2026 Inner Mongolia Cashmere Harvest Season: A B2B Buyer’s Field Guide from Ordos

Most cashmere market notes focus on finished yarn price per kg or FOB sweater cost. They say very little about the pasture side of the calendar — the months when fiber is actually leaving the goat, when herders are deciding what to keep and what to sell, and when the first bidding window opens for mills and factories in Ordos.

This note is a field-level companion for B2B buyers planning 2026 collections. It is based on what we see every year at our Ordos facility and in conversations with herders, combs, and dehairing mills across Inner Mongolia. It is not a price forecast — for indicative price ranges see our 2026 cashmere market report. The goal here is the timing layer: what happens on the ground, when, and how a buyer should plan around it.

The two Inner Mongolian cashmere seasons you actually need to know

Most buyers think of “cashmere season” as one block. In practice, Inner Mongolia has two distinct fiber flows, separated by climate and goat biology:

1. Spring combing (April – early June) — the main commercial harvest. Goats naturally shed their winter undercoat as temperatures rise, and herders comb (or in lower-grade operations, shear) the loose fiber. This is the primary supply for the year’s spinning pipeline.
2. Autumn transition (September – October) — a shorter secondary window for adult goats regrowing undercoat, and the only window for the kid-goat (baby cashmere) harvest, which is combed once as the kid is weaned.

If you remember only one thing from this note: most of the raw cashmere your 2026–2027 finished garment is made from was combed in April–May 2026, and the price your mill will quote you in September was largely set by the herder-bidding rounds in May–June.

The April–June combing window: what actually happens

The combing calendar by region

Inner Mongolia’s pastoral zones do not all warm up at the same time. A buyer who treats “Inner Mongolia” as one block will miss important lot-availability differences:

Region	Typical combing start	Typical combing end	Notes for buyers
Alashan League (western Inner Mongolia)	Mid-April	Late May	Earliest start. Smaller herds (~1.5M head) but the highest-grade fiber on average. White-fibre lots dominate.
Ordos / eastern Inner Mongolia	Late April	Mid-June	The largest commercial volume. Vertically integrated fiber → yarn → garment pipeline.
Xilin Gol / central grassland	Early May	Mid-June	Recovering grassland; combing constrained by grazing-restoration rules.
Bayannur / northern foothills	Mid-May	Late June	Later start, slightly coarser average micron, but reliable volume for mainstream sweater programs.

The regional stagger means a buyer sourcing only from Ordos in early May may miss Alashan lots that were already combed and pooled in late April. Conversely, Alashan-only sourcing runs into availability limits by July because the herd is small. Most of our own 14.5–15.5μm lots are blended across at least two regions to balance volume and grade.

What the fiber looks like the day it is combed

Two facts that often surprise new buyers:

• Combed fiber is not yet cashmere. Raw combed fiber is roughly 30–50% grease (lanolin-like suint), guard hair, and vegetable matter by weight. The tradeable unit is dehaired cashmere, which is what the spinning mill pays for. A buyer who sees a “cashmere price per kg” without specifying whether it is raw or dehaired is reading two different products.
• Greasy fiber yellows within weeks. Even within a single combing week, a lot that is bagged and stored cold will dehair differently from a lot that sits in a herder’s shed. We see meaningful micron and color drift across lots that are nominally the same grade, which is why dehairing mills grade after the wash step, not at the herder gate.

Herder pricing: how the first number is set

The number that ends up in your finished FOB price has its origin in a bidding conversation between a herder household and a local comb-collector, usually in the herder’s pasture, usually in cash, usually in May. The dynamics we have observed for 23 years:

• The first buyer at the gate sets the local reference price for the week. When a comb-collector from a major Ordos dehairing cluster arrives in an Alashan village in early May, the price they pay per raw kilogram becomes the anchor for the entire village that week.
• Quality premiums are visible, not negotiated. Herders with consistently finer, whiter, longer-staple fiber get a per-kg premium that is visible to other herders in the same pasture. The premium is small per kg but compounds across a season.
• Herders with grazing-permit quotas are price-takers, not price-makers. Inner Mongolia’s grassland-restoration program caps herd sizes in many pastures. The herder cannot easily expand supply in a high-price year, which structurally limits short-term supply elasticity.

A buyer who wants to understand why “raw cashmere price” can move 10–15% within a single season is watching the May–June bidding rounds. A buyer who only watches the spinning-mill quote in September is watching a derivative number.

May–June: the dehaired-lot auction window

After combing, fiber is pooled at the village, washed and dehaired at regional mills, and then sold in lots at the Ordos and Bayannur dehaired-fiber auctions — typically late May through July. This is where the per-grade indicative prices that end up in your mill quotation are first established.

What matters for a B2B buyer:

• Lot size at auction is typically 50–500 kg of dehaired fiber, not a container load. To get a 20-ton program-grade lot, a mill usually pools 40–80 auction lots. Pooling is where the real cost and the real risk live — micron drift, length drift, color drift across pooled lots.
• White fiber commands a separate, persistent premium. The premium widens in years when bleached-white garment demand is strong (2024–2025 saw this), and narrows when ecru/natural-tone knitwear is fashionable.
• Cashmere auction prices are not public. Unlike wool, there is no open cashmere auction index. The numbers in any “cashmere market report” — including ours — are factory-sourcing ranges, not exchange-published indices. Treat all numbers as indicative and re-quote for your specific grade and lot size.

July–August: the quiet month

July and August are the low-information months for raw cashmere. Combing is finished, the auction round is mostly cleared, and the spinning mills are blending lots in preparation for the autumn yarn-spinning cycle. This is when a buyer can still meaningfully influence their autumn delivery timeline, because yarn-spinning takes 60–90 days from lot-pool to finished cone, and the autumn delivery slot is fixed by the mill, not the buyer.

Three actions that matter in July–August:

1. Confirm your grade with the mill in writing — micron range, length range, white-vs-natural, down content. Not “premium” or “Grade A” as words, but numbers and a fiber-lot certificate reference.
2. Lock your yarn-spinning slot — the mill’s autumn spinning capacity is finite and is allocated first to programs with confirmed purchase orders, not to inquiries.
3. Confirm fiber-lot traceability paperwork — if your customer requires RWS, GCS, OEKO-TEX, or the Inner Mongolia geographical indication, the documentation chain starts at the combed-lot level and cannot be backfilled at the finished-garment stage.

September–October: what changes at the factory gate

By September, the year’s main fiber flow has been converted into dehaired lots and is sitting in mill warehouses. What happens next is logistics and order-book management, not new fiber supply. The notable changes at the factory gate in September:

• The autumn kid-goat (baby cashmere) combing opens. This is the only window for < 13.5μm fiber, and it is short — typically 4–6 weeks in September–October. Volumes are small and programs are planned 12–18 months in advance.
• Mill-quoted prices for autumn delivery are anchored on the May–July auction rounds, plus currency, freight, and certification costs. They are not reactive to September pasture conditions.
• Lead times for spring 2027 garment delivery are set now. A buyer who wants March–May 2027 retail delivery needs yarn locked by October 2026 at the latest. Yarn locked in November moves the delivery window to June–July 2027.

November–March: the planning window for next year

This is the most underrated part of the cashmere calendar for B2B buyers. While the herd is on winter pasture and the mill is spinning autumn lots, the commercial planning for the following year happens:

• Herders review the season. Pasture rotation, combing yield, herd health, and pricing economics are reviewed at the household and village level. Grazing-permit renewals are negotiated.
• Mills publish indicative ranges for the coming year’s spinning slots. These ranges are not commitments, but they anchor buyer budgets for the spring collection cycle.
• Brand buyers should be confirming their 2027 grade and program specs, not starting from scratch in February. The mills that produce the most consistent year-over-year quality are the ones with the most stable buyer programs, and stability is built in this window.

A practical 2026 procurement timeline for B2B buyers

If you are planning a 2026 or 2027 cashmere program and want to align with the Inner Mongolian calendar:

Buyer action	When	What it influences
Confirm grade spec (micron, length, white/natural)	July–August 2026	Yarn-spinning slot allocation
Issue purchase order with deposit	August–September 2026	Autumn yarn-spinning capacity
Approve pre-production hand-feel sample	October 2026	Knitting program start
Approve pre-shipment sample + lab test	January–February 2027	Bulk production completion
Bulk shipment ex-works Ordos	February–April 2027	Spring–summer 2027 retail delivery

This timeline assumes a standard 2/48nm 14.5μm program for a 300–1,000 piece order. Faster timelines are possible but compress the lot-pooling window and raise the cost of grade drift; slower timelines are possible but reduce the mill’s willingness to hold yarn-spinning capacity.

What this guide deliberately does not include

For honesty and to manage expectations:

• No 2026 price numbers. Indicative price ranges for 2026 are in our market report and are updated when our own quotation book changes. They are factory sourcing ranges, not a market index.
• No pasture-condition forecasts. We do not have access to real-time weather, vegetation, or herd-health data; we only observe what arrives at the factory gate.
• No claims about specific herders, villages, or cooperatives. Privacy and commercial sensitivity aside, single-herder anecdotes are not a reliable procurement signal.
• No ranking of “best” or “worst” regions. All four major pastoral zones produce legitimate, traceable cashmere. The right region depends on your grade, volume, and lead time — see our Alashan vs Ordos vs Mongolian goat comparison for the fiber-side differences.

Where to go next

• For price ranges and supply outlook: 2026 cashmere market report
• For fiber-side goat breed differences: Alashan vs Ordos vs Mongolian cashmere goats
• For lot-level verification before you buy: How to verify Ordos cashmere origin
• For testing and certification paperwork: Cashmere test report checklist for B2B buyers
• For end-to-end fiber-to-garment process: From pasture to garment: 23 steps at our Ordos facility

If your 2026 or 2027 program has a specific grade, volume, or delivery window that you want to pressure-test against this calendar, request a quotation and we will lay the timeline against your spec.

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DONGXIAO® Editorial is the publishing name for sourcing notes produced by the factory and procurement team at our Ordos, Inner Mongolia facility. Field observations in this note are drawn from our own combing-season purchasing, herder conversations, and dehairing-mill lot records across multiple years. Numerical price claims are deliberately excluded; refer to the linked market report for indicative ranges.