The coat of the cashmere goat is made up of two components: a valuable down (cashmere) and the outer guard hair. Industrial processing is required in order to separate them. Yield is defined as the weight of down as a fraction of total fleece weight. An accurate assessment of yield or down weight is essential in order to determine the relative merit of an animal.

Yield is expensive to determine objectively in the laboratory, and a yield figure is also required if down weight is to be calculated directly from fleece weight. Several Australasian studies have shown good correlations between calculated down weight and down length measured on the animal, and a relationship between yield and cashmere and guard hair lengths has also been demonstrated (Winter at al, 1985). However there is no published information on these relationships derived from Australasian or Siberian cross ferals bred in the UK.

The weight of a sample patch of fibre shorn from a measured area on the animal’s midside has been used as a predictor of fleece weight, either to predict the full fleece weight later in the season or when, for practical reasons, fleece weight cannot be obtained (Russel and Bishop, 1990). This experiment investigated these relationships in a group of cashmere goats.