Consumers traditionally make purchasing decisions based on the brand label or name on their clothes, without considering where the clothes came from or how they were made. Today, that’s changing.
The fashion industry is witnessing a significant shift in consumer preferences toward sustainable and eco-conscious fashion. As part of that global trend, consumers – and the brands that serve them – want to know whether farmers are sustainably growing, treating, and harvesting materials like cotton.
The latest technologies are enabling farmers to grow cotton more efficiently and provide consumers and brands with the details they’re looking for about the source and sustainability of their favorite clothing.
As consumers become more conscious of the environmental impact of their purchases, there is increasing pressure on brands and retailers to incorporate more sustainable materials into their clothing. According to a recent survey, around 55% of U.S. consumers have expressed interest in purchasing sustainable clothing.
There’s no one size fits all metric that differentiates the sustainability of a farm. Rather, there are a number of key metrics markets leverage to validate crops – in this case cotton – are grown through sustainable practices. A few examples include:
For farmers, the concept of sustainability isn’t new. They are the ultimate stewards of the land. It’s their livelihood and it’s their legacy.
At the core of sustainable farming practices is protecting and improving a farmer’s greatest asset: their soil. Soil is precious. It’s also finite. To paint a picture, farms today lose an estimated dime’s width of topsoil every year. Farmers are focused on ways to better monitor and care for their soil. By calculating metrics like the amount of soil disturbance, and the portion of the year where living roots are active in the soil, farmers can determine whether their soil health is improving or declining over time and better understand how their fields’ soil health compares to benchmarks. Healthier soil means more resilient yields in extreme weather, and the ability to reduce inputs over time to ultimately see improved profit. It also means their farm can thrive decades down the line.
That’s where data comes in. Farmers use precision agriculture machines, which are highly advanced robots that gather information in real-time, sort it automatically, and store it in the cloud. This serves as a farm-based management system that farmers can access anytime, anywhere, to view operational data in real-time and over the course of the growing season. It provides farmers with key insights that allow them to take measurable action.
Farmers can also monitor their carbon emissions to see how much each field emits and stores, compared to the industry standard. Farmers can use this to identify levers they can use to profitably reduce their emissions. And, there are a growing number of programs that will pay farmers who have lower than average emissions, making it all the more important to have this level of visibility in real-time. These programs can simplify the reporting process by using farmer’s existing data.
Carbon emissions specific to tailpipe emissions can also be easily measured. Directly from the cloud, farmers can see and compare emissions from fuel burn across different machine types and machine forms. Armed with this data, farmers can identify where exactly emissions are coming from, and identify opportunities to profitably improve.
To bring this full circle, traceability is essential for brands to tell consumers whether their clothing is made using sustainably grown materials. To provide traceability for cotton, RFID tags can be applied on the farm and tracked from the field through eventual sale.
During harvest, cotton pickers move rapidly through a field, compressing cotton fibers into giant bales ready for transport. Advanced pickers can automatically apply an RFID tag to each bale, so the person responsible for moving the bale can monitor the picker’s progress and know where the bales are in the field. When the bales are eventually brought to the gin, RFID tags help farmers optimize logistics, as they reveal where in the field each bale came from. By knowing where each bale originated, farmers can evaluate the cotton for quality metrics collected during harvest for a better understanding of which areas are under- or over-performing.
RFID tags are one example of how the latest on-farm technologies can provide the traceability and transparency modern consumers are looking for in a way that helps farmers optimize their productivity at the same time.
The consumer shift toward more sustainable clothing isn’t just a fad. It’s here to stay. And with the latest technologies, farmers can make it easy for clothing companies to identify the farm of origin and the sustainable practices used to grow the cotton in their favorite clothing. That’s just one way farmers are using on-farm technology data to improve productivity, profitability, and better meet the needs of today’s environmentally conscientious buyers.
Oriana Lisker Bosin is the group product manager of sustainability solutions at John Deere. In this role, she crafts and owns the vision, strategy, and road map to help farmers improve their soil health, reduce their carbon emissions, and increase their profitability. Oriana has extensive experience across a range of early-stage ventures in sustainability, digital agriculture, and large-scale sensor data, harnessing this knowledge to bring environmentally efficient practices to customers.
