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When Vogue Business visited LA apparel brand Outerknown’s Peruvian cotton farms in May, harvest times had been thrown into disarray by the changing climate. Since February 2023, northern Peru has been affected by what the United Nations has dubbed “a severe meteorological phenomenon” called the “el niño costero”, causing heavy rains and flooding across Lambayeque, Piura, and Tumbes, and Cyclone Yaku in March. The UN estimates that 517,000 people have been affected, from loss of human life to damaged buildings and livelihoods. Roads and basic services were also interrupted.
Outerknown grows a significant portion of its Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) cotton in Lambayeque, in partnership with Swedish-Peruvian cotton production company Bergman Rivera. They say the farms were inaccessible for three months — overlapping with the critical harvest season — as the roads had turned to mud. CEO Orlando Rivera says this is the first time in 20 years that he has seen such intense flooding in the area, which usually plants a variety of cotton prone to desert conditions that can easily withstand three months of water scarcity. He estimates that the cotton farmers in this region lost about 30 per cent of their yield this year, between the cotton soaked in the fields and the ginned cotton soaked in open warehouses, without the respite of Peru’s typical hot sun to dry it out before it rotted. Rivera says he plans to sell the cotton off cheaply or use it for something other than clothing.
Los Angeles apparel brand Outerknown opened up its regenerative cotton supply chain in Peru to Vogue Business. While progressive, challenges need to be addressed to achieve commercial scale.
Peru is not the only country whose natural fibre supplies and farming communities are being affected by the climate crisis. In 2022, unusually strong monsoon rains in Pakistan cut the annual cotton yield by 40 per cent, according to the Government of Pakistan, while the Department of Agriculture estimated a 28 per cent decline in the US’s annual cotton supply due to drought in Texas. The latest global weather report from the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) paints a drastic and desperate picture of even more extreme weather events to come.
When it comes to the climate crisis, agriculture is both part of the problem and one of the few agreed-upon solutions. Industrial agriculture has been heavily criticised for driving deforestation, damaging soil health and biodiversity with toxic chemical treatments and monocropping, and undermining food security and sovereignty. Regenerative agriculture, meanwhile, has been posited as a solution, attempting to recover both the land and the communities that tend to it, as well as sequestering carbon and curbing reliance on synthetic fertilisers and pesticides. But despite being part of the solution, regenerative farms are not immune to the effects of the climate crisis.
“Regenerative agriculture is a really important part of climate action that the world must take today, and farmers are a crucial change agent,” says Anita Chester, head of materials at grant-giving organisation Laudes Foundation. “When you talk about landscapes and land management or restoration, who can do it better than the people living there?”
The efficacy of regenerative agriculture as a global climate solution relies on scale, which it is far from achieving. At present, only 1.4 per cent of the world’s cotton is organic, let alone regenerative organic, according to the 2022 Textile Exchange Organic Cotton Market Report. And, without systemic support from brands, convening organisations and governments, there is little space for farmers to innovate. “Farming is a very expensive, high-stakes, high-risk process,” says Rebecca Burgess, executive director of Fibershed. “Nature gives you a very limited window of opportunity to be innovative — one time per year — and the potential pay-off only comes once a year too. They can’t risk those yields. As a grower, can you rely on these changes to make your business more resilient to climate change?”
Investment at the government level is starting to trickle in in some areas, but it is sporadic, and its application is unstandardised. In 2022, the US Department of Agriculture announced a $2.8 billion budget for commodities produced using “climate-smart” production practices. On the state level, California spent $1.1 billion in its last approved budget on nature-based solutions to the climate crisis. In the UK, the government is distributing £270 million in grants under its Farming Innovation Programme, hoping to accelerate the transition to more sustainable agricultural practices by 2028. This includes £12.5 million for ‘On-Farm Environmental Resilience’, including regenerative agriculture.
In the private sector, Chester says Laudes Foundation has funnelled $40 million in philanthropic dollars into regenerative agriculture to date; in India, its Regenerative Production Landscape Collaborative connects farmers with global brands, including Inditex, the H&M Group and Ikea, among others. Elsewhere, Kering, L’Occitane and Inditex have jointly invested €155 million in their Climate Fund for Nature, for which ramping up regenerative agriculture is a key aim.
Without the financial safety net that certain regenerative cotton transition programmes put in place, these increasingly intense and unpredictable weather events can be a huge blow to farmers dealing with natural fibres.
“We expected a good harvest season this year, but climate changes in April have caused some losses instead,” says Peruvian cotton farmer Wilmer Saldaña, who works with Outerknown and Bergman Rivera. “I don’t know which to worry about more: excess rain or water scarcity.”
The problems and priorities vary between climates
“Regenerative principles can be adopted across geographies, but each context has different issues,” says Chester. “To restore systems, it’s important to understand the basic issues of a landscape – is it water stress, soil erosion or low yields? Has the area been desertified, or has flood irrigation caused salinity in the soil? It’s very difficult to have a global blueprint for regenerative agriculture because of this.”
Laudes Foundation currently has four landscape initiatives running, covering over 1 million hectares of land from India and Pakistan to Tanzania and Brazil. The oldest and most mature is in an ecologically sensitive wildlife habitat in central India, where the main problems are soil degradation due to overuse of chemicals and biodiversity loss. The project recently installed check dams to store water when it rains, so periods of intense heat and limited rainfall are less likely to result in water scarcity. On the flip side, they have planted cover crops and trees in a bid to minimise soil erosion during floods. “Mitigation is important, but so is adaptation,” says Chester.
While it’s tempting to try and build out a global blueprint for regenerative agriculture as a climate solution, local Indigenous knowledge should always be prioritised, says Beth Jensen, Climate+ impact director at Textile Exchange. Pilot projects consistently show that farmers learn best from other farmers, adds Elizabeth Whitlow, executive director of the Regenerative Organic Alliance (ROA), which certifies farms using these practices, including those working with Outerknown in Peru. “Farmers don’t need so-called experts coming in from elsewhere, they need farmers nearby demonstrating good practice and helping them get on board.”
Regardless of how farms choose to transition to regenerative agriculture, what their priorities are and how they define success, the onus should not be on farmers to fund the transition, adds Burgess. “Farming is a huge gradient: it’s done by hedge funds and private equity firms, there are land grabs and land-use conversion problems in agriculture, and there are people who have been doing it for generations on the same piece of land,” she explains. “In some of the latter cases, growers get as little as one to four per cent of the retail value of a garment. So the onus of solving the world’s problems should not be on the individuals managing farms, who we have not only been ignored and under-invested in but also blamed for so many of our problems.”
Building resilience through best practice
Some say that regenerative agriculture can protect farms from the worst impacts of climate change. In Arizona, farms working with the ROA have reported climate impacts in recent years. “We have a farm at the south fork of the Gila River, which experienced a huge monsoon in the autumn,” says Whitlow. “The wind was whipping the soil off neighbouring farms, but their farm had cover crops and more organic matter, so the monsoon rains seeped into it, and the wind didn’t tear it away. The water just slowly replenished the aquifer beneath the soil instead.” She points to California, where atmospheric rivers have sat atop farms in the region this year, causing severe flooding. “Anecdotally, the ROA-certified vineyards in those regions didn’t suffer nearly as badly as their neighbours.”
But possibilities for climate mitigation can be limited. In Peru, water comes down from the Andes mountain range and the Amazon rainforest through a network of rivers otherwise surrounded by desert. The government gathers its annual water supply during the rainy season from December to February, before distributing it around the country, based on how much was stored that year.
Because of this, farmers know in advance how much water they will have access to that year and are able to plan their season accordingly. The main aim is to reduce the risk of drought, so excess rain like Peru has seen this year throws a spanner in the works, says Rivera. “When Peru has heavy flooding, regenerative agriculture practices can actually make it worse for farmers because those practices increase water absorbency in the soil, but the farms are geared up for desert conditions, so they often don’t have sufficient drainage for flooding,” he explains. “Sometimes, industrial blueberry and avocado fields release water into neighbouring fields, so some of our cotton fields in the north have had worse flooding than others. When there is too much water over too much time, the land attracts salt, which makes it less fertile the following year.”
Bergman Rivera will be adding more organic matter and compost to the fields to try and counteract these long-term impacts. “Every year, it gets more unpredictable, and the peaks and troughs get more extreme,” says Rivera. “You just learn to live with it and make changes each year to adapt. We’re using more rotation crops, diversifying the farms, and diversifying the areas we use in our supply chains, so we don’t have all of the cotton in one region or one climate.”
Outside of regenerative agriculture, the latest report from Cotton Connect, which is partly owned by Textile Exchange, recommends investment in artificial intelligence that can give farmers up-to-date weather advice, training in soil health management and proper drainage systems, as well as regular soil sampling.
“Climate change is making it harder to farm,” says Whitlow. “We will continue to have climate migrants, people leaving their homelands in droves and pushing out of areas that have been severely impacted because they don’t have access to food and water. If we want to stabilise that situation, we need to approach agriculture in a holistic way.”
Time is of the essence, she continues. “Climate change is now. The time to act is now. But we need time, investment and supportive policy to do so.”
Correction: Laudes Foundation has invested $40 million into regenerative agriculture to date, not $40 billion as previously reported. (02/06/2023)
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