New Tool for Sharing Best Practices: Cotton Cultivated

Cotton Incorporated has launched a new website that gives the cotton growing community quick and easy access to important cotton information. Cotton Cultivated provides a portal that integrates websites, downloadable documents, social media and real-time news feeds that have been “cultivated” in an effort to reduce the time spent sorting through pages of irrelevant search results.

Overview of Site Features:

The Home Page is a dashboard providing easy access to all of the site features and information, including a customized search tool. Cotton News displays recent cotton related stories from agricultural media sources. You can find stories of national, global, or regional interest by clicking the respective boxes. Daily Monitoring provides local weather conditions, current cotton market reports (fiber and seed), and the latest crop quality report summarized by Cotton Incorporated.

Research & Reports displays the latest information uploaded to the site. Materials in this section are downloadable directly from the website. The buttons in this widget allow flipping through the three most recent research reports added. To browse all of the material available, simply click on “See all Research and Reports.” Once all the material is displayed, there is an option to filter by growing region and topic.

The Resources Directory works just like the Research & Reports widget but provides a preview of the most recently added web resources. Materials in this section are trusted resources that are useful across the spectrum of the cotton growing community. All of the resources in the directory link to an outside website.

In addition to the four primary widgets, there is a Cultivated Twitter feed which follows cotton related media, research and extension experts. The tweets can be filtered by region and provide real time information without the need for a Twitter account.

“The cotton growing community has indicated that searching for and isolating cotton production information can quickly become an overwhelming task. The Cotton Cultivated site is aimed at helping users find cotton specific information as quickly and easily as possible”

-Ryan Kurtz, Director of Agricultural Research for Cotton Incorporated