Good Earth Cotton Starts Work on a Delight-ful Project in India

How did the project with Good Earth Cotton come into being? Did you approach them, or did they contact you? What were the issues thrashed out?
It is our quest to achieve and offer the best to the sustainable cotton segment and since Good Earth Cotton and the Delight Group both are in the same industry, it was easy to figure out the like minds.

The kind of dedication we observed in the Good Earth Cotton team—especially the Kara and Sundown teams—to grow cotton for an objective, for a cause, as an answer to environmental issues, for a solution to the entire sustainable textile industry, and our decades long association with the Indian cotton farming community, brought us together to form an association for growing cotton for a cause.

There were some initial hiccups—very usual for any new kind of setup, and we also went through that process right from the selecting area, adaptability of a new concept at farmers level, cost involved to run this project, and marketability. We had rounds of meetings with VCs to formulate a strategy keeping all points in mind, not only from the farming point of view but from the eyes of brands too.

Another challenge was formulating Good Earth Cotton practices in an Indian context, where a farm holding is much smaller than the average Australian farm.

Could you tell us how the project works on the ground?
Once we have identified an area, the first important task is to train our staff and all the farmers who are being enrolled for the project. The basic practices remain unchanged as these farmers are already under the Organic Cultivation Programme. However, convincing them to produce climate-positive cotton with regenerative farming practices was not an easy task.

With the Sourcery, which is our implementation partner, we arranged training programmes for Field Extension Officers and also for the farmers. Through the Delight Social Welfare Foundation, which is our CSR wing, we arranged quality non-GMO and non-treated cotton seeds, distributing these to all 1,977 farmers for free besides compost, natural and herbal insecticides.

Prior to that, we ran a massive campaign for soil analysis before the sowing started. This allowed us to get an analytical idea of carbon and nutrient status in the soil and determine soil health so that we had a baseline report of the soil characteristics. A detailed survey of the farmers on their economic situations, agricultural practices, livelihood, etc, was also covered to see the impact year-on-year from the beginning.

The most important activity we performed under this project was to geo-map all the farms so that anyone can check the farm locations on the google map.

How does this project help the Delight Group? How do you plan to promote this alliance (in case you do)?
We see it as a tool for brands by offering a sync for their efforts towards achieving sustainable goals. Obviously, this will also help us to place the Delight Group as a pioneer organisation producing climate-positive cotton in India. Our positioning will be strong, and we foresee tremendous potential and opportunity with our association with Good Earth Cotton.

We are promoting climate-positive cotton with Good Earth Cotton, FibreTrace and the Sourcery on various platforms and we are overwhelmed by the response we are receiving from leading brands. In fact, we are inviting brands to our fields to see the practices we are adopting to help the environment and to help the farming community.

What is the R&D work that will be done? Pls elaborate. What do you plan to do with the data that would be generated? How does it work?
There are various agencies involved in R&D and for data collection, for data formulation and analysis. Not only on the scientific grounds, but also on the scale of economics.

The data generated from the baseline will help us to draw the conclusion year after year to measure the impact of this module. Agencies involved in the data collection and processing are experts from their own field like Carbon Friendly, Australia, AgEcon, Sundown, FibreTrace, FarmLab, Survey Sparrow, the Sourcery, etc.

And on top of that, we respect the data prevention policy to maintain privacy of the data collected at various stages.

Could you tell us more about the Delight Group's work with cotton?
We are engaged in the cultivation and processing of organic cotton fibre, yarn, and fabric in India. The Delight Group is one of the sizable organic cotton producers in India, in accreditation with renowned international certification bodies.

We (Delight Group) produce ‘A Fibre of Faith – A Thread of Hope’ since we have an integration right from the cultivation of cotton to ginning, spinning (ring spun & open end) and knitting, PET bottle recycled fibre.

Under our sustainable cotton cultivation programme, in India we are working with more than 75,000 farmers to grow sustainable cotton covering 0.15 million hectares. Our farming projects are certified for EEC, NPOP, and NOP, Regenagri standards, and soon we will be offering Fair Trade label cotton too.

We are expanding our sustainable cultivation programme to East and West Africa. We are already certified in Tanzania with 25,500 hectares of land and 4,400 farmers, and expanding in Uganda, Ivory Coast and Togo region.

Good Earth Cotton has been working with different organisations in different countries? What do you think are aspects that are specific/unique to cotton in the Indian context?
It has been really exciting to have been able to work with the Delight Group on this project as we see the Good Earth Cotton guidelines as being something that not only benefits the environment but also the farmer, and it has been a real journey in understanding what the farmers needs and how we can get them to being a climate-positive organic cotton farmer.

We believe that this work is extremely important, and if successful, it can be a case study for many across the world on how adopting climate-positive regenerative practices can benefit all.

It has also been a real chance for us to look at the set of practices that we have today on our Good Earth Cotton farm in Australia and understand how these translate to a landscape that is completely different from Australia. We are constantly learning and developing new procedures and this project has allowed us to continue to grow and evolve.

India is also a country that, for obvious reasons, comes with its distinct set of problems/issues. What were the challenges you faced while working out the project with the Delight Group? Could you elaborate?
Of course, setting up Good Earth Cotton in India has come with some challenges. The climate is completely different to what we have previously worked with, as this is the first time the programme is being taken to another continent. Moving beyond that, there are different processes involved that have meant we needed to adapt some of the measurement tools and data capture points to reflect this.

India, of course, has come under a lot of scrutiny for cotton blending in the past. We are thrilled to be presenting a programme that will remove this doubt as all cotton grown on these farms will be backed by the power of traceability and transparency, through the application of FibreTrace. This will ensure supply chain authenticity and integrity.