Nearly 56 years ago, during the Summer of Love, Sally Fox inadvertently laid the seeds for her career as a groundbreaking cotton breeder. A then-11-year-old Fox, accompanied by her older sister, went to Northern California’s first-ever Renaissance Faire and spent her babysitting money on a drop spindle from “these cool people.” From there, she was hooked on weaving. Today, she combines her lifelong passion with entomology and biology to create non-genetically modified strains of colored cotton, which not only reduce dye waste, but contain anti-microbial, pest-repellant, and flame-resistant properties.
Fox’s early plans for her craft were a bit misguided. “I had this whole vision that the world wanted handmade items out of dog hair, so when the dog died, they’d still have something special from it,” Fox says on a phone call from her Northern California home. “I was convinced that I could support myself this way.”
While her family was supportive of her passions, Fox didn’t have the financial means to pursue her interest in weaving and textiles full-time after high school. “I didn’t grow up in a family that had the income [that] being an artist and being a craftsperson required,” she says. Instead, Fox found a mentor in her high school biology teacher, Elizabeth Wangari, a Kenyan PhD student who was studying entomology at Stanford University.
Before Fox went to college at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, her teacher arranged for her to have an internship at a company that commercialized insect hormones for pest management, to avoid or reduce the use of harmful pesticides. After two years at Cal Poly, Fox paused her studies to resume her job working with insects. But even though she was swept up in the world of science, Fox always maintained her early passion for art. While at Cal Poly, she taught a hand spinning course to scrape together extra money. One of her students, an older woman, told Fox about her daughter, who died of heavy metal poisoning from exposure to the chemicals used for tie-dye. From there, Fox swore off dyes in her textile work. “I’m not anti-color," she says, “[but] can’t we use colors responsibly, where, when we dye things, we clean them up?” Fox’s signature colored cotton allows for significantly less dye to be used. “If you start with brown cotton, you can dye it black with 80% less dye and it’s darker black than anyone ever got.”
After college, Fox got a job working with a friend’s father, a tomato and cotton breeder, who first introduced her to breeding pesticide-resistant crops without the use of genetic modification. (This natural method is called conventional breeding.) In his greenhouse, she discovered brown cotton—which has innate disease- and pest-resistant properties. “He had these seeds the USDA had given all the independent cotton breeders in the hopes that they would be able to get the disease- and pest-resistance from these colored cottons into their white cotton varieties, and thus have pest-resistant and disease-resistant varieties of white cotton,” she says. “I asked him, ‘Why are we trying to get rid of the colors? The best part!’’ Fox’s boss told her there was no market for colored cotton. “I said, Why don’t we make a market for colored cotton?”
But there was a problem. “The fiber was awful. It was very rough, and it was short, and extraordinarily difficult to spin,” she says. So Fox decided, in her free time, to improve the fiber of the disease- and pest-resistant and colored cotton. She began cross-pollinating by hand, breeding just a few strains her first year, 1982. Fox eventually moved onto other jobs, but her cotton plants always came with her. “I had this old car all filled up with my pots and hardly [had] any space for my clothes and stuff,” she says. “I would use my money to rent land to grow my plants up and learn, make crosses, grow more out.” She graduated from pots to a quarter-acre, to acres upon acres of land. “I continued to work on these cottons because I believed—and still I still believe—that they are the ticket to to actual sustainability,” she says.
By the mid-1990s, Fox was operating the largest-scale colored cotton farm in the world, and helping the United States government determine its organic cotton standards. She was breeding cotton that ranged from camel to seafoam green. “We were at 5,000 certified organic acres and 3,000 transitional certified transitional organic acreage in Arizona,” she says. The cotton’s pest-resistant qualities were already paying off. “Around us, people were spraying 12 times-plus per season for insects, and my cotton didn’t require any pesticide.” But then, the American textile industry collapsed. Companies were moving production overseas, where labor was a fraction of the price and they could skirt mandates on cleaning dye waste—the most expensive part of textile production. “If you’re in a country where nobody’s watching, or you don’t have laws about cleaning up the dye waste, you have a product that is less than half the price of everybody who’s cleaning.”
With the textile industry in a free fall, Fox’s company was purchased by an angel investor. But all of her clients had folded. “It was about eight years of nothingness,” she says. Today, Fox operates her farm in the San Francisco area, and sells her organic cotton to clients around the world. But she can’t help but think how much more room there is for growth—namely in the expansion of the colored cotton rainbow. “If I had a wish, it would be that I was funded by some foundations somewhere, that I could do the the microbiological work of identifying how to get these colors to shift. If it has the right environment, you can get blues, you can get pinks,” she says. “There’s no reason in the world that somebody couldn’t study this and figure out how to make these color shifts using enzymes or using a fermentation process in the manufacturing of the fabric.”
Fox doesn’t necessarily see her cotton changing the world of high fashion. She likens couture to a rose—her cotton is the soil that allows the flower to bloom. “But I do see [my cotton] playing the role as the sheets you sleep in, your underwear, the things that are closest to your body and give you, and your body, and your soul substance,” she says.
At the end of the day, Fox credits her life’s work to the bygone era she was raised in. “So many of the opportunities of my life that have come to me are because of the happenstance of growing up in this, time with that with those moods, with those thoughts with those visions,” Fox says of the free-loving Bay Area mindset. She also credits her humble beginnings. “I think it s really important for people to see how even humble jobs—raising insects, and doing the lab work to test biological insecticide—led me to coming up with the whole system of organic cotton production in the United States.”
