Talking about race and cotton has always had some uncomfortable realities in the U.S. with the history of slavery. But some black cotton farmers are changing the look of the cotton industry and of the fabric for some members of the community. I am here for it!

I’ve written about some before, but thought with black history month and a recent big story on ABC News, I really had to put something here on the site.

Julius Tillery aka Black Cotton U.S.

For years, I’ve known Julius Tillery — you may remember this article about Black Cotton U.S. from back in the day.

ABC News ran a great piece on Julius recently and the interview includes some of the pieces about the recognition that there is some healing to do in the black community because of the deep pain associated with cotton in the past.

Not only is Julius clearly, and outwardly acknowledging that history, but he is also sharing his entrepreneurial journey to success which includes his family’s small farm. He has found the connections to history also empowering at times. And having seen other family members speak to the business, I know there are generations proud of Julius.

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Bridgeforth Cotton

There is a farm in northern Alabama that has been owned and operated by the Bridgeforth family since the 1800s! Having had a chance to talk with Bill Bridgeforth and some of the other members of the family, it’s clear that black cotton farmers have no doubt faced more challenges than their white neighbors.

The Bridgeforths knew and worked alongside names that stand out in history including working at Tuskegee Institute with Booker T Washington and George Washington Carver! You really should read some of their family history & accomplishments.

But you also should see what they are doing now cause they have done some cool things like provide cotton for the black history month shirts at Target and the like! Now they even have a direct farm brand of t-shirts, etc.

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Shun Binford aka Bearded Farmer

Going to confess, I hadn’t met Shun til a few years ago. Caught a video of him somewhere and had to track his channels down. He’s further south in Alabama, but does a good job of showing people the ins and out of the work he does.

And he usually puts it in the terms of #socksanddraws.

@beardedfarmer_5minmil #fyppppppppppppppppppppppp #socksndraws #cotton #fyp ♬ original sound – Bearded Farmer

Like a lot of farmers, Shun likes equipment and does a LOT OF WORK cleaning, maintaining and when needed, fixing equipment. He’s always got something to talk about.

The post Reducing the Stigma of Cotton for the Black Community appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

I absolutely wish I was in the Mississippi Delta Monday. There have been various times when I’ve missed the Delta since I left there well over a decade ago, but only a few of the occasions have had specific times and places to be.

All weekend I thought about ways I may be able to make it work while also knowing it was just not going to happen. That emotional pull to drive south is brought on by the loss of a dear friend, mentor, incredible innovator and humble leader – Kenneth Hood. I wanted to be in Duncan, MS to celebrate his life, mourn his loss and just be around others who realize this wasn’t a typical Monday.

When I got word of his passing, it was a bit disorienting.

Kenneth has been such a constant in the cotton business throughout my lifetime that I have trouble picturing the industry without him. But that sounds like he was some larger than life person, and he absolutely was, but when I moved to the Delta, he was also a neighbor. Granted, his place was 45 minutes away, but when you drive 30 minutes to go to the grocery store, the neighborhood is larger than most urban neighborhoods.

That neighbor status change let me have so many interactions with Kenneth, his wife Betty and various people on the farm (including the office manager and Kenneth’s brother). The access of being local and all, meant we had a lot of opportunities to find common ground.

Kenneth and I both enjoyed hosting people from around the world and helping them get to know our little part of the planet. We became such a regular combination on the agendas of various groups that we joked that we should do each other’s presentation to make it interesting!

But I seriously cannot imagine where we would be without Kenneth.

He was the first farmer who saw such incredible potential in digital technology that he was working with NASA years on how to apply satellite imagery & digital maps to his cotton fields before any of us had Google maps!

Whether a person was from a nearby town or from the other side of the planet, hospitality was always extended. He listened to others intently to understand their experiences and humbly offered his perspective as well.

Kenneth was the only farmer who came to mind when I’d get a call from a reporter who clearly had an agenda about herbicides but who I knew we needed to try with anyway. We knew Kenneth would steadily talk through his experience, doing everything a human could do to help the reporter understand how much weeds rob plants of water, nutrients, etc and that not controlling them would mean higher prices for his customers and a lot more headaches for him too. And he’d sit in awe of how calmly others did the same thing taking notes for the future.

He was the one who would tell you about a problem with something before spreading the word through the grapevine. He wanted to test new products and help find those things that would perform better for cotton farmers across the Belt. His insight on what was working and what wasn’t became critical to knowing a product had been thoroughly tested.

And when you had had a long day, spending too much time in the sun and dust, Kenneth would magically pull a cold drink out and sit down and start talking to you about the wonder of a five-lock cotton boll. You could see the stress of the day melting away and that sense of joy in being part of something so wholesome and natural as producing fiber that will clothe neighbors and people far away seems as miraculous to you as it should be.

I moved away from the Delta more than a decade ago, but I keep a lot of it with me and seeing Kenneth Hood and others immediately bring that back to the surface. I miss knowing that smile is out there, knowing at any time I could go around a corner at a meeting and see my dear friend and neighbor. And my heart breaks for Betty and the rest of the family.

Sending virtual hugs along with people in every corner of the cotton world. Kenneth was one of a kind and he will be forever missed.

The post We Will Long Miss Kenneth Hood appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Have you ever heard of the Cotton Belt? It’s one of those phrases you can catch in the news, a region mentioned that may make sense to some but not all.

The US Cotton Belt goes from coast-to-coast and includes a lot more states than you may realize. A lot of times people think of the deep south and don’t realize cotton farms extend further north and west. In fact, cotton is currently being grown in 17 states!

Each state in the region has conditions — weather, soils, etc — that make growing cotton possible. That means each state has areas with longer, warmer summers.

There are cotton gins in each of the states that help process the crop by separating the fiber from the cotton seed. Many of those gins are cooperatives that help move the crop to the warehouses and merchants for sale.

And it’s a major crop in 14 of those states, according to the National Cotton Council.

The post What is the Cotton Belt? appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Cotton pickers are some of the coolest machines out there. I mean, memes keep coming back that compare the lights and action of cotton harvest with a mainstage concert!

I love watching cotton getting picked! And getting a ride along is always a fun way to go…. sometimes farmers have even trusted me behind the wheel, but I’m really best suited for the buddy seat.

Basic Functions of Cotton Pickers

The basic premise of a cotton picker is to pull cotton off of plants leaving as much of the plant matter in the field as possible to reduce the possibility of contaminants making it to the gin or the textile mill. But the way they do it is an amazingly complex system of actions.

Here’s a drawing I made to show some of the primary elements of the machine.

Spindles Pull Cotton From the Plant

Cotton pickers have spindles that rotate on cylinders that rotate as well. The roughened metal of the spindle pulls the cotton from the plant. There are cotton pickers and then there are cotton strippers… they both harvest cotton, but cotton pickers are a bit different in that they can harvest cleaner fiber because of the spindles whereas strippers strip everything off the mainstem.

You can see in this photo how the spindles are lined up between the two gray guides.

Rows of spindles around the cylinder, keep lots of movement, trying to leave the branches of the plant and even the bracts in tact. The bracts are the parts of the plant that keep the fiber attached until picked.

Compacting Cotton for Transport to the Gin

There are a few ways this is done now:

• Cotton is still collected in trailers without compacting in some countries but this is rare in the U.S.
• Separate machinery from the picker that is used at the field’s edge. This was common in the recent past but has become much less common in the U.S. You can see this in an old post about how moduling comes after cotton harvest.
• On-board moduling / bales that happens as the cotton picker continues to pick more fiber. I shared a photo essay on the John Deere picker that creates modules in the field back in 2010.

And this tweet and the image in it…. that’s what got me to blog today! Love seeing a diagram of what happens in the basket with the on-board moduling system!

Funciona de uma colheitadeira de algodão pic.twitter.com/DwtJUwYIsn

— Agricultura (@agricultura4you) July 9, 2022

The post Cotton Pickers: How Do They Work appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

This is the building that housed Delta and Pine Land Company for decades. It went from a farm-based headquarters that included the store for tenant farmers, to the headquarters of a cotton seed company that would totally change cotton farming. (Wanna see historical photos? This one in the NY Public Library collection includes one of the first building that had been torn down before I got there.)

I moved into an office just above the post office in 1996 when I moved from White Plains, NY to a place that couldn’t have been more different.

At the time, D&PL was in growth mode but still in a town of hundreds by day, fewer by night. We were packed tightly. There were some employees in trailers and a new building was getting built. I had to share an office for a while and I think they couldn’t have put people with more diverse needs in an office together. I talked to people on the phone and would sit pondering how to write things while Donna would be knocking out data on that keyboard.

The D&PL building had a lot of character and housed lots of characters, many I am lucky enough to call friends.

Sure, the building was not well-suited to the use by the 1990s. We all made jokes about how new employees were tested by whether they could work their way through the maze to find their office or the office of someone they were supposed to meet with. (I remember the test of finding the board room.)

There were exterior doors in weird places because work flows had changed and other buildings put up. Employees hired. And many of us moved away over the years.

Since moving to St. Louis, I haven’t been back much and don’t have a lot of time when I have gone. Not sure whether I took this photo when I went back several years ago to visit Miss Dot just a short while before she passed. We all knew it was imminent so it definitely made the visit through the Delta more somber.

How I Want to Picture that D&PL Building

I’d like to think it was, because the sun and this brilliant blue sky was needed…. I don’t think I could have handled a gray winter day then and I’d prefer to remember the sunnier days.

Make it a sunny spring or early summer day. A day warm enough so that the couple of folks fishing Deer Creek wouldn’t need to sit on the 5 gallon buckets to stay warm…. the ground was already warm enough on its own which means cotton was being planted or maybe it was already up so you could see the rows.

A day when the parking lot was filled and cars would stop in the fire zone long enough to get mail for a house since there was no home delivery.

A day when maybe some out of town visitor found themselves on the backroads and turned in when they saw the sign for lunch at the Scott Store. Friends and I coming together from the old building, the new one, the print shop, QA & even from across the creek….. All of having that meat and three in the store and hearing the laughter from stories told as Charles wrote down the latest amount that would be added to my tab on the index card and put in an old box.

I may not get there much, but Scott, MS is the kind of place that sticks with you once you have called it home for a little while. The building spurred the walk down memory lane today, but the images are forever tattooed on my memory. And I still have my more frequent visits to Scott virtually a lot more often by hopping on the phone or visiting with friends who I met there.

I am forever changed by having called Scott, MS home.

The post Remembering Scott, Mississippi & that Old D&PL Headquarter Building appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

October 7, 2021 is World Cotton Day and it seemed like the better excuse to finally get myself back to writing something for this neglected website. I routinely think I should write something about…. And then I get pulled back into my day job or something I was already in the midst of. But today, World Cotton Day stopped me in my tracks and made me open the browser.

World Cotton Day Theme

The proliferation of days to acknowledge one topic, industry, group gets a bit overwhelming at times. Yet, the reality is, there are so many things happening that simply tagging a specific day to consider a topic that few give thought to can make a difference. And for those who are involved in the topic at much greater depth, this year the theme the UN set was “Cotton for Good.”

If you read much on this site, you know there are a range of factors that can get connected to something that many of us don’t give a thought to as something that starts as a plant and ends up as fabric. But cotton is amazingly good in so many ways!

One of the things that this theme does is really show some differences among countries about the role cotton plays. For some countries, cotton is a primary economic driver where as in others it may be a fashion piece more than economics. Cotton really does do it all as this silly meme I created shows.

Cotton and the Environment

As someone who worked at a cotton seed company for years, I’m used to thinking about the origins of cotton. How farmers in the US and the more temperate and tropical countries grow it, tending the soil and stewarding water and more but the product itself has such inherently good qualities too!

A few things I’ll point you to:

• Water Use in Cotton — Sometimes I hear about the amount of water cotton uses, appreciate having good resources on it.
• Does cotton have an after life? — The natural fiber is definitely a boost when you think about how to discard of it. Cotton can break down naturally in the soil AND it can be used to insulate homes too!

Creating Jobs & More

The economic engine of cotton has had some challenges in the US with cheaper, unskilled labor in several countries luring textile jobs from the US, but that could be changing.

We are seeing small niche companies like Red Land Cotton producing heirloom quality sheets and sharing their full supply chain. And major brands like Wrangler have product lines that move through the US cotton industry from farms to textile mills. And we can see the contributions of even small town cotton gins! And farmers who are taking the creative spin to do home decor too!

And it created this little website in my mind and now maybe I can get it back in my weeks!

The post Celebrating World Cotton Day with Extra Goodness This Year appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

I’ve been meaning to write something here for a while… I have missed my cotton time. I need to visit a cotton field or two. Maybe ten.

And as Facebook memories showed me how I spent a Friday night years ago on a drive for Memphis, I had to share as I think I am well overdue for stopping in random cotton fields as I travel too. Reminded I need to just get going again so here I post.

I have no idea whether the 2021 crop looks this good in Missouri and am realizing I need to spend some time figuring it out. This video was taken in 2017 and that was a really good year for a lot of U.S. cotton farmers although Hurricane Harvey took a bite of Texas. Somehow a lot of people got rains when they needed it and hot sunny days when they needed those. Having been at home a lot more than previous years, I need to catch up.

Sure, I know 2021 has presented challenges, but it is a bit harder to keep a handle on them when you aren’t in the middle of it on a regular basis. And this is the time of year, farmers are beginning to really see what may make it to harvest (if a hurricane, hail or some other storm doesn’t hit).

Have you had a chance to check out a cotton field recently? Have you ever seen one?

If you get this because you subscribe to my emails, don’t forget you can reply and tell me what’s happening in your part of the world too!

I’m ready to see a cotton plant loaded up with cotton bolls and blooming out the top! Bet I make it to a cotton field soon!

The post A Cotton Field in Late July, Taking a Look at Growth appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Cotton isn’t exactly the first thing to come to mind if you are asked to list crops that go farm-to-plate. That may be in the process of changing for more people this month as the FDA approved a ultra low gossypol cottonseed for human and animal consumption. The research on this has been undergoing at Texas A&M led by researcher Dr. Keerti Rathore. I met Dr. Rathore long ago and even wrote about the promise of reduced gossypol cottonseed a year ago when the USDA approved the product for farming.

This brings a few things to mind for me that I would guess are pretty uncommon.

What is gossypol?

Gossypol is a naturally occuring chemical for cotton plants — it’s in the plant’s leaves, stems, seeds, etc. It helps protect the plant from some of the insect pests that love to damage the plant. I am always amazed by the ways nature is cool, but you have to admit that is cool. The bummer is though, that gossypol can be toxic to some animals and to people.

Why feed cottonseed to animals & people?

This one is hard to look at from the place where a lot of us sit. We have a multitude of foods available if you were lucky enough to be born in the developed world. And farmers have lots of choices in livestock feeds that keep those of us who eat meat satisfied.

That isn’t the case in many parts of the developing world. In fact, there are hundreds of thousands of people who live on cotton farms in the developing world. These farms are frequently subsistence farms and while they may have vegetable gardens and/or grain, the addition of another food source for the family and/or livestock, could be life-saving or life-changing. I am not overstating to say it could be a total god-send for people who have a goat, a couple of chickens, etc. 

Would I eat cottonseed?

I am firmly in the “I’d eat it” camp. In fact, I recently fixed myself avocado toast (thanks to visiting an avocado farm) and mixed a little bit of the cilantro-flavored cottonseed oil in with the avocado. But realistically, I know I have so many food choices, that I probably wouldn’t end up eating it directly. I think it could probably be useful in producing some of the meats I eat though. 

The post New Ultra Low Gossypol Cotton Food Product Approved by FDA appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

I love harvest time and while we have a while before we will be picking cotton in Missouri, a time-lapse video of cotton boll opening from the Texas Gulf Coast sure is getting a lot of people excited about what is to come!

Over the years, we have shared about cotton plant physiology quite a bit — creamy white flowers turning pink and into a boll that does the Jiffy Pop dance to open. Well, this year, Justin Roberts (@horned_ranch on Twitter who is a crop consultant in Sinton, TX) caught a boll opening on video. He has rocked the Twitterverse for sure! Just check it out.

Justin says it took a few days for the boll to go from initial cracking to fully open. It also takes some good sunshine and heat units.

Justin has worked in cotton quite a while — he reminded me we had worked on some projects in Georgia years ago. He has a depth of knowledge in cotton genetics and physiology that makes him naturally curious (he’s say nerdy) about things like this so he set up his camera and let it go for a while. I’m always a fan of this sort of thing but time-lapse video of cotton? Sign me up! I love that you can see the strong sun of mid-day and the shadows of morning and evening come and go.

We laughed about how the breezes coming off the Gulf of Mexico make this branch dance more than you’d necessarily expect. But with 10 years in Texas, he’s grown used to the breezes and wind. I suggested he could set up a stake or brace and duct tape the plant to it (no, I never expected him to agree).

It’s interesting to realize that way geography hits when Justin points out the proximity to the Gulf means there is really no measurable irrigation — wells there pump saltwater!

The post Time-Lapse Video of Cotton Boll Opening appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

One of the most interesting parts of having such a clear niche in blogging is having people contact me about specific things they want to know about cotton. While some of those questions are about jobs or things I really can’t solve, I love helping diagnose problems. You may have seen the post about why a cotton boll was so tiny a few years ago. The recent conversation about planting container cotton plants though, really made me stretch my mind muscles beyond just the whether cotton can be grown in a backyard garden!

Email About Container Cotton I Received

The email I received asking me a deep question follows. Please note, I’m not including the name, etc cause I’m not sure that would be cool with them. However, I did say I wrote them such a long reply I thought I may turn it into a post.

Hello Janice, I live in central North Carolina. Last year my girlfriend and I picked two plants from a farmers field nearby and put them in potting soil black plastic pots at out respective homes for decoration. After winter I pulled 16 seeds from my one boll and planted them in the same pot next to other flowers. This spring – NOTHING grew. I mean NOTHING. No clover, no weed grass – just bare soil. It is so barren it looks like the soil was poisoned. Pots next to it were alive with weeds and spontaneously generate new plants even after hand weeding. Same soil, same care (none), same feeding (none). Is this cotton a Monsanto GMO plant with ‘Roundup’ springing forth from its corps?

Thanks. BTW: The farmers field has NO volunteer weeds among the cotton.

Reading that, you can tell, the person writing it was perplexed. There are a lot of things I wanted to know as I read it because I think we both came at it with really different backgrounds and ideas. Over the years, I’ve found if I can ask people several questions, I probably can give them a better answer.

Questions I Asked & Answers I Received

Really, I enjoy getting messages from real people who have read something here & decided to share or ask questions. (I’m not a fan of the robo requests for placing a post here.) Here’s what I sent back:

I’ll be glad to help think through what may have happened. I have some questions that will let me be sure I understand.
— When you say you picked a cotton plant, did you just cut the stalk and put the stalk in a pot or did you dig up the roots? 
— When you picked the plant, was the cotton boll you collected seed from already open or was it a green boll that cracked open later? Any chance you have photos? 
— Was the plant/seed kept inside your home over winter or left outside? 
— The pot you had the cotton plant in…. you said it was in potting soil. Have you used the soil for other things before or was it fresh from the bag. 

This may make a good blog post. And where in NC are you? I have family in the Asheville & Charlotte areas. Love the state. 

I have to admit, I wasn’t sure I’d get a reply, but I did. One-by-one, all my questions got answered:

1. We neither cut the stalk nor dug it up – we pulled up the plants by the trunk including the roots. They were runt plants at the edge of the field by the road. 
2. Yes the cotton was open and the cotton boll showing nicely. 
3. Both the plants overwintered alongside the driveways with the other potted plants – which always come back in the spring. 
4. Yes the potting soil was previously used for flowers such as sweet william or hemp plants. 

I went out this morning to look again – still the soil in that pot is bare – but in pots to the left and right are rich with grasses / weeds – greenery on either side of the pots that the cotton was in. 

Very mysterious. Where are YOU Janice? Want to come see?

My Response Got Really Long

It was obviously mysterious, but I had a lot of information that I thought could help. As I started my reply, it really was going long. I have to confess, I thought hard about ways to simplify it. Make it shorter. Easier to read. I did the best I could but it was still long. I share it here in case you are following and have questions:

Thanks for the offer of a visit but I’m in the middle of the country… not in NC often unless I have a detailed agenda with family. I am sure you understand that doesn’t leave time for random cotton plant checks There is a state cotton specialist in Raleigh if you want to talk to someone local. https://www.ces.ncsu.edu/profile/guy-collins/ 

I am trying to figure out what some of the issues are and there are really a couple of big possibilties: 

1) The seed wasn’t mature so it wouldn’t germinate. There are a few things that can happen to plants during the growing season — maybe the plants didn’t get enough heat units during the period when the seed was forming, maybe moisture in the fall led the seeds to rot, etc. In fact, because that is so likely, each state and seed companies have testing facilities that pull samples of commercial seed and test it. And the plants that help bag seed also frequently use various screening processes to determine whether the seed is the right color or weight, etc. There is also a question of whether the seed went through dormancy which is the way the seed’s energy moves from harvest to gain the energy needed to sprout in the spring. This post explains some of the problems. 

2) Planting conditions may have been challenging. Cotton is a somewhat fussy plant. Potting soil can really retain water and cotton seedlings want just a bit of water. They typically do better in sandier soils than potting soils are. You also want to think about the depth the seed was planted. Cotton likes a good bit of space — farmers usually plant a couple of seed every 6 inches. It also likes a specific set of temperatures to emerge so you want to make sure the soil is 65 degrees or so, 6-9 inches deep.  More on planting.

I’d bet one of those two things is the reason the seed didn’t emerge. The other question you raised was about why nothing else is growing in the pot. That’s a real puzzle for me too. The one idea you mentioned was whether that could be related to the seed. I’ve never heard of anything with cotton seed having an impact on other things growing. In fact, cotton farmers build full weed control programs using cover crops, etc to protect young cotton plants from the weeds and grasses that grow up with them. This post will help you understand some of that. 

The way you asked the question about Roundup, I can tell you have heard about GMO crops. You may not be familiar with the way they work. The Roundup Ready cotton you mention is popular in North Carolina so the seed may have carried the trait. The way that trait works, a single gene was found in aquatic environments that made Roundup or glyphosate was ineffective on it so some of Monsanto’s scientists was added to a cotton plant. I’ve met a bunch of those folks working at the company. The trait allows farmers to spray Roundup on the cotton when weeds and grasses are growing all around and while the vast majority of weeds will be controlled, the cotton (or soybeans) will grow successfully. Farmers usually focus on controlling weeds and grasses early in the season, when plants are small because as they grow, the plants shade out any new plants from growing. 

Understanding all of that, I wonder whether the difference is whether the other plants (all perennials) had attracted pollinators to play on them. That may have accounted for some of the extra things ending up in the same soil. 

I will keep giving this thought. One of the things I wonder is how much of the root structure was there. Cotton’s tap root is usually 3 foot or so on a healthy plant and I’m guessing pulling this was a lot shorter. So that may have impacted the seed’s viability. 

Definitely feel like I wrote a full blog post writing this whole thing out so I am going to see about turning it around. 

Hope this helps! 

And I forgot to remind him about the boll weevil eradication program being a challenge!

Where We Are Now

So, that was a lot to take in. And I’m still thinking about some of the causes — now that I have this all in a blog post, I can get some expert opinions on it too!

My new friend admited I overloaded them a bit. They also decided to do a few things to see what else they can figure out. They will:

• Send a soil sample to the state department of agriculture to be tested.
• See if some other plants will grow in that pot/soil.

The post Diagnosing Problems with Container Cotton Plants appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.