It’s harvest season for PA Flax project, time to pull the flax up out of the ground. “We’re now in our sixth year, and our third year of funded operation, and learning so much,” says Heidi Barr, the project’s co-founder.

"This year’s crop is looking really strong so far,” she added, “It may not be the highest possible yield, but the quality is good. We don’t expect to have a lot of loss.”

Heidi has brought two fourth-generation fiber flax farmers from Europe to work alongside her Pennsylvania growers this year, teaching them how to run the mechanized harvesting equipment they imported from Belgium.

Fiber flax is new to this generation of American farmers, but not to the land. U.S. Growers worked flax at commercial scale until World War II, when synthetics killed off the industry. Heidi and her co-founder, Emma de Long, are bringing it back.

It started with a dress

Heidi and Emma met over a wedding dress. Emma, an independent farmer with a passionate commitment to sustainability, wanted hers made of linen, and preferred that it be local. When she found Heidi, a textile artist and another entrepreneurial idealist, the pair hit it off.

Soon they weren’t just discussing dress designs. They were planning to revolutionize the state’s textile industry and bring back what had once been one of its most important crops.

By 2020, they’d founded PA Flax Project, turning their quest for one dress into a plan to rebuild a fiber supply chain that hadn’t existed in Pennsylvania for the better part of a century.

And it couldn’t be closer to home. Heidi lives in the Wissahickon neighborhood, right next door to where German settlers first brought flax seed to this region centuries ago.

“There was a time when flax was such an important part of our local economy that it appears on the original Germantown town seal, alongside a grapevine and a weaver’s shuttle,” Heidi says.

A different kind of return

PA Flax Project is a worker-owned cooperative, an intentional structure designed to share profits among the farmers who grow the crops and worker-owners.

“We are working to establish an industry that will put resources back into our community and not extract them,” Heidi says. “Let’s face it. The current textile industry is extractive. Corporations extract wealth from land and communities around the globe. But that doesn’t mean we can’t also build a system that respects and cares for the source of our textiles. That means the farmers, and all the other people who work the harvest, as well as the land itself.”

Flax is a great place to start, she says. It is a low nitrogen feeder, and it asks little of the soil in return for what it gives back. The crop needs little water, no irrigation, and almost no fertilizer. One farmer growing for PA Flax Project added nothing to his fields this year, while another applied micronutrients just once.

It’s also a zero waste crop at the mill. In addition to producing fiber for linen, it can also be used for biocomposite for car interiors, animal bedding, insulation and twine. The U.S. Mint currently imports Belgian flax to make paper currency.

Even more interesting, Heidi says, is that it pulls heavy metals like lead out of contaminated soil.

“When we started, we were very much thinking about only fine linen,” she says. “ This far into the project, it’s really interesting to realize how many different markets there are for the different products this plant will produce at the mill, beyond that fine fiber for linen which remains our primary focus. I’ve met people doing the coolest things with natural fibers, from sandwich panels that go into boats to adding it into a fiberglass extruder. It’s just endless.”

Between field and fabric

According to Heidi, six years of research and development have paid off and this year’s crops prove that fiber flax can thrive at scale on Pennsylvania’s farms. The next big challenge will be setting up the facilities needed to process it.

Once flax comes out of the ground, it has to be retted, a process of loosening the fiber from the stalk. Farmers do that in collabortaion with PA Flax’s skilled team right in the field, laying the crop out and waiting for dew so that the pectins in the plant breakdown, which allows the woody core of the stalk to separate from the fiber. Next, it needs scutching, a mechanical process that separates the usable fiber from the woody core.

And this is where the chain breaks. There’s no mid- to large-scale scutching mill anywhere in North America. So local farmers have no way to bring their product to market.

“This gap is a barrier to entry into a profitable market for Pennsylvania’s farmers,” Heidi says. “We are filling this gap.”

The knowledge gap runs just as deep as the infrastructure gap. The expertise that once existed here died out along with the local industry, so Heidi and Emma reached across the ocean for help.

“All of the knowledge for flax growing is in Europe, mostly in Belgium and France, and some in Russia,” says Kathleen Webber, a journalist who has long covered PA Flax Project. When the group first got its USDA grant, Heidi and her team went to Europe to learn from farmers who’d never stopped.

For now, they’re focused on building a mill. If they can get one set up here in the Philadelphia region, close to the farms they’re supporting to grow the crop, they’ll be off and running.

Close, but fragile

PA Flax Project has already cleared the hardest early hurdle. A three-year USDA Agricultural Marketing Service grant, worth $1.7 million, has funded the implementation of their business plan since January 2024.

“We would not be here today without that,” Heidi says. “We were literally in a ‘we either get funding or wrap it up’ moment when we got that award.”

That grant kept the project alive, but it was never going to pay for a mill. That’s a separate, much bigger number, and Heidi is blunt about where things stand.

“Honestly, totally honestly, where we are right now is on the cusp. We’ve done so much, and met all our benchmarks,” she says. “But the project remains fragile. We need secured financing to put it over the top.”

A processing mill costs somewhere in the $10 million range to build. PA Flax Project has already identified a possible site. What’s missing is the money.

The timeline hasn’t helped. A federal funding freeze in 2025 locked up the project’s funds for five months. “We survived it and we got our funding back, but it still puts you behind schedule,” Heidi says.

It’s the kind of pace that leaves little room for anything else. Asked if the team ever takes a breath to mark progress, Heidi laughs. Aside from their annual flax flower picnic, “we celebrate the wins in the moment,’ she says. “We’re mostly just working our tails off.”

What comes next

PA Flax Project isn’t working in isolation.

“There’s a group out in Oregon that’s probably in about the same stage of development, or a little further along, than we are,” says Heidi. “Then there are smaller or earlier projects in Oregon, California, South Dakota, Michigan and Ohio. In Canada, Nova Scotia and the Maritime provinces are working on this, and there’s somebody in Saskatchewan who’s been doing important research for 20 years. We’re also talking with folks in Maryland. There’s a tiny group in Rhode Island and a group in Wisconsin.”

By her count, there are probably nine groups across North America seriously pursuing this. Most of them, she says, “are very early stage.”

Heidi sees a future in which there isn’t just one local mill that processes the flax into spinnable fiber for linen, but many. She and Emma believe that if PA Flax Project can prove the model within three years, five more mills will follow on the East Coast, creating “an inter- connected web of regional flax manufacturing hubs.”

“We want to see this industry revitalize across the US,” Heidi says. “This is the tip of the iceberg. Once we do it, we can go help other people do it.”

None of it comes without asking for help, and Heidi doesn’t pretend otherwise. “We definitely need help from time to time, if not all the time, right?” she says. “Because we’re human.”

So PA Flax Project is now opening its co-op for membership, with tiers for individuals and for corporations. The corporate tier is aimed in part at the region’s own textile companies, some of which are already operating in the area. For investors ready to go further, the ask is direct: PA Flax Project is actively seeking capital for the mill itself.

“Anybody who’s interested in the mill development and investing in the mill develop- ment should reach out directly to us,” Heidi says.

Back at Kneehigh Farm, the imported machine is pulling flax that, for now, has nowhere in Pennsylvania to go once it’s out of the ground. Heidi and Emma are betting that by next harvest, there will be.

Will it take more hard work than they can imagine? Probably. But will it be worth it? Most certainly.

Speaking at last year’s annual picnic, Emma put it this way: “It takes integrity, time, and dedication to weave a different story, one that opposes the all too familiar textile tale of exploitation and extraction to one of regeneration, inclusion and resilience. This is the future of fiber we have to look forward to. It may seem like a radical one in our time, but it is obtainable and frankly, necessary. “