With the European Union’s Empowering Consumers Directive—which aims to reduce greenwashing—coming into effect this week, many in the textile industry are thinking twice about the labels they put on their products.
That certainly holds true for Good Earth Cotton, the Australia-based traceable and third-party verified cotton program. The organization is moving away from the terminology of “regenerative agriculture,” which co-founder Danielle Statham said has become a throwaway moniker that doesn’t necessarily reflect real action at the farm level.
“It’s not that I don’t believe that a regenerative practice label should exist,” she said. “It’s more about there are enough acronyms, enough objectives—we need to have outcomes.”
Statham said farm-level data should verify any claim of “regenerative” or “sustainable,” rather than relying on certifications to confirm next-gen agricultural practices are actually occurring.
“We are farmers, and this has been farmer-led, not certification-led,” she said. “We would prefer to substantiate the claims about our cotton, and how we do that is through primary farm data. We need to look at the outcomes rather than the prescription of what people are telling us we should be doing as farmers.”
Along with running Good Earth Cotton, Statham owns Sundown Pastoral Company—a 60-plus-year-old next-gen agricultural operation in Australia—with her husband, David, who also co-founded Good Earth Cotton. The couple also founded and operate FibreTrace, a verification platform that uses a patented luminescent pigment embedded in raw fibers, which is then traced, verified and audited in real time through every step of the textile supply chain.
Statham said this experience with both the farm and verification sides of next-gen fiber production have informed their work with Good Earth Cotton. She said that regenerative agriculture isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition, and to ensure wider adoption of these practices, verification programs must take into account the conditions at the individual farm level.
“It needs to be contextualized, and that’s where we’re coming from as growers,” she said. “Every farm will behave differently. Yes, there are a set of practices that are out there that can achieve a result, but globally, not every farm will be able to adopt those practices.”
That’s where data comes in. Statham said that data collection on individual farms will allow those operations to make meaningful adjustments to their agricultural practices that not only improve sustainability, but also make sense for the region and the farm itself.
“Farm-level data will always be different from every single farm,” she said. “All farms should be keeping data on their previous year, what inputs were accounted for, how much water you used, the climate variation, how the seed performed, your yield. And whether that data is kept in a notebook or on a computer or a software system, all farmers should be keeping that information, and most farmers do.”
Statham said that data must then be audited by a third-party that can give cotton fiber a score related to the actual practices carried out on the farm. It’s assessed against established baselines and monitored over time.
“That goes back to not describing what the farm intended to do, but what the farm achieved,” she said. “That’s the difference between a certificate of practice and a verified claim. You need to connect the outcome to the fiber.”
Good Earth Cotton’s model currently represents around 60,000 metric tons of physically verified fiber—enough to produce around 300 million t-shirts. Statham said the Good Earth Cotton model has shown her that by and large, farmers want to do the right thing and appreciate guidance that respects their knowledge of their own businesses.
“No farmer wants to put any further inputs into their natural resource than they have to,” she said. “But every farmer wants to increase their yield. Every farmer wants to do the right thing by their land—that enables them to sustain their business and pass it on to the next generation. At its core, this is about succession planning for farms.”
Statham said that her work with farmers and on her own agricultural operation helped drive this mindset shift from the language of “regenerative agriculture.” While it coincides with the roll out of the European Union’s Empowering Consumers Directive, she said this move was more about future-proofing Good Earth Cotton and ensuring that its farmers are part of a real value proposition beyond trendy buzzwords.
“The biggest takeaway that I want to drive home is on its own, ‘regenerative’ works like the words ‘sustainable’ and ‘eco,’” she said. “Products can’t carry this claim unless it’s proven, and sustainability labels have to rest on independent third-party verification, not a suggested practice.
“And cotton is probably more exposed than any other material because much of what’s said out there is self-declared data. There are regional averages or the word ‘regenerative’ really has not been defined yet—it’s a set of practices. When we get down to the nitty-gritty, if we really want to make a change, we need to have that burden of proof.”
