Climate Beneficial Cotton Farm Tour
COTTON
A wonder of nature and one of the most diversely used materials in the apparel industry for the time of humanity. Rows of puffs of cotton are both alluring and strange looking. Cotton is a material that has gotten many of us through life. From the first swaddles and baby garments - to bedsheets and undergarments. Tees that we wear like little billboards to tell everyone what we’re into - and Workwear and Denim for durability and strength. Cotton balls to soothe our faces or cover our wounds and filling for puffy blankets to comfort us.
While our associations may be comforting and warm - the trade of cotton holds some of the darkest stories. In the history of The United States and many other countries cotton picking involved slave labor. This practice is still going on around the world. Recently the spotlight has been on the Uyghur people in China ‘reeducation camps’. Cotton has already been banned from some regions near Russia where school children are required to work as Work Education. Cotton traceability has become a necessary component to conscious cotton consumption. Also still today pesticides and chemical fertilizers are still used on most grown cotton. Endangering the local valleys with forever chemicals including glyphosate.
Luckily I had the opportunity to meet with a group of people working to assist farmers forge an incredibility positive direction with their cotton fields. My friend Nicholas Brown - a sustainability connector and advisor - invited me to a cotton farm tour in the Central Valley of California. This farm has a Climate Beneficial Verified field - with the assistance of Fibershed. They promised that we would be ‘getting our hands in the soil’ - so I had to go…
Fibershed is a non-profit and grant funded organization run out of Northern California. Rebecca Burgess of Fibershed has dedicated her time to helping write legislation, assisting farmers, textile makers and brands connect. And Fibershed has also developed the Climate Beneficial Verified program for the farmers interested in transitioning some (and hopefully eventually all!) of their fields to a more sustainable and soil healthy farming. They currently have more than 180,000 acres currently enrolled in this program. They believe that since inception in 2016 they will sequester more than 130,000 metric tons of CO2 over the next 20 years.
Pedretti Ranch is a 3rd generation operation with both cotton farms as well as a small dairy farm. On a gorgeous cool fall morning we all gathered in the Pedretti family barn to hear more about the amazing efforts of Fibershed and the myriad of non-profit and for-profit helpers that are assisting in this hard work. Gino Pedretti started by explaining his position as a farmer. He explained that farmers are gamblers…. And transitioning fields to a more healthy, conscious place is risky. The entire process including establishing new crops takes around 5 years to see a full volume. In addition they are at the mercy of weather. The last few wet years were not great for the cotton crop that prefers a more dry environment for optimal growing. Climate change is making the weather shifts more extreme and harder to predict. And cotton is a commodity - like oil, etc - it’s prices are dictated by supply and demand. My background is in the apparel industry and I recall years where the cotton supply dropped making prices very high - and at the same time oil prices dropped. So to address it - we added more polyester into our line and reduced the cotton. To remain profitable as a brand it seemed like a reasonable adjustment at the time. But the future of this industry will require more brand commitments - to the farmers - to the ups and downs of price. Along with that customer understanding of the true ups and downs of the market. More brands that honor and value the integrity of their cotton and market it to consumers who are also interested in upholding that integrity in what they wear.
The fields were low rows of little cabbage looking buds - that oddly look like Seymour from ‘Little House of Horrors’… and out of them springs out a bud of white, fluffy cotton puffs. While I stared longingly at the Petretti’s little daughter joyfully picking and tossing white puffs into the sky - I listened to facts about soil that I never thought would intrigue me as much as they did.
The Climate Beneficial program involves many things including planting cover crops in the off season, using compost and animal integration to eat the cover crops and leave their feces and urine behind for additional fertilizer. The year round growing of the cover crops alternating with the cotton helps to sequester carbon out of the environment and drastically reduce the need for synthetic nitrogen. Soil without cover crop tends to be dry and compact so during a rain event the water (and most likely much of the topsoil) is washed away rather than absorbed. Water that is absorbed not only assists in watering the plants but the extra water continues down to replenish the local aquifer - which has been depleted to the point of strict restrictions.
If you’ve been excitedly waiting for the hands in dirt part here’s where it comes in…. On one side of me - the Seymour white puffs and on the other side a freshly tilled bed ready for eventual re-planting. We did an exercise to see how quickly 1” of water would be absorbed into the soil of the freshly tilled plot vs. into the soil of the Climate Beneficial cotton fields. The tilled field took almost 9 minutes for the water to absorb. The Cotton field… 22 seconds. Mind blowing! In a rain event you can just imagine how much water would absorb vs. wash away.
Another demonstration showed us the viscosity of soil clumps. From the cotton field vs. the conventional tilled field. The tilled soil started to break up and fall apart immediately after entering water until it eventually completely dissolved. The soil clump from the cotton field stayed together much longer and never fully dissolved. Once again keeping the soil in place rather than running off in a rain event. This was recently witnessed first hand during California’s extreme rain events the last few years. The Climate Beneficial fields were happy and healthy and green while the conventional fields were all flooded with rain. Right next to each other… but reacted to the rain event very differently.
So here’s the round up… no awful pesticide pun intended. These farmers are doing everything right. They pay the best rates for labor in one of the richest countries in the world. They have giant fun John Deer machines to pick the cotton. They are trying to help the future of the growing community and the health of our soils, aquifers and to move into maintaining the future of farming. But in order for this risk to pay off they need US - consumers to understand WHY they are doing this… And to support them by committing to buy them. And also as consumers we need to hold the brands we buy and support accountable to trace their cotton. We have to make sure that the cotton is not coming from a place of forced labor. It’s 2024… everything legitimate is traceable online. Every bale of US cotton is tagged with a barcode that follows it through the journey.
And also very importantly - the farmers need the cooperation and partnership of the larger, established retailers and brands in the US to support their Climate Beneficial Cotton program. Gio Pedretti told us about the partnership with Starbucks through their dairy farm. Starbucks commitment to sustainability is directly helping small farms like his. From providing compost and solar technology if needed - more importantly they commit to continue purchasing milk from his family farm. Most of this cotton is currently being shipped to Asia for spinning. So bigger American brands can commit to using this cotton while still producing in the countries they are already producing.
Currently there is only one smaller sized spinning mill in North Carolina that is able to work with this cotton. A few more spinning mills specialize in different types of yarns. The US is actively relocating spinning mills out of the US to South America and other countries. If a brand making local goods has the ability to create a local spinning mill - it could bring a full vertical fiber to garment operation back to California.
I’m now back to Los Angeles - far from the farm - but now I’m starting to look at my cotton clothes a little differently. When the Seymour Puffs emerged what did the field look like? Did a machine pick it or a human? Did they use Glyphosate to keep off the pests? Is that forever chemical still in the fibers? How far did it travel…. I hope maybe it sparked a little thought in you as well. If you’d like to learn more I encourage you to connect with Fibershed: climatebeneficial@fibershed.org
Some more cotton resources:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/05/16/china-xinjiang-uyghurs-cotton-forced-labor/
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=101728
