California Cotton and Climate Coalition

California Cotton and Climate Coalition

Tim Hammerich
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Rebecca Burgess is the executive director at Fibershed, a nonprofit focused on regionalizing the textile system through regenerative farming practices. Together with textile brands and cotton producers they started the California Cotton & Climate Solution, or C4, to increase transparency along the supply chain and create a cleaner handshake from farm to mill.

Burgess: Clip 1_A “While there’s been challenges in doing something farm forward, the brands have worked pre- competitively and they are sharing the yarn speck together. They’re not competing and saying ‘I’m gonna make this thing over there that’s proprietary.’ They’re actually working together and scaffolding minimums and coming out in a way where they’re all gonna go to market with the same story, basically.”

Burgess says this way of farming regeneratively is a trend more and more brands want to be a part of, and C4 helps direct these joint efforts toward a more sustainable future.

Burgess: Clip 1_B “So it’s been a project of collaboration, coalition building, more communications than I could ever keep up with, and there’s more brands coming all the time. They’re just really excited. Like the markets are changing. It's not just our coalition. There’s many people out there gravitating this direction; we just happened to create a collation so that brands could get over those mill minimums and work collaboratively."

Burgess said she wants to create a more economically-viable, regenerative solutions for the cotton industry.

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