Green Products

If you think that conventional and organic cotton starts out the same way, I’m sorry to tell you you’re wrong. Actually, conventional cotton farmers don’t just start out with approximately 70% GMO, or genetically modified organism, seeds, but they also treat their seeds with fungicides and insecticides before planting. Organic farmers, however, use only untreated, non-GMO seeds for their cotton harvest.

Maybe the seeds are a little different, but they’re planted in the same earth and fed the same water, right? Wrong. Conventional cotton is planted in synthetic fertilizers, and there’s actually less soil because of a predominantly mono-crop culture. Incidentally, conventional cotton production requires intensive irrigation, adding wasteful water management to conventional cotton farming’s list of flaws.

Organic cotton farming, on the other hand, already has strong soil because of annual crop rotation, so no additional fertilizers are needed. The cotton crop also retains water more efficiently because of increased organic matter in the soil, which means organic farms play an important part in water conservation efforts.

Weeds can certainly be a crop’s worst enemy, so there’s no question they have to either be removed or destroyed. The conventional method calls for inhibiting weed germination by treating the soil with herbicides, a method that often requires several treatments to be effective. Organic cotton farming, however, requires that weeds be eliminated physically, not chemically. Organically, weeds are controlled exclusively through cultivation and hand hoeing.

Because conventional cotton production readily uses insecticides as its primary method of pest control, it accounts for approximately 25% of insecticide usage worldwide. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the nine most common pesticides used to produce common cotton are highly toxic, and five are probable carcinogens. Additionally, aerial spraying is a frequent method of distributing the chemicals and potential drift can be lethal.

Organic cotton production, however, avoids pesticide use altogether. On organic cotton farms a balance between pests and their natural predators is created through the presence and maintenance of healthy soil. Organic farms also uses beneficial insects instead of insecticides to control pests.

Before the cotton crop can be harvested it must defoliate or be defoliated, meaning the leaves must come off. In conventional cotton farming this is done almost entirely with, you guessed it, more chemicals. In organic cotton farming, however, chemical defoliation is not an option, and farmers rely mostly on the seasonal freeze for leaf removal. If the season proves to be unreliable, organic farmers might turn water management as a defoliation stimulant.