Citizens of Humanity’s investment in regenerative agriculture is a blueprint for how clothing brands can reduce their environmental footprint one supply chain link at a time.
Marshall Hardwick is chatting with me from his truck, parked in front of his cotton field in Northeast Louisiana. After our call, he’ll begin harvesting the crop. Most years, he has no idea what the cotton will become: a T-shirt or a blanket, perhaps. But in a few months, these particular bolls will be transformed into thousands of pairs of luxury jeans.
Citizens of Humanity, a Los Angeles denim company whose jeans cost roughly $200 a pair, is on a quest to curb its environmental footprint—starting with its raw materials. This year, it has partnered with six farms across the United States, including Hardwick’s, to buy cotton at a premium, enabling farmers to use the profits to implement more sustainable-farming methods, like minimizing tilling and chemical fertilizers. By next year, this collective harvest will yield enough cotton for half a million pairs of jeans, which the brand will sell at its regular price, without a markup.
Citizens of Humanity, which also owns the AGOLDE and Goldsign brands, is not alone in dipping its toe into the world of farming. There’s now a growing movement in the fashion industry to support regenerative agriculture, which refers to practices that preserve the soil’s health and reduce carbon emissions. Large apparel companies, including Patagonia, Levi’s, and the Kering luxury group, have invested in large-scale regenerative agriculture projects in Europe and Asia; and smaller brands, such as Christy Dawn, have partnered with Indian farms to buy regeneratively grown cotton.
But Citizens of Humanity’s project stands apart because it provides a blueprint for American fashion brands interested in building a sustainable supply chain here in the U.S., starting with establishing relationships directly with farmers.
A GLOBAL SPRAWLING SUPPLY CHAIN
The notion of a denim brand partnering with a farm seems radical in our current global economy. Starting in the 1980s, fashion brands began to ship their operations overseas, using Asian factories, where skilled labor is cheap, and buying fabrics from mills that source raw materials from many countries. This drove down the price of clothing—causing clothing consumption to skyrocket—but it also meant that brands have become further and further removed from the people that make their products. Many fashion brands have no idea what country their cotton comes from, much less the name of the person who farmed it.
“We typically don’t know where our cotton goes once it is out of our hands,” Hardwick tells me. “We know it ends up in places like Turkey or Bangladesh where there are large spinning mills, but it ends up getting mixed up with cotton from all over the world.”
In the age of climate change, this presents a problem. Fashion is a major contributor to global warming, generating 4% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Much of these emissions happen early in the process, in the production of raw materials and manufacturing. But brands can’t begin to reduce their carbon footprint if they don’t know what is happening at each stage.
Amy Williams, Citizens of Humanity CEO, says that over the past 20 years, the company has been working to control more of its supply chain, including building a production facility in Turkey and a laundry in Los Angeles to create denim washes. “We wanted to have complete control over the quality,” she says. “But we still didn’t have visibility into the mills and cotton farms. And while we can invest in better machinery in our factories, the single biggest impact we can have is changing the way we source our cotton.”
THE REGENERATIVE REVOLUTION
For years, scientists and environmental activists have argued that industrial farming methods, like tilling, using chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and growing a single crop on the same land year after year, destroy the soil and release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. There’s been a recent movement in the food industry to shift toward regenerative methods, like rotating crops and using compost.
Over the last five years, pioneering fashion brands have realized that they can also contribute to the movement by supporting the farmers who produce their cotton and wool. In 2018, Patagonia launched a regenerative agriculture certification program, which thousands of Indian farmers have adopted.
Last year, Kering cofounded a fund that will convert 1 million hectares of farmland (more than 247 million acres) in Europe and Asia into regenerative agriculture in five years, while the New Zealand Merino Company has partnered with Allbirds and Smartwool to produce regenerative wool. Christy Dawn paid farmers in South India a premium to grow cotton regeneratively.
At first, Williams found the world of regenerative farming daunting. Many brands’ projects are complex and global in nature. But as she began to do research—speaking with farming experts at U.C. Berkeley and U.C. Davis—she saw that there was a lot of work to do here in the United States, which is the third-largest cotton producer in the world, after India and China. And she realized it is possible to have a valuable impact by working at a grassroots level, partnering with individual farms.
KNOW YOUR FARMER
Williams got to work searching for American cotton farms that could benefit from Citizens of Humanity’s support. “I didn’t know where to start,” she says. “But then, it turned out to be like any other kind of networking.”
Some farms she spoke with were not a good match: Some were too large and would require extensive time and resources to adopt new farming techniques; others simply weren’t committed to regenerative practices. But eventually, she found six farms—in Mississippi, Louisiana, West Texas, and California—that aligned with Citizens of Humanity’s vision. Many of the farms have agreed to follow regenerative standards laid out by Advanced Ecological Agriculture (AEA), an organization that helps growers make the transition.
One farmer, Trentis Allen, had dreamed of farming cotton on his family’s land, which his great grandfather had received when slavery was abolished in Mississippi. But he pointed out that Black farmers, like himself, often struggle to get the financial backing they need to harvest cotton. So Citizens of Humanity guaranteed that it will pay a premium for at least 25,000 pounds of cotton, allowing Allen to grow 25 acres of the crop on his land. (It takes roughly 1.5 pounds of cotton to make a single pair of jeans.) “Each of the six farmers is in a different geographic situation, which means the soil situation is different,” she says. “AEA focuses on their specific needs, ensuring they are consistent with the regenerative model.”
Williams also met Hardwick, whose family owns an 8,000-acre farm in Louisiana that produces corn, sorghum, soybeans, and cotton. Hardwick has been eager to move toward regenerative farming, many of these practices are expensive. In the past, Hardwick has sold the bulk of his cotton to large cotton brokers who pay a price set by the commodities market. (Last year it was $1.13 a pound.) This doesn’t provide enough of a profit to invest in more sustainable practices. That’s why he was so eager to work on this project. “It’s so much better for us to have a direct relationship with a buyer like Citizens of Humanity,” he says. “With big brokers, we can’t negotiate a price based on our quality, or our sustainable practices. We’re able to make long-term plans for our farm because we are guaranteed this revenue.”
For instance, Hardwick has wanted to move from synthetic fertilizer to using organic chicken manure, which is far better for the soil because of the micronutrients it contains. But as organic farming has become more popular, chicken farmers have raised the prices of this manure, which would ordinarily cut into the farm’s profits. Thanks to the advanced payment from Citizens of Humanity, Hardwick has been able to invest in it this year.
All of the farmers have now harvested the cotton. Citizens of Humanity will send it to its mills in Turkey and Japan, then turned into the brand’s 2023 collection. Hardwick can’t wait to get his hands on a pair, to see the fruits of his labor turned into a garment that someone will wear. But more importantly, this project has allowed Hardwick to make enduring changes that will allow the farm to grow all of its crops regeneratively in the future.
Williams hopes to continue building on these efforts in the years to come by working with more American farms. She says that reducing the impact of the Citizen’s of Humanity’s raw materials has been the most effective way to reduce its overall environmental footprint.
Moving toward regenerative materials means paying more for raw materials, which adds to a brand’s bottom line. Williams acknowledges that projects like hers are easier as a luxury brand with higher margins to play with. Still, she believes that the company’s experiment shows that even small labels can play a role in the shift toward regenerative agriculture if they’re committed to it. “I think any company can do it,” she says. “It just requires a business model that isn’t about securing the lowest-priced cotton.”
Source: https://www.fastcompany.com/