Report October 2025

News from the jute growing areas in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India are mixed. Weather conditions for growing this season’s crop were excellent. However, this changed during August when the weather turned unfavourable during harvesting. The Tossa crop, being harvested later wasn’t so badly impacted, but the quantity and quality drop in White jute and Meshta means more Tossa jute will be required to fill production gaps across a wide range of industrial demands.

Year-on-year production dropped 6.6%, while demand increased, leading to an 11% hike in farm cooperative premium grade Tossa jute fibre prices. While this isn’t a problem that affects KOUMANAWA production, it will have an overall impact on price and quality to the general market. We’ve entered the fortunate position of switching over to in-house supply from our own yarn mill, mitigating production costs which we aim to maintain, or near the current level.

Last month we completed the first milestone – rope structure, and anyone who has seen the pre-production samples has been amazed at what we have achieved. I’ve been trying to secure this for well over a decade, but always been thwarted by quality, tolerance and reliability when sourcing yarns from third party mills. It’s an ordeal the whole jute product manufacturing industry endures, where most application specification tolerances can be much wider. For example, a carpet backing yarn eg. CRT, where variations in fibre quality, even blending with cheaper Meshta, batching oil content, piling time, carding, drawing, and spinning twist settings can be accepted over a fairly large range. We don’t have such luxuries, as the Shibari market demands very high quality, fit for purpose, affordable and available rope.

To explain the yarn production steps in detail, raw jute is procured from farmer cooperative markets, each run by a collective agent. For the first time ever, we’ve locked this down as our Iftekharul and Ando-san now buy direct. We know where the best growing areas are, and built relationships with agents. Naturally, the best costs extra, and we get in at exactly the right time, outbidding other interests.

Once delivered, bales are selected from our huge storage sheds, opened and each plant’s fibre bundle unfolded for inspection. Our trained hacklers then chop off root and gummy top material depending on final application, threshing it over spikes to dislodge unwanted impurities. Less material and impurities can be trimmed for lower grade requirements. Our KI-grade yarn uses the best raw jute and the highest bulk removal during quality control.

From there material goes on to batching, where % soybean oil content has been adjusted, and piling timing altered to optimise softening, not only for the yarn making process, but its final strength, pliability and compressibility specific for Shibari. We’ve also introduced proprietary technology to maximise piling efficiency and uniformity.

After piling, each ~50kg roll of batched jute fibre is loaded onto the first (breaker) carding machine where filaments are fanned out and combed into a single direction. Further carding then brings parallelism, preparing the fibre into form ready for drawing, where slithers (ribbons of fibre) are shaped while blending to improve average filament overlap. For the best results we use four drawing stages.

Fourth drawing stage slithers go directly into the yarn spinning machine, where a great deal of our research, development, testing and analysis has been focused. Combined with drawing machine settings to maximise bulk fibre, twist and count settings have been optimised for our niche application – Shibari. This could never be achieved without access to our own yarn mill and production technical expertise, when it went operational end of last year.

Finally, we have our own stringent quality control department, where impurities, hairiness, diameter tolerance count, twist and strength are measured at regular intervals during every production runs.

KI yarn (KOUMANAWA Ito) is therefore a slightly heavier count yarn (greater diameter) providing improved lateral fibre compression and longitudinal strength, meaning one less yarn per strand at each rope diameter. This gives greater rope flexibility and lateral tooth – the ability to grip to itself, while improving wear abrasion and overall strength while reducing fibre loss (dust). Visually, it’s almost impossible to notice, apart from the amazing blonde colour and incredible cleanliness. In testing, the resulting ropemarks look so good on skin.

This is now the peak moment to produce as fresh crop arrives. Many other interests seek the same quality of fibre, and while hoarding is common, driving up prices later in the season as availability becomes scarce, it’s illegal. Sadly, local authorities seem toothless to act. Fortunately, this no longer affects our production now we have taken full control of our raw jute procurement.

After February, production can be compromised by lack of stock, so it’s always wise to produce the best yarns between September and the end of each year. Setting up the yarn production system for our specification demands a minimum run of five tonnes.

Yarn storage space is still an issue. Our two rope factories opened in 1993 and 2000 have limited room, so we produce to order and ship on completion.

You can see video of our yarn production here.