SAIF Agri-Business Banquet – January 17, 2025
Get ready to welcome keynote speaker, Jeanne Carver.
JEANNE CARVER and her late husband, Dan, owned and operated the historic Imperial Stock Ranch since the late 1980s. The ranch has produced sheep, cattle, grains, and hay throughout its 153-year history. Their focus was the stewardship of natural resources. Working in collaboration with agency partners, in 1989, they formulated a Conservation Management Plan for their entire operation with the health of soil and grasslands as the primary focus and grazing animals as the primary tool. In 1999, they faced a new challenge. With a collapsing wool market due to off-shoring U.S. textile manufacturing, Jeanne led them from commodity wool sales in a new direction. Similar to the farm-to-fork “slow food” movement that reconnects us to our food, Jeanne pioneered taking her wool directly to market, at scale, and built fiber supply chain relationships as close to home as possible. Connecting their ranch’s heritage and mindful stewardship of land and animals to the products, she built a growing customer base for textiles with an attachment to place.
Her efforts eventually took them to the world stage as a partner to well-known fashion brands. At national trade shows, Jeanne was the “Farmer’s Market of Textiles,” known across multiple segments of the U.S. fashion industry and beyond. She has been the voice and source of American wool for Ralph Lauren’s Team USA Olympic uniforms since 2014. In 2016, Imperial Stock Ranch became the first ranch in the world certified by the leading global standard for sheep and wool production, called the Responsible Wool Standard. With demand increasing, in 2018, Jeanne launched Shaniko Wool Company to scale the supply of U.S. wool meeting this leading global standard. Today, Jeanne has become a global voice for Responsible Animal Fiber standards and has led the development of a fully certified textile supply chain in the U.S. meeting these standards.
Jeanne is an award-winning agricultural entrepreneur and author. In 2023, she received the American Sheep Industry Innovation Award and the Oregon State University College of Agricultural Sciences Hall of Fame Award. She was featured in His Majesty at 75: The Leadership and Vision of King Charles III (November 2023), for her work in regenerative wool production and promoting the provenance of wool in fashion. She coauthored Stories of Fashion, Textiles and Place – Evolving Sustainable Supply Chains (Davis and Carver – Bloomsbury Publishing, London).