The Healthy, Responsible Choice
Fact: About 1/3 pound of chemicals are used to produce one nonorganic cotton T-shirt.
Fact: Twenty-five percent of global pesticide use is in conventional cotton farming.
Fact: Conventional cotton farmers obtain bank loans more easily than organic cotton farmers do.
Fact: As demand and resources for organic farming increase, organic prices will become more competitive.
Conventional Cotton Farming
Conventional cotton farming has made cotton one of the most environmentally damaging crops on the planet. Farmers apply heavy doses of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, sometimes as many as ten times in a growing season, to strip the soil of weeds and insects and defoliate the cotton plants to facilitate harvesting. This process leaves fields essentially barren and pollutes air and water, which spread toxic contaminants into human and wildlife communities. Developed originally for use in warfare during World War I and II, many of these agrochemicals devastate human and animal populations, causing birth defects, cancer, brain and organ damage, and reproductive and immune disorders.
But chemicals are not just used on the plants. Bleaches, formaldehyde, and other chemical finishes are also used in nonorganic textile manufacturing. Even after you've washed a cotton shirt many times, chemical traces remain.
Benefits
of Organic Cotton Farming
Here are six major benefits of producing cotton organically:
- Biodiversity: Organic farming preserves species biodiversity through crop rotation and a "natural enemy complex" in which predator and parasite insects keep destructive insect populations low.
- Soil fertility: Organic farmers treat soil as a living ecosystem that they enrich with cover crops and natural fertilizers such as compost and chicken manure.
- Healthy plants: Organic farmers nurture cotton plants so they remain vigorous enough to resist many insects, weeds, and diseases.
- Healthy working conditions: Organic farmers and field workers are not exposed to dangerous chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and defoliants.
- Environmental health: Organic farmers grow cotton in soil kept free of chemicals for three or more years and enriched with natural fertilizers. They eliminate the use of harmful chemicals, preventing soil erosion, contamination of water supplies from toxic runoff, and poisoning of people, animals, and helpful insects.
- Safer products: Clothing made from organically grown cotton is free of much of the harmful chemical content present in conventionally grown cotton.
