Climate

How can we make Smallholder Farmers’ cotton data valuable to brands like Timberland?

From “degenerative” agriculture that extracts from the land and excludes farming communities from recognizing the full value of their contributions, through to “conservative” and “net positive” agriculture, and then evolving to a “regenerative” paradigm, this highly visual piece explores the paradigms of farming and their impact on the planet and communities.

Cotton, the world’s oldest commercial crop, now finds itself at the vanguard of the newest international agricultural revolution: regeneration. Taking this ancient crop and combining it with new tools and possibilities, the transformative power of regenerative agriculture is appearing where the world might least expect it—in the cotton fields of Haiti, where members of the Smallholder Farmers Alliance (SFA) lead the way.

If you, as a consumer, have a preference for buying food with an “organic” label, you’ve already accepted that data is an agricultural product; the data on that label conveys a higher value than a “conventional” counterpart. What happens when we connect small farmers directly to such consumer transactions, allowing them to contribute the data that helps consumers make determinations regarding the quality, value, and impact of the fruits, fibers, grains, or other goods that they grow? What if a consumer could pick up an apple and know which farm it came from? This is the future of data as an agricultural product.

A third of humanity has been largely invisible for the past half century because they have been deemed by many to be at best irrelevant, or at worst, a threat to global progress.

Meet the smallholder farmers of the world.

Regeneration is not a mere book, but a resource, a tool, and a guide, drawing on decades of interdisciplinary expertise and hands-on knowledge.