Cotton production is an energy-intensive process that uses significant resources like water and land. To minimise our impact, we only use organic cotton, meaning that they are grown without any chemical fertilisers, pesticides and insecticides, which causes less harm to the people and the planet. However, we decided to take it a step further by introducing regenerative cotton into our latest collection! You can find regenerative cotton in our Autumn Winter Collection of 2024.

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What is regenerative cotton?

Regenerative cotton is grown on regenerative agricultural lands. This means that cotton is grown on farms with a strong focus on rebuilding healthy soils and restoring biodiversity. In other words, regenerative cotton grows in a way that doesn’t extract nutrients and life from the soil, but instead, builds organic matter and life in the soil. Eventually, this enables the production of consistent yields without relying on synthetic inputs such as herbicides, pesticides and fertilisers. Regenerative agriculture practices you could think of are agroforestry, intercropping, or livestock integration. Let’s give you an example to clarify. Instead of mostly growing cotton crops on the farmland, the farmer also integrates trees that improve the soil’s strength, keeps livestock to improve biodiversity, and grows other crops to improve ecosystem resilience.

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Why are we using regenerative cotton?

Regenerative agriculture has lots of benefits. It regenerates soils, supports ecosystems, and could help mitigate climate change as healthy soils and more biodiversity capture carbon in the ground. For farmers, the benefits lie in the resilience that regenerative agriculture builds. With enhanced biodiversity and healthy soils the risk of failed harvest due to climatic shocks reduces. While we are all trying our best to fight against climate change, we have to take into account that extreme weather events such as droughts and floods will occur more frequently in the future. Besides, healthier soils will lead to higher productivity, and thus, more income for farmers which will improve farmers’ livelihoods.

What is the difference between regenerative cotton and organic cotton?

Regenerative and organic farming are different approaches to sustainable farming. Regenerative farming changes the whole system, where farms are approached as landscapes instead of just a farm. Whereas organic cotton farmers focus on eliminating the use of synthetic pesticides, fertilisers, and other harmful chemicals, regenerative cotton farmers focus on restoring soil health, improving biodiversity, and reducing environmental impact. You could say that the biggest difference is that regenerative farmers often use additional practices to maintain healthy soils and reduce environmental impact while organic farmers may not. The two methods can be combined, but their approaches are different.