The PA Flax Project & The Return of American Linen

This week on the Hemp Show we’re talking about flax, a fiber plant with remarkable similarities to industrial hemp when grown for textiles. There’s a fair amount of flax growing this year in southeastern Pennsylvania. The last time this much flax grew here, tractors hadn’t even been invented yet. By the late 1800s flax production was in rapid decline in the Keystone State, pushed out by cheap cotton and forgotten by a country racing toward synthetic fiber — which makes 2025 a special year in Pennsylvania. Thanks to the PA Flax Project, spearheaded by Heidi Barr and Emma de Long, there are 30 acres of flax for fiber production in Chester, Montgomery and Lancaster counties this year. Thirty acres sounds small, but it’s a far cry from the eighth of an acre the organization started with in 2022, or the zero acres for generations before that. When they harvest their 30 acres of flax next week, de Long said, this will be the first flax for fiber ever mechanically harvested in Pennsylvania. “When flax became no more in the United States, thanks to cotton and free labor and synthetics, the linen industry was destroyed. And since then, it has mechanized in other parts of the world. So now that we are having a resurgence of growing fiber flax and bringing this industry back, we have imported equipment from Belgium and we’re ready to rock and roll,” she said. Barr said the Pennsylvanian Department of Agriculture has been instrumental in helping further the nascent flax industry in the state. “We advocated for and they added fiber flax to Pennsylvania’s specialty crop list, which made us eligible for a specialty crop block grant, which we received,” Barr said. The organization also received an Organic Market Development Grant through USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service, which they are using to implement their business plan and scale acreage, educate and support farmers, and to develop a plan for a scutching mill, Barr said. She said the mill will be a worker- and farmer-owned cooperative, based on flax-producing co-ops in Europe. The podcast this week shares a handful of voices from the PA Flax Project’s Flax Flower Picnic, held June 14 at Lundale Farm in South Coventry Township, Chester County. In order of appearance on the show, we hear from Emma de Long and Heidi Barr from the PA Flax Project; Natalie Horvath, design director at F. Schumacher and Company, a family-owned textile and interior design powerhouse in New York; Bill Schick, director of agriculture for the PA Flax Project; Mike Roth from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture; Paul Turner, chair of the Department of Theater and Dance at Rowan University; Leslie Davidson from the Pennsylvania Fibershed; and PA Flax Project member Rachel Laramee. After flax, we check in with Dr. David Suchoff from NC State University in North Carolina about the Global Fiber Hemp Summit in Raleigh later this month. Learn More: PA Flax Project paflaxproject.com F. Schumacher & Co. schumacher.com Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture www.pa.gov/agencies/pda.html Pennsylvania Fibershed pafibershed.org North American Linen Association (NALA) northamericanlinen.org Thanks to our sponsors! IND HEMP Indhemp.com Forever Green, distributors of the KP4 Hemp Cutter hempcutter.com