4. Wool production in Lesotho began in the 1850s, barely 20 years after the founding of the nation by Moshoeshoe I. Basotho acquired wooled Merino sheep through labour migration and employment on South African sheep farms and, sometimes, through stock theft. Wool prices were high at this time and contemporary reports agree that the principal motivation for this acquisition was the cash income to be gained from wool sales. The initiation of mohair production lagged that of wool production by about 20 years. By the end of the 19th Century, however, almost all of the sheep flock and most of the goat flock had been transformed from traditional meat producing varieties to the exotic Merino sheep and Angora goat breeds.
5. This commercialization of small stock keeping parallels a similar upsurge of commercial grain production by Basotho. This grain found ready markets in the neighboring Orange Free State and in the South African diamond and gold fields. By the 1870s, Lesotho was becoming well integrated into the Southern African market economy and was widely described as prosperous. By this time, traders had established over 70 trading stations where the growing agricultural surplus was exchanged for manufactured consumer goods and farm implements. By the 1890s, an additional 50 stations had been established.
6. Competition with cheap Australian and American grain, as well as South African imports against Lesotho's grain exports, severely limited Lesotho's grain exports. In response, Basotho turned increasingly to the complementary pursuits of labour migration and wool and mohair production. Between 1900 and 1931, the Merino population increased ten-fold - from 300,000 to almost 3 million heads. The Angora population increased by a similar factor from about 100,000 to over 1 million. As a result of a combination of severe drought, world economic depression-induced falls in wool and mohair prices, and substantial range degradation from overgrazing, sheep and goat populations fell by one half between 1931 and 1937. They have remained more or less constant ever since.
