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October 30, 2006
Megan Johnston
Forbes
Buy ordinary jeans and you'll be bumping off innocent farmers, or maybe butterflies.
Be careful when you shop for a cotton T shirt. If you buy the wrong kind you could be poisoning children and driving a farmer to suicide.
That's the scary image conjured up by fans of organic farming. Capitalizing on such fears, purveyors of apparel made from organically grown cotton have built a $583-million-a-year volume (at retail). Organic Exchange, which disseminates information about the hazards of conventional cotton farming, says it expects organic cotton apparel sales to hit $2.6 billion in 2008.
Check out the Web site for Gaiam, a publicly held purveyor of organic cotton apparel, bedding and baby clothes. It says that life for Kailash Burman and several hundred other farmers in rural India has improved since they stopped using pesticides and chemical fertilizers five years ago. Until then they were spending $70 to $115 a year—as much as 25% of their income—on chemicals.
That burden apparently caused some farmers to commit suicide. The Web site quotes a farmer: "When we were using chemicals in our fields, it was being introduced in the soil, in the environment, in the cattle feed," says the farmer, referred to as "V.J." "And there we are, feeding the milk to our kids. It poisons everybody."
This heart-yanking tale is part of a marketing package that includes photos of fetching models in $44 drawstring pants and $48 pajamas made from organic cotton. Gaiam doesn't make any overt claim that non-organic cotton is going to give you a skin rash. It leaves that to the imagination. "For a little bit more money you can make a sustainable choice that's healthier for you to sleep in or live in," says Carrie Allen, merchandising director for Gaiam, which netted $1.3 million on revenue of $142 million in 2005.
To get the organic label, a farmer has to swear off chemicals and genetically modified seeds. For that he gets a better price. In the U.S. the wholesale price of a pound of chemically grown cotton (enough for one T shirt) is 52 cents; the price for the organic variety can be as high as $1.15.
Mr. Greenjeans: Loonstate's Scott Hahn calls the process of farming conventional cotton "scary".
Organic cotton is the hottest trend in apparel retailing to come along in years. Nike, Whole Foods, Timberland, Patagonia, Eileen Fisher, Walt DisneyCo. and Wal-Mart are all on board. Indeed, Nike cofounded (and has contributed $150,000 to) Organic Exchange, a nonprofit organization in Oakland, Calif. that not only traffics in information but advises farmers and retailers. It certainly doesn't hurt the image of a company demonized for importing shoes from low-wage nations. Sweatshops? Not us. We're stopping farmers from kicking the bucket.
The organic crowd is right about one thing: The chemicals used on cotton plantations are pretty nasty. Among them are the insecticides acephate, aldicarb and dicrotophos; the herbicide glyphosate isopropylamine salt and the fungicide PCNB. The modified seeds incorporate a gene for a bacillus thuringiensis toxin. People unhappy with such seeds say that the Bt gene escapes into the wild and threatens butterflies.
"When we realized how toxic the conventional cotton process is, it was pretty scary," says Scott Hahn, cofounder of Loomstate, a small organic apparel vendor in New York City whose $160 designer jeans can be found in boutiques. (His company works with Edun, a fair-trade apparel company owned by Ali Hewson, the wife of Bono, a FORBES investor.)
Organic cotton farmers fight boll weevils with ladybugs, weed their crops by hand and use manure for fertilizer. None of this is cheap. Don J. Cameron, a cotton farmer in Helm, Calif. who is featured as a successful organic cotton farmer in a video that airs in Eileen Fisher stores, farms 60 acres of organic cotton and 440 acres of the non-organic kind. Even though the former commands a price premium of 30% to 50%, he says, he doesn't plan to expand the acreage he devotes to it. Controlling insects is a hassle. Yields fluctuate wildly. And labor to weed by hand costs $400 an acre. Cameron says he has lost money two out of the four years he has grown organic cotton: "I don't want to jeopardize our operation any more than we have."
But marketers love organic cotton. On its Web site Patagonia reports that conventional cotton crops in California are doused with 6.9 million pounds of chemicals every year. Loomstate says on its Web site that making a single T shirt from regular cotton requires a third of a pound of pesticide and fertilizer.
Balderdash, says Roy Cantrell, the vice president of agricultural research at Cotton Incorporated, a marketing organization for the cotton sector. He says the T shirt would require only 0.03 ounce (a gram) of pesticide.
And Cantrell practically smacks his forehead when he's asked about Wal-Mart Chief Executive Lee Scott, who said the company "eliminated two jumbo jets full of pesticides" by buying 200,000 units of an organic cotton yoga outfit, which sold out at Sam's Club. Elton Robinson, editor of Delta Farm Press, a trade publication that covers cotton farming, uses U.S. Department of Agriculture data to calculate that Scott exaggerated the amount of pesticides needed to make the togs by a factor of 500.
Embracing organic cotton early on cost Patagonia, the outdoor apparel retailer. After the company started using organic cotton fabrics exclusively in 1996, raw material costs doubled and its bottom line unraveled. Now the company is trying to figure out how to introduce and promote eco-friendly dyes without suffering a similar hit.
Levi Strauss & Co. plans a marketing blitz that will include print ads when it launches Levi's Eco, organic cotton jeans that will retail for as much as $350. It's the company's second go-round in this space: An organic cotton line called Levi's Naturals bombed in the early 1990s. Robert Hanson, brand chief for Levi's in the U.S., says the company's ads won't feature farmers in India or any of the "negative banter that can occur around an issue like this."
But even Hanson, who works for a company that will make most of its money from conventional cotton products for some time to come, can't resist the opportunity to make a sales pitch: "Obviously, organic production is easier on the environment, and it's a way for people to personally contribute to issues they care about."
Planet-Safe Dungarees
Levi's Eco, its new organic cotton jeans, will retail for as much as $350.
A natural-colored canvas Levi's tab and signature Two Horse Patch, typically leather, are made from organic fabric.
Some jeans feature recycled buttons, rivets and zippers.
Natural indigo is used to dye some styles of the Eco line.
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