Soil health is the key to continual improvement in U.S. cotton. By improving soil health, the soil can do a better job of storing water and nutrients – making the crop more resilient to drought, reducing the amount of fertilizer needed, and reducing greenhouse gases emitted.
Cotton Incorporated and the University of Tennessee are doing their part to spread the word to more U.S. growers by creating a series of videos to explain the benefits of soil health and cover crops to the cotton growing community. These videos give cotton producers suggestions on how to successfully integrate cover crops into their operation and minimize their environmental impact.
New research from Texas A&M University also leads to further improvements in soil health. The new system applies phosphite, rather than phosphate, to cotton crops engineered to express a certain gene. The gene enables the cotton plant to efficiently process phosphite into nutrition, while suppressing weeds. Now, U.S. growers can use one product to feed plants and starve weeds.
Wrangler is one Cotton LEADS partner that supports U.S. growers’ efforts to improve soil health in a variety of ways. In addition to launching their own sustainability goals in 2017, the brand most recently published “Seeding Soil’s Potential,” an overview of 45 scientific reports concluding the practices of conservation tillage, cover crops and crop rotation result in greater crop resiliency and productivity, among a host of other benefits to the grower and the land.
The Australian cotton industry is still expecting a large cotton crop despite the persistent rain in much of New South Wales and Queensland impacting on already sodden paddocks, and in some cases, delaying picking and planting.
An increasing number of farmers are applying bulky organic fertilisers like manures, composts, and biosolids on their fields to reduce reliance on synthetic mineral fertilisers.
Research in nutrient efficiency, conservation tillage and farm management equipment promises major energy use reductions for cotton in the coming years.
Cotton growers – through Cotton Australia’s Cotton to Market program and the Australian Cotton Shippers Association (ACSA) - have been represented in key supply chain meetings in Indonesia.
Project collaborators are confident that with a solid business plan and more research, returning shredded cotton products to cotton fields could soon offer benefits to soil health, and a scalable solution.
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