By that, he means up to 20 or 30 times a year.

Finding a grazing spot is not easy. They take time to reach from the family’s ger – the traditional Mongolian circular tent – which they must dismantle and rebuild each time they relocate. It’s a slog, especially during the winters, but, ultimate­ly, “life is boring”, shrugs Buyanrogtokh. Out on the plains, “I only have the company of my dog.”

In the spring,life gets busier. “It depends on the weather, but we usually shear the sheep and comb the goats between April and early June,” says Buyanrogtokh. It is a vital part of his work, because the family’s main source of income isn’t the meat they sell or the dairy they produce – “the most profit­able product is cashmere”.

That is true not just for Buyanrogtoh and his brood. The ultra-soft wool of the Mongolian cashmere goat, favoured by fashion houses the world over, is the country’s biggest source of income after mining. And Mongolia is the world’s largest exporter of animal hair.

“We get paid between 60,000 tugrik [US$23] and 90,000 tugrik per kilo,” says Buyanrogtokh. Each goat produces about 240 grams of cashmere a year, so the family can make well over seven million tugrik from this enterprise. Add that to meat and dairy yields and it amounts to a small fortune in a country where average per-capita income is US$4,103.

Unlike sheep and camel wool, which herders shear fast and sell for far less, the best cashmere fibres come from hand-combing the goats’ soft undercoat. “They shed it natur­ally so we have to keep an eye out and do it at the right time,” says Buyanrogtokh. “It’s a long process. We have to do it carefully.

“Shearing would be much easier and faster, but it would cut the cashmere fleece shorter and it would mix with the guard hair,” which is a coarser fibre. “If that happens,” says Buyanrogtokh, “the price will drop significantly.”

The Cashmere Goat Association defines “the quality of cashmere fleece by three factors: length, diameter and degree of crimping”. Industry standards dictate that the hair must be at least 3cm long with an average diameter of less than 19 microns (human hair can be up to 181 microns).

According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, Mongolia accounts for a 42 per cent share of the global trade in animal hair, topping China, which has a 41 per cent share. When it comes to cashmere, Mongolia produces 30 per cent of the global supply, while China accounts for 60 per cent.

The Annual Cashmere Report, published by the Schneider Group, says Mongolian cashmere’s “quality has degraded over the years due to a lack of a proper national strategy for livestock, health, disorganised breeding, and herders’ interests to grow their goat population rather than producing high-quality fibre.”

In February last year, the Mongolian government launched a four-year programme, backed by a 500 billion tugrik Cashmere Development Fund, aimed at increasing the country’s processing capabilities and creating 3,600 jobs in an industry that “provides income to over 100,000 people”. Of those, says the Schneider report, 90 per cent are women and 80 per cent are under the age of 35.

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“The main idea is to keep domestically grown cashmere, use it to make final products within the country, and reduce export of washed cashmere to China,” the report states.

The government aims to have 40 per cent of all Mongolian cashmere processed domestically next year, and 60 per cent in 2021, up from 35 per cent last year. Non-govern­mental organisations such as the Wildlife Conser­vation Society are also promoting local associations of herders, to raise breeding standards and increase profits.

Buyanrogtokh doesn’t belong to a formal group, but says he and a few herder friends have banded together to increase their collective bargaining power. The nomads use govern­ment-provided satellite phones to exchange information and set prices. “We will warn of intermediaries coming our way and inform each other of the offers they make,” grins Buyanrogtokh. “We will sell as a group, which benefits all of us.”

Middlemen collect the cashmere at Buyanrogtokh’s ger and take it to the capital, Ulan Bator, where Gobi Corpora­tion owns the world’s largest cashmere factory, its slogan displayed proudly at the entrance, “From goat to coat”.

The leading Mongolian luxury group, Gobi employs more than 2,100 people at this sprawling facility located among small residential buildings and the occasional ger. The company has invested heavily in technology and this modern factory, comparable to the most advanced in China, is a big step for a brand born in 1981 with Japanese aid.

“It was a development planned as reparation for the suffering caused during World War II,” explains Gobi chief sales officer Ariunaa Batchuluun, a matter-of-fact woman who likes to get straight to the point. “Until the turn of the new millennium, around 90 per cent of our production was exported, mainly to the former Soviet states. But now Mongolia’s wealth has increased, and we focus more on the domestic market.”

The corporation was privatised in 2007 and has been growing ever since. “We’ve diversified our products and improved designs,” says Batchuluun. “We even hire foreign designers. Before we used to produce materials for other brands, but although that is still an important business for us, we have shifted our efforts to build our own brand.”

Gobi now produces more than 1.1 million metres of woven material, a million knitted items, 150,000 tailored products and 35,000 printed cashmere pieces a year. It has grown into a global business with a network of 62 franchise stores in 41 cities across three continents.

The company claims to adhere to the highest standards of sustainability and its brochure states it has “removed any unnecessary intermediaries in the production process”. Batchuluun adds that the corporation works with the Sustainable Fibre Alliance to source half its raw materials directly from herders like Buyanrogtokh. “Cashmere is a great opportunity for a country like Mongolia to develop,” she says.

A thorn in the industry’s side has been an investigation carried out between November 2018 and April 2019, in 30 randomly selected cashmere farms in China and Mongolia, that concluded all were guilty of animal cruelty. As evidence it offered hard-to-watch videos of goats bleating in pain while having their belly hairs torn out.

“Peta Asia documented a pattern of abuse showing that these goats suffer in every farm they visited before they are sent to be killed,” writes Peta senior vice-president of inter­national campaigns Jason Baker, in an email. “No matter where it comes from or what assurances companies provide, cashmere is a product of systematic cruelty to goats in this industry.”

Batchuluun has not watched the Peta videos, but she is aware of them. “I believe that can happen in China [where] many brands label their prod­ucts as Mon­go­lian, and shoot their ads here, because of our better repu­ta­tion,” she says. “But they are, in fact, from China’s Inner Mongolia.”

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While Peta insists the videos were shot on farms in both countries, when asked for addresses of the facilities, the organisation declined to share the information.

No animal cruelty was witnessed by this writer on reporting trips to Mongolia. Rather, nomadic herders were observed taking pride in caring for their animals. Goat kids are carried inside herders’ jackets when on the move during the harsh winter months, and share the gers with families at night.

The Peta videos show facilities in which tens or hund­reds of goats are being processed. This, the Mongolian herders say, is uncommon.

“Most of us do the work at home or in the open,” says Buyanrogtokh. “We can’t afford to take our entire herd to a city.”

Once the herders have finished combing, the raw material arrives at the factory where women sort it according to quality. Before it can be sewn into clothing, cashmere must be scoured, dehaired, dyed, blended, spun and woven until the wool becomes soft and light.

“There are four natural colours – beige, brown, white and grey, from the most common to the rarest – which we use unbleached in our organic collections, but we can dye it over 1,400 different colours,” explains Gobi’s export marketing manager Khajidsuren Otgonbayar during a factory tour.

On the second floor of this massive, maze-like building, cashmere finally takes the form of finished garments – jumpers, coats, scarves and socks. Every detail undergoes quality control checks before products are shipped. The first stop for much of it is the main Gobi outlet, a huge two-storey glass building just east of Ulan Bator’s Sükhbaatar Square, in the heart of the capital.

“For Mongolians, owning a Gobi product is a matter of pride,” says Batchuluun. “Foreigners are attracted by the high quality and relatively low prices. Half of our customers in Ulan Bator are foreigners.”

A tourist inspecting an elegant sports jacket remarks that a similar coat back in Italy would cost up to 10 times as much. Russians are shopping here too, but one type of customer stands out: young mainland Chinese women broadcasting pieces in the shop on WeChat video calls. These are daigou: women who buy popular items abroad to sell back in China. Many are students and based in Europe, Japan and South Korea, where they have access to luxury fashion products and cosmetics at cheaper prices to those in China. Cashmere capital Ulan Bator is a happy daigou hunting ground.

Onesocial-media-savvy 20-something, who asks to remain anonymous, says demand is strong for Gobi prod­ucts among her customers. “Chinese brands like Erdos are more expensive and often of lower quality,” explains the woman, who hails from Inner Mongolia. She has just sold two jumpers and made a 400 yuan (US$56) profit. “I can make more money doing this than with most of the jobs available to people my age back home.”

Goats account for an increasing percentage of Mongolia’s gross domestic product. They also, however, eat 10 per cent of their body weight every day, and, unlike grazing sheep or horses, goats dig out the roots of the grass, making regrowth less likely. This makes Mongolia’s most valuable animal resource also the biggest threat to its environment.

Scientists from Oregon State University, in the United States, studied Mongolian grass­lands in 2013 using Nasa satellite imagery, and found that “over the last 10 years across Mongolia, grassland degra­dation is mainly related to an increase in domestic animal populations, and to a more limited extent, to changes in precipitation patterns”.

In a separate study led by Y.Y. Liu, at the Australian University of New South Wales, overgrazing was also considered to be a factor in environmental deterioration, although to a lesser extent.

“Approximately 60 per cent of the vegetation, water content, and above-ground biomass declines can be directly explained by variations in rainfall and surface tempera­ture,” Liu’s team reported. “A marked increase in goat den­sity with associated grazing pressures and wildfires are the most likely non-climatic factors behind grassland degradation.”

In 1980, there were an estimated 4.4 million goats in Mongolia, one sixth of today’s number. The goat population doubled between 1992 and 1999, after socialism was aban­doned, and then doubled again over the following decade. From 1940 to 2014, tempera­tures rose by 2.07 degrees, double the global average, and precipitation levels fell by 7 per cent.

“A changing climate and increased grazing pressure have intensified the threat of desert expansion from south Mongolia towards the central and northern grasslands,” Liu’s study states. “In 2002, it was estimated that over 70 per cent of the total territory was degraded relative to its natural state.”

Now, 90 per cent of Mongolia’s grasslands are in danger of desertification. Since the 1980s, more than one in 10 of the country’s rivers and one in five of its lakes have dried up.

“Breed more camels” is often floated as a solution, and “sure”, agrees Buyanrogtokh, “camels are easy to take care of [he owns more than 150 of them] but their wool is worth a fraction of the price of cashmere”.

“Income generated by herding is already unattractive for youngsters, who prefer a comfortable life in the city,” he says. “We have to find incentives for them to stay, and pass on the traditional way of life.”

“Winters are warmer and drier now,” says Hairathan Sernehan, an ethnic Kazakh herder from the westernmost province of Bayan Ulgii. “I don’t mind the temperature, but the lack of water is making our life hard.”

Still, like Buyanrogtokh, he’s not trimming his herd yet.

Cashmere-producing goats, eating their own industry into oblivion, “are just more profitable”.