocean away, in a market that has rarely asked what a given pasture can sustainably support. Framing this purely as a consumer choice — buy less cashmere — ignores that herding remains one of the only viable livelihoods across huge stretches of Mongolia's countryside; the more useful question is how herding can continue on land that is not being depleted faster than it can recover.

Otor, and older knowledge

Traditional Mongolian herding relied on otor, seasonal, sometimes long-distance movement of herds between pastures to prevent any single area from being grazed continuously. The practice is significantly harder to maintain today, as informal fencing, growing settlements, and competition over the best-watered pastures have shrunk the range over which herding households can realistically move. Baatar, who coordinates a pasture-user group of fourteen households in Bayankhongor province, described spending as much time now negotiating grazing schedules with neighbouring groups as he does actually managing his own herd — a level of coordination that, a generation ago, informal custom handled without needing meetings at all.

What the Sustainable Fibre Alliance is actually trying to do

The Sustainable Fibre Alliance, an industry body founded in 2016, works directly with herding communities across Mongolia and the wider cashmere-producing region to develop and monitor grazing practices intended to keep pasture use within sustainable limits, alongside animal welfare standards. Its approach centres on working pasture by pasture with herder groups to set locally appropriate stocking rates, rather than applying a single national standard to a country whose grassland capacity varies enormously by region and rainfall. OYU does not currently hold SFA certification, and we are direct about that; a meaningful share of the herding households we buy from operate in regions where SFA-aligned pasture groups are active, and we see the organisation's Cashmere Standard as the most credible reference point in the industry for what responsible grazing should look like, even where we cannot yet claim formal compliance ourselves.

An honest accounting of where we are

We do not have a tidy resolution to offer on this subject, and any brand claiming full assurance of sustainable sourcing across an entire raw-material supply chain this complex should be read with some scepticism. What we can say is narrower: we buy a portion of our fibre from specific herding households whose pasture practices we have visited and discussed directly, we track which regions our fibre comes from, and we consider support for organisations like the Sustainable Fibre Alliance, and for herder-led pasture groups like Baatar's, a more useful long-term investment than a certification badge acquired without the underlying practice behind it.

Fibre sourcing regions for the current season are listed on our About page →

See also The People of Cashmere: A Day With a Herding Family and Cashmere All Year Round: Why It Isn't Only for Winter.