Cotton: The Fabric Of Our Lives

A SHORT STORY

Growing up in Texas with the last name Cotten, I got used to the routine questions… Do you live on a farm? Do you harvest cotton? Did you get your last name because your family used to harvest cotton?  And every time I answered with a polite “No.” In fact, I had never even been on a farm until I came to Oklahoma for school. Last year for Christmas my dad had shirts printed up for our family that were a spin off of the Cotton Inc logo.  Instead of the boll of cotton there was a Christmas tree and instead of spelling cotton with an o we spelled it like our last name: Cott-E-n. My friends back at school got a huge kick out of this shirt and began running through those routine questions I thought I had left behind. When I was through answering “No” to every question they threw my way one of them said, “Well we need to fix this!” Before I knew it we were in a car and on our way to her farm in Tuttle, OK. She was more than thrilled to show me the ropes of cotton farming and couldn’t resist the occasional cotton/Cotten puns. Had I known then what I know now I would have loved the opportunity to learn first hand the process that their family uses on their farm to harvest their cotton, what they know about where their cotton goes and what continues to happen to it during it’s production, and what changes they have implemented (if any) to make their farm more sustainable. I think that experiencing cotton farming first hand definitely made the article, The Sustainability of Cotton, more interesting. After all, “knowledge of what happens in the filed is the basis for recommendations.”

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of the study discussed in The Sustainability of Cotton was to compare the three major farming systems in terms of their impact on the environment. Cotton crops are known for bringing in considerably more income than other crops. In the article, Karst Kooistra and Aad Termorshuizen admit that even though cotton likely has the most impact on a global scale, the available data was limited for analysis (red flag number one that cotton is not going to be an easy material to make sustainable).  

In this article, Kooistra and Termorshuizen compare the three most common cotton cultivation systems: conventional, organic, and integrated pest management (IPM). However, all three of these systems engage in applications that are unsustainable for the environment which only shows that, at least right now, the cultivation of cotton cannot be 100% sustainable (red flag number two).

The breakdown of cotton cultivation is as follows:

·      80% conventional

·      20% IPM

·      .4% organic

The conventional farming used in developed countries often approaches the standards of an IPM system because highly toxic pesticides have been banned. In an optimal system, the IPM system scores well based on their efficiency of fertilizer use, their effective use of low-persistence and narrow-range pesticides, and in their high yields. Organic farming stands out with high scores when it comes to wide rotations and the lack of pesticide use all together. The conventional and organic farming systems are not as different as expected either. The Sustainability of Cotton offers the comparison that “transforming a conventional system that has unsustainable water use to an organic system with the same degree of unsustainable water use has limited advantages.”

It is no surprise that “cotton is considered to be quite a difficult crop to grow.” Cotton is dependent on water, sensitive to low temperatures, and helpless against insect attacks. In order to ensure that the cotton crops will grow and be harvested farmers have to fight each of these difficulties, and while each of the battles can be fought and won, the process required to bring cotton to its full term comes at a cost (red flag number 3).

NEED FOR TRANSPARENCY

As I acknowledged earlier in this post and in previous posts, transparency is crucial to sustainability. Organic farming is the only certified type of production, IPM is only certified occasionally, and conventional farming never is. Certified production makes it possible for both retailers and consumers to keep tabs on the entire production process, which in turn allows for inferences on the environmental impact to be made. Since cotton is such an important crop, it only makes sense that in order to obtain the quantitative field data on the environmental impact that more fieldwork is needed. The areas The Sustainability of Cotton focuses on in order to compare are: water use, land use, biodiversity, human and environmental toxicity, eutrophication, acidification, global warming, erosion, and salinization. I will try to briefly focus on water use and human and environmental toxicity (pesticides).

WATER USE

The Sustainability of Cotton suggests that one way water use can be reduced is to introduce more sustainable irrigation techniques. Professor Steven Raine provides hope with his study on irrigationfutures.org. In his article he explains:

The Future Irrigation: Practice and Technology program is focused on providing the leadership and capacity to capture, develop and promote new irrigation practices, technologies and management systems to ensure the social, economic and environmental sustainability of the urban, peri-urban and rural irrigation sectors.

Raine goes on to discuss new insights that The Future Irrigation program is putting into practice. One of the projects his team is implementing is Improving the Precision of Irrigation. The purpose of this project is to develop frameworks in order to assess the importance of both the crop variation and the irrigation systems that should be adapted in order to deliver the most efficient use of water.

PESTICIDES

      The most important factors to consider when determining the effectiveness on crop growth and the impact on the environment that fertilizer has, according to The Sustainability of Cotton, are:

·      rainfall patterns

·      types and levels of the fertilizer used

·      timing of the application of the fertilizer

The negative consequences that pesticides could potentially cause for human health are becoming even more widely recognized despite the fact that statistics are still rare. One statistic pointed out in this article is that it has been estimated that globally 40,000 lives are lost annually due to the application of pesticide.

SILVER LINING

The President and CEO of Cotton Inc has published a message to the Cotton Inc website stating that “the cotton industry envisions a future where environmentally sustainable production and manufacturing will thrive along with the businesses that depend on cotton as a source of income.

Dr. Ed Barnes with the Agricultural Research branch at Cotton Inc explains one effort that they are taking. He explains that they have switched 70% of their crops to conservation pillaging. With this system, Cotton Inc is simply planting the new crops without pilling the ground from the previous crop. By doing this he explains that this protects the soil, allows the ground to absorb more rain, limits erosion, and helps to trap the carbon from the atmosphere so that it cannot contribute to greenhouse gas.

CONCLUSION

I appreciate the efforts the cotton industry is implementing, however the red flags I pointed out earlier are still of great concern. I think that cotton is in too high of a demand for its sustainability to dictate whether or not it is sold. I also don’t think that a 100% sustainable solution will happen because like I just said, it doesn’t have to happen in order to keep cotton on the market. Lastly, the sustainability of cotton does not stop at the farm. The next step of sustainability goes beyond the cultivation process, “if cotton production and processing are to be sustainable in a more holistic sense that goes beyond environmental indicators, then social and trade aspects need to be addressed.” As much as I do believe in the improvement that is taking place in the cotton industry I still feel that, despite our best efforts, cotton will not be joining the list of sustainable materials.