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A new, first-of-its-kind coalition unites fashion, farmers and researchers in a partnership that plans to make regenerative cotton more accessible for brands and more financially viable for farmers, with significant implications for fashion’s sustainability goals and, if it’s successful, the planet.
With backing from brands including Reformation, Outerknown, Mate the Label, Coyuchi and Carhartt, and led by environmental organisations Fibershed, White Buffalo Land Trust and others, the California Cotton & Climate Coalition (C4), helps brands source cotton directly from farmers who have transitioned to “climate beneficial practices”. These types of regenerative agricultural methods build soil health, allowing it to sequester carbon from the atmosphere — rather than releasing it, a consequence of industrial agriculture — while also generating other ecological benefits such as increased water retention and soil biodiversity.
Under the agreement, brands pay a premium for regeneratively grown cotton, currently about 100 per cent higher than the commodity cotton price, but the percentage will vary according to fluctuations in the market. They’ll also make purchasing commitments with the farms in advance and for the long term. That part is crucial: a lack of commitment is seen as a key bottleneck in the growth of organic or regenerative agriculture. The transition from conventional farming involves significant cost and risk, and without a guaranteed return on investment, farmers are unwilling or unable to take it on themselves.
In the context of the current commodity system, C4 is revolutionary, says Fibershed founding director Rebecca Burgess. Fibershed is part of a group awarded $30 million by the US Department of Agriculture, announced yesterday, to expand climate-beneficial fibre production under the agency’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities programme. C4 will be the pilot for cotton and gives the work a major boost, says Burgess.
“These things may look nominal, but there's a lot of radical change happening,” she says. “Growers don't have much power. They don't have much ability to move their own material through a system, let alone work with one brand and have that brand move it through.”
As fashion has pledged to use more sustainable materials — regenerative materials in particular — as a key part of its climate strategies, brands have realised that just because they demand more sustainable materials does not mean they will find the supply. “The real work that's going on mostly at the farm isn't necessarily benefiting from increased demand for [organic] cotton. So, this is a different way of looking at how we can operate in the system,” says Eileen Mockus, CEO and president of organic textile homewares Coyuchi.
On the global map of cotton production, organic and regenerative farms currently account for a tiny blip. Switching can be a slow and challenging process, so for the farming profession, which already comes with significant risk and less-significant profit margins, taking on that transition can be too much. That’s why some brands, such as Patagonia and Gucci owner Kering, have started to support farmers in making the transition, recognising they need those transitions to happen in order to meet their own goals. Such partnerships remain few and far between. What C4 does is take that general concept and add an element of regionality to it, which has implications for both environmental impacts (and the ability to calculate them accurately) and labour practices.
“Cotton has a lot of rhetoric around it. A lot of global measurement gets applied to very specific regions it doesn't match. Because of that, we miss so many details that are really instrumental [in determining] climate mitigation potential,” says Fibershed’s Burgess. “For the brands to actually say, ‘I'm interested in a region’ — I was not sure that was going to happen. Brands are used to Global South wages and not even, often, paying a living wage.”
The cotton, grown on 187,000 acres in California, is being used in products that will be released on a rolling timeline throughout the next year. Coyuchi will launch a comforter in December and sheet set in spring 2023; Reformation will launch knit styles “that speak to the existing and new Reformation customer”; and Mate the Label is still designing a capsule, but says it’s spent “countless hours working to develop the perfect fabric to showcase the uniqueness of California cotton”.
“When we launch our initial styles with C4 cotton early next year, we'll be showing the possibilities of regenerative fibres, which we hope will inspire other brands to take responsibility and invest in more sustainable solutions all the way to the farms,” says Kathleen Talbot, Reformation's chief sustainability officer.
The varied nature of the brands is intentional: it allows farmers to know they have a place to sell their cotton regardless of the quality their harvest produces in a given year or across a given acre of land, because quality can vary even within a single harvest. A comforter doesn’t require the same high-quality, long-staple fibre, for example, that a blouse or pair of jeans might — or even a set of sheets, which is why Coyuchi’s comforter is launching first and the sheets later.
“Our insurance policy is finding the highest and best use for everything on that acre,” says Burgess. “It's unrealistic to say that one brand would purchase carte blanche everything coming off, let's say, 50 acres. The value of the pre-competitive coalition is that we have found partners who can take different types of the yield — and so because they're working together, not one company is burdened by having to uptake cotton that doesn't work for their product because someone else needs that cotton for their product.”
Fashion has an opportunity to learn from the food industry in that regard, says Mockus of Coyuchi. “Whether it's the home industry or fashion, we've really separated where our fibres come from that’s in all of our clothing, and there's something really interesting about sharing more of that story,” she says. “The food industry has gone further than textiles on where that produce is coming from and why every tomato doesn't look perfect — and hey, that one that doesn't look so great may actually taste better than the one that looks perfect. I think there’s more to be shared around textiles in that regard.”
The list of partners involved is already growing: in addition to founding brands Coyuchi, Mate the Label, Outerknown, Reformation and Trace (a tampon brand) and other founding companies including Imperial Yarn and Circular Systems, others are joining on. Carhartt is now a member, as is Natural Fiber Welding, which plans to use C4 cotton as the backing for its leather alternative Mirum (it says the cotton backing is one of the main contributors to Mirum’s carbon footprint), and the coalition is still searching for more brands to join, both this year — they still have cotton to sell from the 2022 harvest year — and beyond.
C4 members are hopeful that the model can offer a blueprint for how fashion can secure more sustainable materials while transforming agriculture — and building soil health, a crucial tool for mitigating climate change — at scale. It’s a way to not only link brands directly with farmers, but to tie both of their fates to the soil they rely on.
Creating stability
“We have 80 employees and their families that are counting on us to make good decisions, and it starts with soil health. Keeping this ground as fertile as possible so we can keep growing here year after year, generation after generation,” says Tony Azevedo, manager of Stone Land Co, a farm growing cotton for C4. “I’ve got to be able to make a payroll every two weeks, so we have to be doing things that are sustainable and keep us in business.”
Farmer involvement was foundational to how the coalition was created — and what differentiates it from other efforts, such as brand-specific certifications, that have gained momentum within the industry, says Fibershed’s Burgess. The founding principle of C4 is to promote “farm-forward” supply chains, which means putting farmers front and centre.
“Tony went out on a limb and tried practices he wasn't already doing and he's like, ‘some of these work and some of these don't.’ What's important to punctuate there is that we're measuring as we're iterating. This is very different from coming out with a brand-driven certification,” Burgess says. “Brand-driven certifications did not bring farmers into that stakeholder group from day one. The intellectual property of that system was driven by CEOs of brands. That has been my challenge — how do you transform millions of acres, and in perpetuity keep rural economies afloat, if you don't have a process of trying to build bridges of understanding? I just don’t know how you do it otherwise.”
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
Correction: 187,000 acres is the area that C4 says it has the potential to influence, not the acreage its cotton is being grown on, as previously stated. (15 September, 2022.)
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