As designers, brands, and retailers, when we trace our supply chains back, we hit a wall: we can't answer #WhoMadeMyCotton. Too often we're left with just a country or region of origin, with no real understanding of who was involved in growing or ginning that cotton.
Since 2021, with the support of Cotton Diaries, Ani Wells and Anne Oudard have conducted an in-depth qualitative study working down the denim supply chain, mapping the roadblocks to radical transparency at every tier: brand and retailer, mill, spinner, ginner, merchant, and farmer.
Gin workers at Rigdol gin, Odisha, India, 2024
Report
Step 4: The Farmer’s Ecosystem
Launching on World Cotton Day, the fourth report of #WhoMadeMyCotton brings us to the farm level and the people and organisations farmers work with most closely. Who grows the cotton? Who do they sell to? What challenges do they face? How do we move beyond broad-stroke transparency to something we like to call “relational traceability”?
“Relational traceability” is the knowledge brands and mills build through long-term relationships with farmers, cooperatives, gins, and local partners. While a record shows where cotton moved, a relationship shows what shaped it: what the seasons cost, what risks farmers carried, and what was out of their control. This means meeting farmers not as storytelling material, but as sources of intelligence.
Relationships with farming communities are key to building resilient textile supply chains. They form the infrastructure that makes supply systems genuinely adaptive, able to anticipate disruption and maintain supplies when conditions change.
This research has been shaped by the people who let us visit farms, gins, and workplaces, shared records and experiences with us, answered our many questions, and challenged the assumptions we arrived with. Cotton systems vary enormously between regions, so this report is not intended to present one model for farm-level traceability. Instead, we hope it offers a useful way to think about the information already moving through cotton supply webs, the remaining gaps, and the relationships that can help make that information meaningful.
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“This deep dive is for the people working across fashion, fibres, agriculture, sustainability and social justice, who know traceability matters, but also know it is more complicated than a neat map or a dashboard.”
Tracing the thread, tier by tier
Tap a tier below to read its #WhoMadeMyCotton report.
Truck driver transporting bags of seed cotton to the gin, Odisha, India, 2024
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This fourth and final phase of #WhoMadeMyCotton gets down to the roots (literally) exploring the realities of cotton production at farm level and the systemic barriers that continue to limit meaningful transparency and change.
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Step 3 goes inside the world of cotton trading, drawing on conversations with traders from three major trading houses, an independent broker, an organic cotton merchant, and a board member of the International Cotton Association. Together, their perspectives reveal how cotton trading really works — from the moment a spinner requests supply, to where the industry may be headed next.
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12 denim professionals at mills and spinners reveal the gap between farming reality and denim industry practice. Across Steps 1 and 2, a pattern emerged: traceability becomes harder to follow at the yarn spinner and raw material tiers, largely because spinners source their cotton through traders.
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27 denim professionals from brands and retailers share the roadblocks they face tracing cotton back to the farm.
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