From Field to Factory: Mongolia’s Cashmere Production Goes Green

Pumping the foot pedals and rotating the hand cranks of her antiquated weaving equipment never felt like work for Davaasuren Ayursed. The machine was an extension of who she was, she says, because it allowed her to create something beautiful out of thin air, as an artist would. She had learned how to knit commercial garments at a vocational school in Mongolia in the 1980s, and joined a cooperative knitwear factory in Ulaanbaatar, the capital, at age 17. When the factory went bankrupt in 1995, a casualty of Mongolia’s transition to a market-based economy, “It was one of the worst moments of my life,” she remembers.