Mr. Jeffrey Thimm
Organic Product Specialist – GOTS
Mr. Ganesh Kasekar
Representative in South Asia – GOTS
Advancing sustainable cotton production and processing has been at the heart of the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) since its inception over two decades ago, requiring compliance with strict ecological and social responsibility from fibre cultivation through all stages of textile processing. In order for fibres to qualify for use in GOTS Goods, in addition to respecting human rights at the farm level a minimum of 70% must be certified to one of the IFOAM Family of Standards (International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements), which includes India’s National Program for Organic Production (Global Standard, 2023). India has long been the largest producer of certified organic cotton, providing an estimated 38% of the global supply with over 280,000 tonnes of organic and organic in-conversion cotton fibre originating from India in 2020/21 (Textile Exchange, 2022). Although India’s certified organic cotton production only amounts to approximately 2.1% of the country’s total cotton production, the organic cotton sector continues to grow steadily and is ripe for expansion.
Organic certification of fibre cultivation is the first step in the traceability system for GOTS Goods, but recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have enabled the development of digital tools to enhance the traditional methods of on-site auditing to include remote sensing – a game-changer for the integrity of organic cotton. Although GOTS accepts all certified organic fibres, cotton is the most commonly used fibre – this is very significant because conventional cotton is in the top five users of pesticides worldwide (Delate et al., 2021). Organic cultivation, on the other contrary, does not permit the use of synthetic pesticides, instead requiring farmers to utilize preventative measures like integration of beneficial pest-predator habitat into the farm agroecology before using natural, non-toxic pesticides like neem oil. Organic agriculture is well known to be a pillar of the green economy, with circularity embedded in its philosophy and practice, however, there is always room for improvement so we strongly encourage even greater adoption of practices to increase biodiversity and promote soil building and carbon sequestration, including the application of activated biochar made from cotton stalks which might otherwise be burned (Kranthi K., Kranthi S., 2023; Tao et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2024). Such measures can transform cotton into a win-win-win for farmers, brands and the environment.
In support of the continuous advancement of GOTS and the organic sector, its not-for-profit custodial organization – Global Standard – has been pioneering the development of novel technological solutions to improve the traceability and sustainability of organic cotton value chains. With a stringent system of third-party certification and auditing for social and ecological compliance throughout the textile processing value chain, chain of custody and product segregation are the backbone of GOTS’s traceability system. Furthermore, advancements in technology are being employed to reinforce these systems and are opening new opportunities to further strengthen the integrity of organic cotton.
Figure 1: Sentinel-2 Satellite (ESA)
One such technological advancement that is poised to significantly support the integrity of the organic cotton sector uses AI and satellite data. The project is co-financed by Global Standard and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Business Applications and Space Solutions Programme BASS, while the collected data is owned by Global Standard. The software is owned by Marple, a German software company, designed to remotely analyse fields using multispectral and multitemporal satellite data from the ESA’s Copernicus Open Access Hub, an online platform that provides free and open access to Earth observation data including optical and radar imagery, land cover maps and climate data collected by the polar-orbiting Sentinel satellites (Figure 1).
Figure 2: Satellite image without analysis
In June 2023, Global Standard officially launched its Satellite Cotton Monitoring Project with an initial focus on India, particularly Gujarat, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. Over 6000 crop fields were visited to collect geo-coordinates and field characteristics like soil, crop and cultivation methods (conventional or organic). This was then used by Marple to further train Cotton Cultivation Remote Assessment (CoCuRA), a digital platform using machine learning for field detection and crop identification. Since training it on ground-truth data from India, CoCuRA currently has an accuracy of 97% when identifying cotton fields and about 80% accuracy when distinguishing between conventional and organic cotton fields in India (Figure 2, Figure 3). This will increase as the AI is trained on more field data and CoCuRA is applied to the roughly 2.7 million km2 in India that could potentially hold cotton.
Figure 3: Satellite image with CoCuRA’s land-use classification:
Agriculture (red) Cotton (white) Organic Cotton (green)
Some of the indices used include: NDVI (Normalised Difference Vegetation Index) measuring vegetation health by comparing the difference between near-infrared and red light reflectance; DVWI (Drought Vegetation Water Index) measuring plant water stress levels by analysing the reflectance of various wavelengths sensitive to water content in vegetation; and MSAVIhyper (Modified Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index, Hyperspectral) minimizing soil background effects in hyperspectral imagery to enhance vegetation health monitoring. But as is the nature of AI, it is not always clear which indicators the AI ultimately uses for the identification, mapping and categorization of patterns.
The agronomic differences between conventional and organic cotton cultivation are evidently sufficient for differentiation. Although it is commonly assumed that the primary difference between organic and conventional cotton cultivation is the use of pesticides, it is postulated that synthetic vs. organic fertilizers play a more significant role. Since organic fertilizers like cow manure dissolve slowly in comparison to highly soluble synthetic fertilizers, organic crops tend to have a more gradual rate of growth. However, more research is needed to confirm this rationale.
The potential for this technology to both encourage more sustainable cotton production and improve traceability and sustainability of cotton value chains is significant. One avenue of application is for fraud prevention and mitigation, whereby cotton fields that are certified organic can be remotely monitored by certification bodies to check for compliance without the need for costly on-site audits.
Furthermore, unintentional contamination of GMO pollen and pesticides in organic cotton may be reduced by remote identification of conventional cotton crops that are in close proximity to organic cotton fields and need social and/or physical mitigation measures employed. However, of greatest potential impact is the opportunity to identify cotton fields that the CoCuRA AI categorises as organic but are not in the certified organic cotton database; these farmers evidently are already cultivating according to organic principles and should be proactively invited to become certified organic so that they can benefit from the financial premiums and market access that they deserve for growing their cotton in a manner that benefits their communities and the planet.
Learn more about this project through the following links:
References
Delate, K., Heller, B., & Shade, J. (2021). Organic cotton production may alleviate the environmental impacts of intensive conventional cotton production. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, 36(4), 405–412. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742170520000356
Global Standard (2023). GOTS Version 7.0. https://global-standard.org/images/resource library/documents/standard-and-manual/GOTS_7.0_ENG_signed.pdf
Kranthi, K., Kranthi, S. (2023). Production of biochar from cotton stalks using the cone-pit open earth kiln technique. The ICAC Recorder, March 2023.
https://icac.org/Content/PublicationsPdf%20Files/e183f980_1077_4557_87c7_c984b829015a/Biocha r%20Recorder-June-2023-ss-eng-V1.pdf.pdf
Textile Exchange (2022). Organic Cotton Market Report 2022.
https://textileexchange.org/app/uploads/2022/10/Textile-Exchange_OCMR_2022.pdf
Tao, Y., Feng, W., He, Z. et al. (2024). Utilization of cotton byproduct-derived biochar: a review on soil remediation and carbon sequestration. Environ Sci Eur 36, 79 (2024).
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12302-024-00908-7
Zhang, Z., Dong, X., Wang, S. et al. (2020). Benefits of organic manure combined with biochar amendments to cotton root growth and yield under continuous cropping systems in Xinjiang, China. Sci Rep 10, 4718. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-61118-8
