Episode #262
Sally Fox: Organic Cotton And Chemical Dyes

Organic cotton grower and breeder Sally Fox turned to naturally-colored varieties of cotton after learning about the atrocities of chemical dyes and dye waste. In addition to her long career of researching and breeding machine-friendly varieties, Sally is also outspoken about labor issues and the extractive marketplace practices that have taken a toll on farmers, weavers, and others in the once-healthy supply chain.

Our Sally Fox interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviewed Sally Fox in California in the spring of 2025:

Dave Chapman
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking with Sally Fox. Sally, I’ve waited a long time to have this conversation with you. You are a true pioneer of organic cotton in America and around the world. I want to hear the story of that. I know you have a love affair with cotton. I want to hear that. I know you love soil, and that’s so important. So, we have a lot to talk about. Where should we start? Should we start with organic cotton? You’ve grown it for how many years?

Sally Fox
I started in 1982 working for a cotton breeder. I was employed because I knew how to raise a pathogenic nematode for cotton. His focus in his breeding work was always… he bred tomatoes and cotton, and he was always breeding for resistance to diseases and nematodes. If you have a group of potential varieties and you want to know if one of them is more resistant to something than the other, then you have to expose them to it – whatever it is.

Sally Fox
In this case, he wanted a bunch of root-knot nematode grown. I had been studying under a professor of soil ecology. I had been working on rearing a biological control of root-knot nematode. It was a bacillus, and so I knew how to raise root-knot nematodes. That’s why I got the job – to make a big planting area full of root-knot nematode. Then we could test his potential varieties to see how resistant they were to root-knot nematode.

Sally Fox
But I also got the job as the pollinator. It was this chance to go into one of the pillars of reducing pesticide misuse. There are all kinds of ways to reduce pesticide misuse. One of the real foundations is: breed varieties that are resistant to whatever your troubles are – breed a variety that’s resistant to it. Back in those days, that was all done by classical plant breeders, and that’s who employed me in 1982.

Dave Chapman
Okay, that was before gene splicing and all of that.

Sally Fox
Way before. This is all by actually just putting all the seeds in, exposing them to what you are interested in finding out – if they’re resistant to it or not – then observing which ones are resistant and which aren’t. Then you decide which of those seeds to bring forward based on how resistant they are.

Dave Chapman
Then you breed the seeds from that plant, and then again choose the ones that are most resistant. After a certain number of generations, you’ve got a real winner.

Sally Fox
Yes, it’s the old-fashioned selection process.

Dave Chapman
Yeah. He was working with cotton and tomatoes varieties at that point?

Sally Fox
Yes. He was breeding tomato varieties and developing and breeding cotton varieties. He was so innovative. He had such great ideas. In fact, just now, what is this – how many years since 1982?

Dave Chapman
About 43 years ago.

Sally Fox
Right. Just now, there are all these companies that are doing his ideas, and they’re doing great business. He proposed these ideas, and the cotton community poo-pooed it, wouldn’t allow it in California – all this stuff. It was crazy. He was so ahead of his time.

Dave Chapman
What was his name?

Sally Fox
His name was Dr. Bob Dennett. He was in his 70s when I was working for him, and I was in my 20s. He was so revered by the canning tomato world that at his funeral, every canning tomato CEO was there. He totally changed the canning industry in Northern California. Northern California is a place where a lot of canning tomatoes are produced. It was his resistant varieties. He bred Fusarium and Verticillium – these are major soilborne diseases of tomatoes. He was the best at this.

Dave Chapman
He was working in private industry?

Sally Fox
Private. He had his own company. He used to work for a company called Goldsmith Seeds in Monterey. He was just an amazing breeder. He grew up in Hawaii as a kid and got into plant breeding. He was an unusual person in every respect. He worked for a while, but back then, there were independent breeders who supported themselves by developing varieties and licensing them out to seed companies.Then by the royalties that the seed companies paid, it supported their work.

Dave Chapman
it supported their work and they kept going.

Sally Fox
It’s a simple thing, which nobody does anymore, because somehow that whole system got dismantled when everyone got so big.

Dave Chapman
All right. We’ll come back to “big,” because that’s important. Tell me about what happened for you then. You were doing all this work to support his work.

Sally Fox
Right. I got employed to work for him. It was right after I had my master’s degree in integrated pest management. I had come back from being in the Peace Corps in West Africa, and I had seen all this pesticide misuse and disasters and all these things. But before I ever went and studied entomology or any of these things, I had been a hand spinner, a hand weaver, and a hand knitter. My passion was textiles.

Sally Fox
I taught hand spinning to older people as one of my jobs I had during college to pay, because I came from a family that couldn’t contribute, so I was working all the time. One job I had was teaching hand spinning to members of the Central Coast Hand Spinning and Hand Weavers Guild. I had this wonderful student. Her name was Dorothea. Dorothea was in her 70s, and I was 20 years old and in college – undergrad.

Sally Fox
She shared this terrible story of her daughter, who had been an art teacher in San Francisco during the tie-dye era, where everybody was tie-dyeing, and her daughter didn’t wear gloves. The dyes got into her skin and migrated to her brain and made her a literal vegetable. She was in a nursing home and died during the time I was teaching her.

Sally Fox
I had been focused on how to get rid of pesticides. I’ve got another story. The reason I went to college was I wanted to be part of the team of people that got rid of the misuse of pesticides. I was already familiar with who made pesticides. But then, after teaching Dorothea and hearing about these dyes, I thought, “Well, who makes dyes?” I go back to those library days – you had to go to a library.

Sally Fox
I went to the Cal Poly library, and looking at the history of dyes, sure enough, the companies that made pesticides all started out by being dye companies. Every single one of them started out as a dye company in the late 1800s or early 1900s. Then I became like, “Okay, in my own work of spinning, hand spinning, weaving, knitting – I’m not going to use any dyes. Dyes are, in my mind now, just as toxic as pesticides, if not more.”

Sally Fox
In my own work, I started only using natural colors of natural fibers. There are whole bunches of natural colors in wool, camel hair, musk ox. If you look at the animal fibers, there’s plenty of color. But when I went to cotton, which I like to spin, there was just white. Linen is a beautiful color on its own. There are colors of silk, but cotton was just white.

Sally Fox
At one of the Handweaving Convergence events, there was some textile that came from – I think it was either Nicaragua or Guatemala – and it had naturally colored brown cotton in it. I saw it and I was like, “There is color in cotton. I did not know that there was anything other than white.”

Sally Fox
Back in my brain, this is like 1977 or something, I see this. Then, I’m working for the breeder. This is 1982. He tells me he has this job. I go to work for him. I think it’s a full-time job. He says, “Oh, it’s only a minimum wage job.” I had gone to UC Riverside and moved up to Davis. He was outside of Davis. He had a greenhouse about 10 miles outside of town. He tells me, “It’s minimum wage. Is that okay?” “Yeah, sure,” I said.

Sally Fox
But then he neglects to say it’s only two hours in the morning and two hours at night, and it’s like this 10-mile bike ride back and forth every day. I’m like, “How could I even pay rent on two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening?” I said, “I need more hours.” He said, “Okay, good. Clean this greenhouse up.” “Fine.” So, I start cleaning this greenhouse and going through the drawers.

Sally Fox
One day, I open a drawer, and there’s this lunch-size bag, just like these. I open it up, and it’s brown cotton. I was like, “What’s this here? You have this. Why aren’t we doing anything with this? This is the most beautiful. It’s the whole basis of everything I’m working with.”

Sally Fox
When he came, and I showed it to him, I said, “Why aren’t we doing anything with this?” He’s like, “Oh, yeah. We got this crazy breeder from the USDA named Dr. Gus Heyer at Shafter. He’s been giving these to everybody, telling us that we can get insect-resistant and disease-resistant traits. It’s a source of every resistance, and it’s just the most fabulous cotton. But we can’t get rid of the color,” he said.

Sally Fox
I’m like, “Who wants to get rid of the color?” Then he goes, “No, there’s no market for colored cotton.” I said, “But we can make a market for colored cotton. Why don’t we make a market for colored cotton?” He said, “Why don’t you make a market for colored cotton? And you can have that part of the greenhouse, and I have ideas of how you could improve the fiber.” Because also, the fiber was really short. It was not just beautiful; it was also rather short and not easy to spin. And I was a good hand spinner.

Dave Chapman
Okay. I have to interrupt, so that people have a sense – the white cotton, which was the norm, was extremely vulnerable to everything.

Sally Fox
To everything, right. But he was, of course, breeding…

Dave Chapman
I understand, but just so that people understand, it’s my understanding that cotton – this is pre-genetic modification – was the most heavily sprayed crop in California.

Sally Fox
In the world – everywhere. But that is not its fault. There are white cottons that are resistant, and people have been breeding resistance to this disease, resistance to that disease, resistance to pests. It’s been a continual process – this breeding for resistance. It’s not as though no one was doing it, and that’s what the breeder I was working for was doing.

Sally Fox
But because it’s been a worldwide commodity, and it was grown in such vast areas, it became the target of everybody. Every chemical company, of course, found it worthwhile to register their chemicals on cotton because it’s such a big commodity. So, everything was always approved and ready, and it was such a large mechanized crop that it was an easy place to park many a pesticide- it seemed to me, looking from the outside.

Sally Fox
Indeed, a big focus of the integrated pest management people was reducing the pesticide load on cotton because it was such a major commodity crop. But still, in my mind, and in every breeder’s mind, we knew that the white cottons needed to be bred to be more resistant, which is why this breeder – the USDA guy – was giving these seeds to everybody. Nobody wanted to deal with the color, is what I heard.

Dave Chapman
If you could deal with the color, then suddenly you were freed from a great deal of chemical input.

Sally Fox
Exactly. That was the purpose. Like, wow, it’s supposed to be resistant to every disease and insect, and it has color. What it didn’t have was fiber length, fiber strength, the same amount of fiber around the seed, or machine pickability. It had a lot of things that needed to be in order to be commercially produced and used, and that’s what I focused on.

Sally Fox
That’s when my work began. I wasn’t an organic farmer. In 1982, I only started breeding. At first, I had everything in these pots in the greenhouse, and then I just thought cotton breeding was too boring. I couldn’t take it – there weren’t enough hours. There were like two hours. I ended up taking this job for the County of San Mateo as a medfly trapper, and then I chipped… I don’t know.

Sally Fox
I worked in all the normal things entomologists worked in, which is sort of pest exclusion stuff. Then I got this job in Bakersfield working for the IPM guy. As I took all these jobs that were sort of minimum wage, entry-level jobs in agriculture – not just agriculture, counties, all that – I had this car, and I always had all the plants.

Sally Fox
Wherever I moved, I had all my plants in pots that came with me. For a couple of years, I just had the pots. Then in ’84, I started renting land, and that’s when I started farming the cotton – more than just in pots.

Dave Chapman
Okay. Just to catch up for people, cotton is a commodity crop, meaning it’s a very low-value per acre. It can be high-value if you have enough acres, but it’s very low-value per acre. So, it’s done on scale, and because the scale is so great, that’s why chemical companies – it costs a lot to get a chemical registered – so they go, “Oh, great. Here we’ve got a million acres of cotton in the world. Let’s register all these chemicals for them.”

Sally Fox
Right, and it’s so mechanized. There’s one guy with 1,000 acres. The norm then was one farmer had 500 acres with one helper and machines. You have machine pick, machine everything. When you don’t have any labor, who’s getting the weeds? You have to use herbicides. You’re picking with a machine. You don’t have labor; what you have are machines, and then your other tool becomes pesticides.

Sally Fox
This was the only way, because back then, a good profit per acre for cotton was $100 profit per acre. So, you had to have a lot of acres to make it. Then cotton, of course, is only a rotation. People aren’t growing cotton every year on the same ground. They grow cotton in rotation. In the San Joaquin Valley, where I ended up being for quite some time, the normal rotation was cotton, alfalfa, sugar beets, and wheat.

Dave Chapman
Can you explain for people who don’t understand. Why would a farmer choose to have a rotation?

Sally Fox
Even if you weren’t an IPM person, you wouldn’t want to constantly use your soil… The plant uses different aspects of the soil. Cotton is a tropical perennial grown as an annual in temperate climates. It wants to be a tree. It wants to – the first year – establish a taproot that goes down four feet. It puts out a woody root mass, so it actually has this good position in the rotation for breaking up hardpans – it will go down.

Sally Fox
A lot of people use radishes as their cover crop to break up hardpans, but cotton does that. Cotton does all these cool things to your soil, like break up the hardpan. The other big plus is, despite all the rhetoric, it uses half the water of all the other commercial crops. It’s often used in drought years when you can’t grow anything else. Alfalfa uses at least two to four times as much water as cotton. It has this niche. It’s a low-value crop, but it’s useful in your rotation.

Dave Chapman
It’s very useful to us. We make our clothes out of cotton, and we have, for a very long time.

Sally Fox
Yes. Back then, we had a domestic textile industry. There was a great incentive from the textile industry to support and encourage cotton to be included in this rotation even though you didn’t make very much money on it. It was still important for the mills that they had a domestic source of cotton. Then it was important for the farmer to have something to break up the hardpan.

Sally Fox
It was part of their deal and rotation, but never anywhere near as profitable as sugar beets, alfalfa, or even maybe wheat. It’s a low-value commodity crop that somebody else dealt with. They would grow huge amounts of it, bring it to the gin, and those people would sell it, and you’d get your money. It was highly and heavily subsidized by the government because the USDA really wanted a domestic source of cotton for the textile industry in the U.S.

Dave Chapman
How would they subsidize it? Would they make direct payments to farmers?

Sally Fox
Back then, I’m not sure of all the ways. It’s changed so much over the decades. But one of the things I was keenly aware of that knocked my business out – contributed to the end of my business – was that they would pay the storage of the cotton in the warehouse. So, as a farmer, when you grew your cotton, it would be ginned, and the seed would be separated from the lint, and the lint would be baled up. The bales would be put in a warehouse.

Sally Fox
The USDA would cover the storage for however long it took you to sell it. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it actually was. There were all these sorts of little things like that which reduced the risk for the farmer, making it a comfortable crop to put in.

Dave Chapman
Okay.You’ve got this crop that’s being nuked with with insecticides and herbicides.

Sally Fox
Herbicides, primarily. In California, hardly any pesticides were used on cotton. We did not have the pests. The use of pesticides is highly regional. So, the worst places for pesticide use in the United States were Arizona, New Mexico, southern Texas, and the Southeast. Those were the areas where the worst insect pests were found. California had one insect pest that was a problem called lygus. People would spray one or two times back then.

Sally Fox
The main pesticide used on cotton was herbicides, and that was everywhere. It was so funny to me that I was always thinking about pesticides. Because I studied entomology, I was always thinking insects, insects, insects. Then it turned out the biggest issue with cotton was not, where I was in California, the insecticide. It was the herbicide and the defoliation.

Sally Fox
Defoliation was horrific, and a lot of people suffered. They got asthma from it. Defoliation was required once people started machine-picking white cotton, because you had to get the leaves to fall off before you could put the machine in the field. If the leaves were still there, it would stain the white cotton green. If you had too many green leaves in the cotton as it was waiting to be ginned, you could have combustion. It would ferment in the storage and then go up in flames.

Sally Fox
They had to invent all these chemicals to get the leaves to dry up and fall down before they could machine pick. If you were in Arizona or southern Texas, they were spraying insecticides 12 or more times a year, whereas in California, it was one or two times a year only. So, insecticide use was very regional.

Dave Chapman
But the herbicides were the same everywhere.

Sally Fox
Herbicides were universal everywhere, and defoliation was another thing that everybody was using.

Dave Chapman
Which was also an herbicide.

Sally Fox
Well, yeah. Some of them were.

Dave Chapman
They’re doing the same thing now with grain crops…

Sally Fox
Using the same desiccants.

Dave Chapman
With an herbicide to kill the plant so that it’s a way of rapidly drying out the grain before harvest.

Sally Fox
Yes, and that was the same concept. So, it started out in cotton in the ’70s, they were doing this. Everyone who lived there was subject to breathing all these horrible things. I worked in Bakersfield at the farm advisor’s office with my plants in pots. Then I started renting land. I eventually got a job with benefits in San Diego, and I used to drive back and forth every weekend to work on my cotton in Bakersfield.

Sally Fox
Everybody else was having a weekend. I would drive up and work on my cotton and drive back. Then eventually I left that job and got another job in Wasco, which is where they grew the original Bt, Bacillus thuringiensis, in a fermentation vessel. I worked at that facility for a number of years. All this work I always did was to pay for this research.

Dave Chapman
Okay. I want to go to the Bt, but several things first. One is, I want to just point out that we’ve talked about high use of insecticide and high use of herbicide. The third thing that is invisible to most people is that once you’ve milled the cotton, you have to dye it. I’m wearing some nice blue jeans. They did not grow blue in the field. Let’s talk about the dyes that are used.

Sally Fox
Okay. Back to my spinning and weaving days, every single thing from hand spinning, hand knitting, and hand weaving translates to machine spinning, machine weaving, and machine knitting – everything. The dyeing process is this joyous thing. People love colors. They love colors. It makes you happy. Each color affects you differently. I think we’re the only animal that doesn’t have fur or feathers.

Sally Fox
As humans, our path to being who we are and forming community is very, very, very much… textiles play an important part. The craftsmanship of textiles is a crucial part, in my opinion, of being human. Before chemical dyes came into being, people were using plants and minerals to dye their textiles and utilizing all natural colors of natural fibers. First, people used every natural fiber’s color, and then they would dye the white versions of wool and the white versions of cotton. Anything that was white, they could dye it.

Sally Fox
Dyeing is expressive and exciting, and is where so much creativity comes in. When you go to take that to an industrial scale with cotton, what I observed, and what is still true, is: first you take the fiber and you either spin it, then bleach it, and then dye it, or you spin the fiber and then you weave it, then you can bleach that fabric and dye it. But all dyeing requires first bleaching, then dyeing.

Sally Fox
Since 1860 or 1870 – I’m not sure the exact year that the chemical dyes all began to become the thing – but once they started doing it with chemicals, the waste effluent of the chemicals themselves became a toxic waste issue. When I first entered the world of textile, when my cotton first came in, the first customers I had were in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

Sally Fox
Part of the reason there was interest in these cottons, once I solved the technical problems of length, strength, and machine pickability, was that the first mills that took it up were interested in it because they were paying a lot of money to take the toxic waste from the dye process to toxic waste dumps.

Sally Fox
There were laws passed in the 70s and 80s – the Clean Water Act here, but in Europe and Japan, same thing. There were laws that you could not dump these dyes into rivers. You had to clean them up. You had to concentrate them and dispose of them properly. The cost of dyeing used to be the cost of the energy and water involved in bleaching and dyeing it, which involves water and power.

Sally Fox
But the cost of the cleanup ended up being two to three times the cost of the dyeing. When my cotton first was on the marketplace, the economics of using it – there was incentive to try to figure out how to use these cottons because of the cost of the cleanup of the dyes.

Sally Fox
If it cost, let’s just use this figure, $1 a pound to dye it, it used to cost two to three dollars a pound to clean the waste up. Therefore, the farmer could make a lot more money per pound, and the fiber could be sold for a price that brought in… The farmer, instead of making $100 an acre, could be making $500 an acre.

Dave Chapman
If that cotton did not need to be dyed.

Sally Fox
Correct. Dye waste wasn’t being cleaned up. In the beginning, when I first entered the market and this was first being sold to mills, the farmers were making considerably more per acre producing this cotton. The mill was happy to get it, and it made sense financially because of the cost of dye cleanup.

Dave Chapman
That was based on regulations like the Clean Water Act, which required that they not just take it out back and dump it in the river. So, regulation shifted the whole equation.

Sally Fox
It shifted the equation and, finally, for once, farmers were making money on cotton. But it was small. It was a niche market, but the vision was big. Levi’s, at that point, first started with 150 acres, then went to 500 acres – something like that – – then to 3,000 acres, and they asked me to get 100,000 acres’ worth of seed ready for the following year.

Dave Chapman
Was this certified organic cotton? Was there even organic certification yet?

Sally Fox
There was, and we were growing there, and nobody even knew. Remember those labels that used to say “organic” by the State of California…

Dave Chapman
Right. They had their own standards

Sally Fox
We had California, and you in Vermont, you had one. We had these state standards. I worked with Texas. I worked with the TDA to come up with Texas standards for fabrics. We had the first textile standards for fabrics written and signed into law by Rick Perry. First, it was Jim Hightower. Organic textile standards were done under Hightower. Then it was Rick Perry. Anyway, before there was…

Dave Chapman
There wasn’t USDA certification, but there was a market developing for organic.

Sally Fox
But no one knew they were buying organic.

Dave Chapman
Okay. I wasn’t saying we want organic. No, they just said, “We want colored cotton.”

Sally Fox
I was the one that wanted organic, so I took this as my big chance. I was like, “Okay, here’s my chance.” Everybody had been saying, “Oh, you can’t grow cotton organically. Oh, there’s no market for it.” You heard this your whole life. When you started out with the vegetables, you can’t do it. Number one, you can’t do it. Then you do it. Then they say, “Oh, no, it costs too much.” Then they say, “Oh, the market is too small,” on and on.

Sally Fox
Every single thing they say. Then the more I heard it, the angrier I’d get. Then I was like, “Okay, if you have to make more money, what’s the perfect thing? Here’s these dyes that cost all this money. If you have this cotton that grows in color, then all that money can go to the farmer, and the farmer can figure out how to grow organically, can pay for the whole crew, and figure out all this intricacy,” which took a lot of money.

Sally Fox
In those places in Arizona where they were spraying 12 times a year, they needed to use insect pheromones. They needed to be highly sophisticated in the way of dealing with the pests. That sophistication took money. If you’re going to do that, you can’t make $100 an acre. You have to make a lot more per acre to pay for someone to go and sweep your field once a week and tell you what insects are.

Sally Fox
If you’re going to buy Bt, you have to apply it at the exact right moment. All this stuff required people, expertise, and money. If you’re going to do that, you have to have a product that sells more. So, here it was. Here’s Levi’s buying it at this high price that brings them in the money, the contracts with me. I’m the one saying to the farmers, “If you want to grow for me, this is what I want from you. I want you to help me figure out how to do this organically.”

Sally Fox
I had buy-in of the people growing it, who wanted to figure it out. They wanted the contract. They wanted to figure it out. By the time that this all collapsed, we had 5,000 certified organic acres certified with OCIA. Back then, it still wasn’t USDA, but it was by the California standards. 5,000 certified acres in Arizona, where people were spraying 12 times plus a year for insecticides.

Sally Fox
We had 3,000 acres in transition. We had some that was conventional, but even the conventional had no insecticides. Even the ones that weren’t on the path to organic – which were a few – when they first would start out, would say, “Can we just farm it our regular way while we get used to it?” Those people, they just couldn’t handle the no herbicide thing. They didn’t have access to people to weed the crop, but they weren’t using any insecticides, and they weren’t using the folate.

Dave Chapman
Sally, let me ask you, for you at that point, what did organic mean? Maybe you could say, “Oh, let me tell you what it means to me now.” But was it just about no pesticides, or was it about something else?

Sally Fox
There we go, because I came to organic from the no-pesticide side. I had been studying entomology, nematology, and plant pathology. What mattered to me was not exposing farm workers and the people who lived in rural areas to all these pesticides. That was my entry into the concept. As a child, once somebody brought a No-Pest Strip into the house, and I got headaches. We couldn’t use No-Pest Strips.

Sally Fox
Then I was inspired in high school. I was going to be a custom hand spinner. I wasn’t going to go to college. I had this whole idea that I was going to spin dog hair for people for a living. I grew up in Menlo Park in Palo Alto – and this woman from Kenya, her name was Miss Wangari, she was getting her PhD at Stanford and eventually did receive it and went to work for the UN.

Sally Fox
But she inspired me to go into entomology and got this internship for me at this company that was founded by Carl Djerassi, who’s the one who made the money on the birth control pill. He took some of his money and formed this company that did insect pheromone and hormone research. His idea was, if we dealt with insect pests with sophistication – using the way they communicate with each other and the way they develop – instead of toxins, we could reduce the toxicity of agriculture.

Dave Chapman
Yes, absolutely.

Sally Fox
Still to this day, all of us in organic farming rely upon pheromones, and that was all worked out at this company. I got a job there in 1972 in the insectary, raising the insects. Because of Miss Wangari – who then became Dr. Wangari – I was encouraged to go to college and study entomology. Her thing was all this pesticide misuse in Africa, which was horrific, and I experienced it later when I was in the Peace Corps.

Sally Fox
I came to organic from the concept of how do we produce food without these toxic chemicals. But then, thanks to going to EcoFarm and getting to know real organic farmers, I realized that so much of this whole idea that entomologists, nematologists, and all the other -ologists had, was that we were always looking at it from the outside instead of from where it starts, which is the soil.

Sally Fox
It was because of EcoFarm, I would say, that I learned more and more that it actually is about the soil – and how do you have a living soil? If your soil is alive, you won’t have all these pests. Sometimes you’re going to get locusts coming through that are not from your farm, but many of the key pests that people do experience are a result of imbalances in the soil. So, I learned that after I was already drawn to it from the no-pesticides side. Does that make sense?

Dave Chapman
It’s so important. Yes, it makes a lot of sense. I always say, we all want food and cotton clothing that is not covered with pesticides. But that doesn’t actually, to me, adequately define organic. These are like these super bonus points. It’s what everybody wants. But why don’t we need pesticides for organic crops when they’re done well? That’s the question.

Sally Fox
That’s the question. It took me decades of being around real organic farmers to understand the importance of the living soil. I feel that there’s been this kind of funny… The success in the marketplace of organic among the non-farming community, part of it is by the non… The people who buy food and don’t produce it are looking for things that don’t have pesticides on them, without understanding any of the nuances of how you produce it.

Sally Fox
How we figured out how to grow these crops organically started out with soil, a deep connection to it, and an understanding of its importance. It became like the crops we produced. Our way to fund the soil health, and the crop is like the thing we have to produce so we can pay for the soil health. Whereas the people buying the products aren’t thinking about soil at all. All they’re thinking about is, “I want to eat something that doesn’t have pesticides on it.”

Sally Fox
So, it’s like one message from the marketing took over the minds of the non-farming public, and they don’t still understand that when they’re buying organic… If they’re buying organic from an actual farmer, that’s what the farmer’s doing – they’re building soil.

Sally Fox
Now it’s all mixed up. Now we have all these people, like you have with the hydroponic and this and that, where, oh yes, that stuff is supposedly organic and is pesticide-free. But they’re not building soil. That’s where it’s like, “Whoa. What happened here?” All of a sudden, there’s this disconnect between pesticide-free and actual organic farming.

Dave Chapman
I just interviewed Julie Guthman, and we were talking about the pressure of “industrial organic” – that’s what her term was – against what she would call “agroecological.” I would call it “real organic.” For industrial organic, all they really care about is permitted inputs. They have a mindset that is still chemical. It’s just, “Well, if I can’t use that, what can I use instead?”

Sally Fox
Right. Because they’re in this precision mindset that the conventional ag community went into back in my youth of, “Okay, we’re going to use pesticides…” All integrated pest management people started it. “We’re going to use pesticides, but we’re only going to use them absolutely when they’re necessary.” So, instead of 12 and a half times a year, it’s two. It’s not something that’s broad spectrum; it’s very specific.

Sally Fox
In my lifetime, I’ve seen the use of pesticides become more sophisticated and less cumbersome, and less problematic to the people who live there, and safer for the residue. So, when I was young and I would eat something that wasn’t organic, I would be physically sick. I could only eat organic food, or I would get sick, stuck in bed for a day. Now, if I happen to eat something that isn’t organic, I don’t get sick. The residues remaining on the conventional food have, in general, become less overtly toxic.

Dave Chapman
Overtly toxic.

Sally Fox
Overtly toxic. We are still left with all this glyphosate on the wheat that affects the microbiome. I’m not trying to say it’s safe. I’m just trying to say it’s not overtly toxic as it was when I was young. When I was young, I went to Cal Poly, and I joined this natural food co-op. I remember going and buying all these carrots. We did all these trades, so somebody would grow organic carrots, and then I remember being on my bicycle, riding miles to go…

Sally Fox
We did all this stuff ourselves. The regular supermarkets wouldn’t deal with organic food, but we all formed co-ops. We were riding our bikes, bringing carrots to people. All this because we believed that this was the most important thing for our health – of our bodies and, eventually, I learned, the soil.

Sally Fox
But I didn’t come from a farming background. I came from an urban background. I didn’t know about soil as I came to know it as time passed. But I did learn this from the farmers that I contracted with who wanted to be organic and never could, because there was no way that the value of the product could support the expenses of going organic.

Dave Chapman
Okay, so much there. I’m not going to talk about the fact that it might be that people… I guess I am going to talk about it just for a moment. There’s less obvious toxicity, like “I ate the carrot, and then I felt sick.” But I have three nephews who have gotten cancer, one of whom died of it, and they’re young.

Dave Chapman
I don’t think that that’s just bad luck. I think that’s because of the level of toxicity, and maybe instead of insecticide, it’s herbicide. I know one of them was exposed to herbicide, because he sued Monsanto and won his case, but he still got the cancer. So, this is all around us. It’s not going away. The level of cancer is going up, up, up.

Sally Fox
Yes, I agree. I’m just trying to say that when I was young, I was immediately sick.

Dave Chapman
I hear it.

Sally Fox
Did you have that same thing when you were young? Did conventional food make you sick?

Dave Chapman
No.

Sally Fox
Okay, you were stronger than me.

Dave Chapman
No, I have no memory of feeling ill. Many of the people who I know, who really came strongly into organic early on, it was because they were getting sick. But for me, it was just a good idea, and it seemed like that’s where the party was. All the people I wanted to hang out with were growing organically. So, I went to the party. Of course, that sounded like fun, but I believed it completely.

Dave Chapman
I want to talk about the economics here for a moment. If the farmers who are making the transition at this point in your story are being organic, and I guess they’re being certified by a state agency and OCIA. Back in Vermont, it was Vermont Organic Farmers. We were all just starting out. We didn’t know what we were doing.

Dave Chapman
Some of us were farmers somewhere, but nobody knew what we were doing about organic. It’s a new world. I wish I’d known about EcoFarm back then. I would have loved to have come and joined that community. But my question is, it costs more to grow it organically. Can you explain why it costs more to do it that way?

Sally Fox
All right. Let’s just start with soil fertility. If you can buy UN-32, which is, I think, still used – it’s like the cheapest conventional source of nitrogen in the soil – versus an organic form of nitrogen, the price differential for the two forms of nitrogen, one generated by a chemical process, synthetic nitrogen, and one generated by microbes digesting biologically developed nitrogen, is, I do believe, still ten times more for the organic form than the synthetic form.

Sally Fox
Even if we just looked at soil inputs, it’s ten times more for organic versus conventional. Then we look at the biggest cost on organic cotton, and that is weeds – herbicides. So, the cost of herbicides is pretty cheap and easy. As I said, it used to be 500 acres, one guy, and one worker who lived on the farm.

Sally Fox
They could handle 500 acres with herbicides. If you’re going to go back to no herbicides, which organic requires – which is why it was so hard, and why I still had some people growing with no insecticides, no defoliants, but still using herbicides – you have to have access to labor, and you have to prepare your fields differently. You have to pre-irrigate to get the weeds to come up.

Sally Fox
Then you have to plant after the first flush of weeds has come up. Then you have to have pretty sophisticated mechanical systems of cultivation. You also have to have access to people who will come and get those few weeds between the plants.

Dave Chapman
The primary weeding is with a tractor and a cultivator, some kind of sophisticated tines or baskets or something. So, you’re tilling the very surface of the soil to get the weeds when they’re very small. Then you have to have a whole crew.

Sally Fox
You have to have a whole crew, and in a lot of places, there are no workers available. That was the Texas High Plains, where most people couldn’t do the organic thing; it was the whole crew part. They did not have a bunch of people working in vegetables, where there were people available to come and weed. They could not do the no herbicide thing. They could do the no pesticide and the no defoliant, but they couldn’t do the no herbicide. That cost of hand weeding still is monumental.

Sally Fox
The guy that grows my cotton at scale for the mill in Japan that I sell to – and now I have a new customer in Italy – he’s in New Mexico. The part of New Mexico where they grow those peppers, it’s near Hatch, New Mexico, that’s famous for those peppers that are used in chile rellenos. Those chile rellenos peppers are labor intensive. They bring in a lot of money per acre, and people have to singe them. There’s a lot of labor.

Sally Fox
There are people there working around that you can hire to come and weed. But in places where there are not people to hire, you can’t do that. The cost of organic is not just the cost of the biological fertilizer versus synthetic fertilizer, which, of course, you know – but maybe not, not everybody knows – the synthetic fertilizers damage the biological life in the soil, which is why it’s so important to use biological sources of nitrogen and other minerals required.

Dave Chapman
It also has a huge carbon footprint. I can’t remember, but it’s a large percentage of our national energy that is used to make nitrogen fertilizer.

Sally Fox
It’s not an efficient process.

Dave Chapman
No. Haber-Bosch takes a lot of energy.

Sally Fox
It takes a lot of energy- like dyeing.

Dave Chapman
That’s right. These little things are kind of hidden, but if that’s something you care about, then that’s something you should care about.

Sally Fox
Right.

Dave Chapman
Okay. There’s the cost of fertilizer. However, do some cotton farmers grow their fertility as a green manure and till it in?

Sally Fox
Yeah. Most places where people grow cotton do not have water for a cover crop in the winter. This is one of the propaganda points that these regenerative cotton people are driving me crazy with, because they keep trying to impose cover crops on organic cotton. They claim that because organic cotton producers don’t grow cover crops, they aren’t regenerative, even though they’re organic.

Sally Fox
It’s very kind of a mean-spirited view, not knowing enough about the fact that most people growing cotton are doing so because they don’t have very much water. Everybody thinks cotton uses all this water. It’s like, “Wait a minute, no. Cotton uses half to one-quarter the water of any other crop. You tend to put it in places where you don’t have access to water.”

Sally Fox
What you don’t have water to do is put a cover crop in during the very short period of time between, let’s say, when you finish the cotton, which might be December. Sometimes people grow cotton two years in a row, and then they go to their next rotation. So, if it’s between the one year and the second year, you’re only talking about a few months.

Sally Fox
What they tend to do is, because here in the irrigated West, our rains come in the winter, they harvest their crop, turn it in, form the beds for the next year, and then the rains come. Yes, you get all sorts of things that grow over that period of time – volunteers – but you didn’t necessarily plant a cover crop that gets incorporated in a precise way.

Sally Fox
If it’s a drought winter, where you don’t get rains, then nothing’s growing, and you would not have spent money on a bunch of seeds that didn’t sprout because it didn’t rain.

Dave Chapman
Something I didn’t understand until I started coming out to California is just how dry it is. California has run as an agricultural juggernaut because of irrigation, but now that water is so short and there’s a competition between the population, which is always growing, and the agriculture, and it’s gotten drier. I know really great organic farmers who say, “I can’t grow a cover crop this year because I don’t have access to that much water.”

Sally Fox
This is true for the cotton people. The rhetoric from the regenerative group is that the regenerative people pick on organic cotton for not putting in cover crops religiously, and they criticize them for cultivating, which is the only mechanism for controlling the weeds if you’re not using herbicide.

Dave Chapman
The regenerative growers you’re talking about are using herbicides.

Sally Fox
Those regenerative people. There’s this whole other thing of regenerative organic, which is another thing. But the ones who are not regenerative organic, or regenerative, they use herbicides. They believe it’s irresponsible for people to touch the soil. They’re all on this no-disturbing-the-soil thing, like it’s suddenly the big crime. Just like, “Okay, so herbicides are good,” and taking a knife through the surface of the soil is now bad. What? It just depends on who has the money to put the stories up.

Dave Chapman
Who do you think has the money? I have noticed, and it’s been a fascinating thing, where essentially all of big food and big ag have gone regenerative.

Sally Fox
Isn’t it just amazing?

Dave Chapman
It’s amazing. We’re talking about Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta, Cargill, Bunge, and ADM. These are huge companies, and they spend more money on marketing than anybody you know spends on production. So, I’m just curious – is this just a windfall for them, that they can essentially not change…?

Dave Chapman
I certainly believe that there are real regenerative people who are trying very hard to do things differently, and God bless them, and we hope that they succeed. But they’ve mostly been awfully quiet about their brothers and sisters who are using massive amounts of herbicides and trashing organic at the same time.

Sally Fox
They trash organic at the same time. The other thing they keep claiming is that organic people use all these pesticides, which is another weird thing. We come back to going back, though, in time to the late ’80s, early ’90s, when this was really starting. The other thing that the organic cotton farmer had to deal with was insect pests. In my case, it was Arizona, and that area was rough.

Sally Fox
We had pink bollworm – that was the main pest – pink bollworm, but also whitefly. Those insects required pretty sophisticated and expensive management. The management involved the company I worked for: the pheromones. Most of the management was involved in something called male confusion of the pink bollworm. So, you would…

Dave Chapman
Males are already pretty confused.

Sally Fox
This involved taking all these little strings that were embedded in the pheromone. I used to work there, growing the insects for them to test. I had this sort of connection to the products because I’d worked there when I was so young. One of my professors at grad school had worked also on the male confusion of pink bollworm, and I used to raise pink bollworm, because there were two aspects of this.

Sally Fox
One is the USDA was rearing millions of pink bollworm, which I worked on for a while, doing and then releasing the sterilized males. They would release males that had been sterilized with some sort of UV light. They would be out, flying around. Then we, who were doing the cotton organically, would put around the fields these little strings that had the pheromones that would confuse the males.

Sally Fox
We had the males confused by too many pheromones, and then all these other males flying in that were sterile. This would reduce the general population of the pink bollworm. In addition, the cotton itself was resistant to pretty much all the insects.

Dave Chapman
Were the yields of an organic farm lower per acre than the yields of a chemical farm?

Sally Fox
Yes, in some ways. Part of that was the color itself – there was a lower yield because I was only starting to breed this cotton. The issue of yield is not just how many bolls are on the plant, but also the size of the bolls, and what the ratio is between the lint and the seed weight. This is called the lint-to-seed turnout. Modern bred varieties all have around 35%, sometimes even more, lint-to-seed turnout.

Sally Fox
What I started with on the green cottons that I have was 15% lint. The brown is still at around 22–24%, so there’s a lower turnout. You think you have all this cotton, then you go to gin it, and it’s mostly seed. There’s not as much fiber. The fiber around the seed is less than in commercial white cottons.

Sally Fox
But the other thing that changed – and this has to do with water and the broader conversation about water – is that in the 1980s, conventional cotton cultivation changed dramatically through the use of plant hormones. Remember, I was saying how cotton is a tropical perennial grown as an annual in temperate climates?

Dave Chapman
Yes.

Sally Fox
That has to do with the fact that we were breeding for varieties that do produce flowers in the first year, but they really don’t want to. The only way to initiate flowering in a perennial that you’re treating as an annual is to stress it. In the irrigated West, the preferred mechanism of stressing the plant to encourage it to flower was by withholding water and nitrogen.

Sally Fox
You don’t want it to have much nitrogen, and you don’t want it to have much water until it really gets going with flowering. After that, you can give it some, but not very much. In the 1980s, I don’t know who exactly – maybe BASF – came up with chemical plant hormones to apply to cotton to make it flower even when it had plenty of water and fertilizer.

Sally Fox
So, suddenly, conventional cotton in the irrigated West went from yielding half to one bale per acre to four bales per acre. This was because you no longer had to stress the plant to get it to flower. You were able to put a bunch of cheap nitrogen out – cheap to you, the farm not the environment – but you could put a bunch of nitrogen out and water it way more than you normally did, and you would be rewarded if you use the hormone correctly with these incredible yields.

Sally Fox
The conventional cotton production system shifted to this other system, whereas those of us doing organic stayed with the old fashioned one. We’re still getting the plant to flower by withholding the water. There’s this divergence between the conventional which is now… if you have irrigation and a lot of water, not all years do you have all this water. If it’s a drought year, the conventional grower may revert to the old method and get lower yields, but still get the soil benefits from deep root systems.

Sally Fox
They retain the agronomic benefits of growing cotton, even with a smaller harvest. But the organic farmer doesn’t have those hormones to use, so we’re still relying on the traditional method of water and reduced nitrogen to trigger flowering. That’s why, instead of four bales per acre, we might get one and a half.

Dave Chapman
A bale being like 500 pounds?

Dave Chapman
Yes, of fiber.

Dave Chapman
Okay. Now let’s become a consumer, a citizen. We’re saying “Here, citizen, you can buy this cotton shirt, and it can be organic, or it can be conventional chemical.” The organic costs twice as much to produce as the chemical. Can you explain to them why they should choose the organic?

Dave Chapman
I understand for the farmer, it’s like “I didn’t get exposed to all these pesticides. My kid’s not going to be part of the lawsuit against Bayer-Monsanto.” But I’m just curious, for somebody who’s just buying the product somewhere else, do they have to care about you? Do they have to care about your soil?

Dave Chapman
And if they do have to, if that is the point, why should they? What can you tell them about why they should care? They’re not going to eat the shirt.

Sally Fox
No. Remember, we’re talking about the cotton seed being, in the case of modern varieties, two-thirds. In the case of my cotton, eight-tenths, the seed goes to dairies. The seed is the primary feed for dairy cows. Without organic cotton, you don’t have organic dairies very much. They are connected to each other. Yes, there is a food produced by organic cotton, and that is the cotton seed that goes to the dairy cows.

Sally Fox
But other than that, back when I was starting out, and even though it was my thing that I wanted organic cotton, the people buying it from me didn’t necessarily know it was organic. They were just happy to not have the dye part because they cared about the pollution at their end. They were worried about the dye effluent, and they loved the color and the magic of it. My marketing thing in those days was “Organic is just better.” Look at this shirt I’m wearing. See these stripes?

Dave Chapman
Yes.

Sally Fox
The brown in this is 30% organic brown and 70% organic white. It’s just little bits of it. Small amounts created a pattern.

Dave Chapman
This shirt that you’re wearing had no toxic dyes used at all?

Sally Fox
No, and it’s all organically grown. Even the white.

Dave Chapman
But it had to be bleached?

Sally Fox
No.

Dave Chapman
So, it is just as it grew.

Sally Fox
Right. Even the white is natural.

Dave Chapman
Even the white is natural.

Sally Fox
Right. This was spun in North Carolina, woven in Pennsylvania, and cut and sewn on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia. This is Dana Lee Brown’s shirt. The pants I’m wearing are Japanese. The outside is organic cotton, indigo-dyed, which is a natural dye. Then the inside is my brown cotton. The socks are my brown cotton. You can’t see that.

Sally Fox
But at any rate, the point of this is my original marketing of the product was more appealing to the mills’ desire to be good stewards of the Earth, the environment, and of the people who lived around them, their downstream. That’s what they were interested in. They liked that the cotton was pest and disease resistant. They liked that. They did not make any marketing claims to their customers about it being organically grown. They just liked that it was.

Sally Fox
This was my thing. This was my big chance to do something, which was to use the money from the color to help farmers figure out the way. Because, as you know, it’s not so easy to figure out how to grow these crops without these chemical inputs.

Dave Chapman
But it is doable.

Sally Fox
They did it, and we did it. We did it because we made enough money on the product to fund… I had a full-time entomologist walking every field every week. I had a full-time agronomist who helped every… It took technical expertise, all of us working together, and none of this sort of, “I figured it out and I’m not going to tell you.” No, we worked as collaborators and with respect for each other.

Sally Fox
What I see now, so common, is people pulling each other down to say, “I’m better.” We didn’t have that. Even the people who didn’t like each other still acted like a community.

Sally Fox
Why would someone care about their clothing being organic? This is where the skin comes in. Your skin is the largest organ in your body. It’s absorbing things. Look at people who use nicotine patches and all sorts of medicines applied through skin patches – you absorb them. So, if the fiber in your clothing has toxins, you absorb them into your system.

Sally Fox
If you wear clothing that has toxic dyes on it, you absorb those too. That’s the point – this is what’s next to your skin. It’s the brown, not the dyed. There are a lot of people who actually can’t tolerate dyes; they get rashes and things. They were my first customer base. Many people who have autoimmune diseases end up being very sensitive to particular dyes. The dyes themselves are more of the issue on the skin, in my opinion, than the organicness.

Dave Chapman
Dyes are a big deal, and part of what has gone on is that it has become economically advantageous to grow naturally colored cotton if you’re dealing in a system in which they’re forced to pay to clean up the dye mess. I’m going to guess that even if they’re doing a good job according to the standards, it’s still not the same as not having done it in the first place.

Sally Fox
Maybe, maybe not. They were pretty good. I got really, really good and it did cost a lot of money, though.

Dave Chapman
It cost a lot of money.

Sally Fox
Isn’t this interesting, that the big retailers, all starting with Walmart, then…? Every major player ended up deciding that they were going to buy products from the parts of the world where everything was dumped into rivers. In the period of time from when I started selling in the marketplace and growing the business for all these farmers and all these mills, by the 1990s, all of the big players in textiles had gone to buying everything out of China, India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, where, even if there were rules about dye effluent, no one was enforcing the rules.

Sally Fox
A pound of yarn, if the dye waste was cleaned up… Here’s an example. There was one guy at the Gap. He was their sustainability guy. Back then, they had one person – it was a big deal to be in sustainability. Now, there are over 100 people working on sustainability at the Gap. One guy was working there, and I used to help them. I sent someone one day a week to help them source organic cotton.

Sally Fox
So, we were trying to do a khaki thing. I was designing khakis for them, mixing my browns, greens, and white to make particular khakis. He had just finished this whole study that cost me a few thousand dollars at a research mill to make a layup, and I’d sent it to him.

Sally Fox
He called and said, “Guess what? We’re getting offered khaki trousers, already cut and sewn, for less than what a pound of cotton costs, and that’s what the corporation is going for. They’re buying that. We’re done. Nothing’s going to be made in the U.S. anymore.” In two or three years, every single mill I was selling to – I was selling to 38 mills around the world – went out of business. Every single one. Not one was left.

Dave Chapman
They went out of business because their customers, which were the brands…

Sally Fox
Stopped buying from them and bought from their competitors in places where the dye wastes were dumped and labor happened to be cheaper, too. They did all this innovation. They designed and created all these fabrics, then these customers took the designs and brought them to these other countries where they dumped the dye waste, and had no labor rules that were enforced.

Sally Fox
The profit margin in the industry used to be modest. People used to be making 10% to 20% profit margins – the spinner, the weaver – they were all happy at 10% profit. People who worked at the Gap made modest salaries. The people I knew at Levi’s made reasonable salaries.

Sally Fox
Suddenly, when they started buying all these products in places where it cost so much less, they did not lower the prices significantly at the retail. They, instead of making 20%, were starting to make 80% profits. The retailers – the Levi’s, the Gap – those guys are now all making massive profits – massive, huge profits versus modest profits. All these smaller businesses that were spinning, weaving, and knitting closed – out of business like that.

Dave Chapman
I think it’s important, Sally, to just highlight that it isn’t that those smaller businesses were inefficient; it’s that they were responsible.

Sally Fox
Right. They were responsible, and most of them were multiple generations of owners. I remember I was selling to this mill in Italy. I used to buy these round-the-world tickets. You could get a round-the-world ticket where you had to be gone for at least six weeks but less than a year. I would go and visit all my customers once a year on the round-the-world ticket. I’d start here, and I’d go east. Then I went all the way around.

Sally Fox
I would go, and I remember there was this yarn store that was in the basement of the Louvre. You see the pictures of the Louvre, and they have this glass pyramid. I remember going down the stairs. I’m very young at this point, and I’m always nervous and insecure about myself. I remember I was so nervous. I was going to see three of my customers at this yarn fair under that pyramid.

Sally Fox
I got to the booth, and here’s this, again, 70-year-old man, tears, tears, tears. He had just found out they were closing his mill. He was a fifth-generation owner of the mill. That was it, closed.

Dave Chapman
What country was he from?

Sally Fox
Italy.

Dave Chapman
He was from Italy.

Sally Fox
Yeah. In most cases, spinners were very often multiple-generation operations, and people began working… I did sheets with Fieldcrest Cannon. They were in Kannapolis, North Carolina. I remember going to the mills, and the guys – most of the managers of the floors, of either the spinning or the weaving – were African Americans in their 50s who had worked as kids, worked their way up, and now they were the managers of a beautiful mill.

Sally Fox
All of them lost their jobs. They had built all this up, and they were extremely efficient. High quality, amazing industries – just like that, wiped out.

Dave Chapman
As I understand it, this was both organic and non-organic.

Sally Fox
This is all. Nothing to do with organic.

Dave Chapman
All clothing.

Sally Fox
All textiles. Very few people even knew this was organic. I knew it. It was certified, and I had a trademark. I still have that Fox Fiber called “Organic.” I let everybody use it for free. No one had to pay a penny for that mark as long as they used my cotton. I registered it in every country, in every category. It cost me hundreds. I don’t even want to go into how much it cost. I did this for everyone.

Sally Fox
Now, you have to pay this and that. All the certifiers require a lot of money. Of course, it does cost money. I know. It cost me a lot, but I did that. I did that for people so they could create the market. Then it was gone. What took over was this organic cotton that was white, dyed in every color possible, with the emphasis being on… All of a sudden, the sustainability story had to be that you were using organic cotton, and not a word about how it is processed.

Sally Fox
The focus became, let’s pick on farming, and let’s leave our part of the story out. We’re not going to talk about how we are putting our color in. We’re not going to talk about the fact that we are dumping dye waste. We’re not going to talk about exploiting workers. We’re not going to talk about any of that. We’re only going to talk about how we should be using cotton that doesn’t have pesticides. That’s what the marketing became for organic cotton. This so-called organic cotton cost 20% more than organic – not double.

Sally Fox
The few of us that remain organic in the U.S. have had to compete with… and we really are organic. Ours costs at least twice as much because we are actually organic. We’ve had to compete with these other parts of the world. There are legitimate, long-time organic cotton producers in other parts of the world. I know them. I remember them. They are wonderful. But along with them came a whole bunch of people who were sort of forced by contract to be organic.

Sally Fox
They see organic as some sort of colonial imposition on them. They even write stories about it and publish them – how they don’t want to be told they have to be organic. It’s something that someone makes them do, instead of something that comes from them – that they want to do and dream of. That they decided this is what they wanted to spend their life developing. It becomes a bad word, “organic,” for them because someone made them do it instead of them wanting to do it.

Dave Chapman
A lot of what you’re talking about right now is in India, which is where organic agriculture came from. Albert Howard, and his wife Louisa, were learning from the peasants of India how to do this. They came back and realized there was a need to make it a political movement, because there was this massive chemical industry building up.

Dave Chapman
They took this very traditional, highly skillful farming, and turned it into a political movement, which it still is. But the amazing thing is to go back to India and hear them going, “Oh, you’re making us do this. It’s not what we believe in.” Well, they’re trying to make a living.

Sally Fox
There are, of course, in India, real organic people. It’s not like it’s only those, but what I hear are cotton farmers being forced to do organic because that’s the only contract they can get. They don’t want to; they’re doing it because it’s the contract.

Dave Chapman
I know some hydroponic producers who would say they’re in the same situation. They don’t believe in organic. These accounts are saying, “We want organic greens, so let’s figure out how to do it hydroponically,” whatever that means. We know it’s possible to get certified. It’s not possible to actually be truly organic, but it’s possible to be certified.

Dave Chapman
One thing I just want to mention for people is we can’t just say, worker welfare. People are dying working in these factories just the way they died here 100 years ago, working in the garment districts, because they had the same situations. They were locked in, no safety features. The famous fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City – everybody in that factory died.

Dave Chapman
It was in the Lower East Side, and the bodies were lined up on the sidewalk, and the photographers were there from all the papers. Frances Perkins, who became the U.S. Secretary of Labor, was there too. Because people could see it, they said, “We won’t accept this. We won’t tolerate it.” Out of that, a lot of things came. A lot of safety standards came – OSHA came. There was a real chance for the life of workers in America to change.

Dave Chapman
Now the clothes we’re wearing are mostly coming from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh – someplace where somebody is being paid very poorly in a very dangerous situation. It’s not just the farmers; it’s also the people who are milling, weaving, working in the factories – the people cutting and sewing.

Dave Chapman
Can you explain what GOTS is says? Because people…

Sally Fox
GOTS, which I’m sour-grapey about because they allow dyes. Anyway, Global Organic Textile Standard, to their credit, ensures that the working situation is safe and that there are no slaves. When they use dyes, they make sure the dye waste is cleaned to the standards of the U.S. It’s actually a German organization. When you see the GOTS logo on organic textiles, it really means organic.

Sally Fox
They’ve made a huge effort to make sure it’s not GMO cotton. They test for it, they test for pesticide residues, and they inspect every mill along the way to make sure there’s no dumping of dye waste, no slave labor, and safe working conditions, etc.

Sally Fox
However, it goes way overboard. A lot of people in Japan – which, of course, has higher standards than the U.S. in terms of dye effluent and labor – are paid more per hour than our workers are paid. Anyway, many people in the textile industry are older – for instance, in their 80s. The GOTS inspector, when I was just there, told me they’re not going to renew their license because they want them to put a new roof on their barn, because they don’t think the roof is safe.

Sally Fox
There are mills in the U.S. that refuse to participate. For example, the spinner that spins sits absolutely will have nothing to do with GOTS because they’re so mad. They say, “We started organic here, and we aren’t going to pay all this money for someone to come in and ask my workers, one-on-one, if they’re slaves.” It’s really insulting.

Sally Fox
There are difficulties with every certification. What we have now are systems that can erode. However, if you’re a normal person at a store and you see the GOTS logo, you can be sure that the dye waste was not thrown in a river, and you can be sure that nobody was a slave and that they had a safe building to work in. So, despite my little negative comments, the GOTS logo is actualy a real thing.

Sally Fox
I, on the other hand, because I’m in the U.S. and so many won’t do this, feel like we need something here for U.S.-made products that is not part of GOTS. This whole business of testing for pesticide residue is creating havoc for some of our farmers.

Sally Fox
With organic, your farm is certified organic. If some neighbor, on a windy day, applies something and a small amount gets on your produce, you’re not supposed to be unable to sell your crop. We aren’t supposed to go out of business because of the bad behavior of a neighbor.

Sally Fox
We have buffers; we have all these things. But the current GOTS testing will take the whole crop out. It is then sold as conventional, which puts the farmer out of business. If you’ve put all this into your organic, and then one windy day with a bad neighbor ruins it. We shouldn’t be put at risk because other people were faking their organic.

Sally Fox
So, it’s a challenge we have with U.S. domestic production. In my opinion, I would like to see us stick with our organic standards, which do not require testing for pesticide residue on all our products. We test for GMO, but we don’t test pesticide residue on our produce – because it’s not our fault if a neighbor applies something on a windy day. We aren’t applying it.

Dave Chapman
Let me ask you a question. You told me that there was a rebirth of the American organic cotton industry that happened at some point because the brands realized that the stuff they were getting from Southeast Asia really wasn’t organic. It wasn’t according to Hoyle, and those brands had been sort of looking away, going, “Well, it’s certified.”

Dave Chapman
Suddenly, the publicity was too great, and they realized they had to do something. They came back to America because they knew they could trust it. Then what has happened? There was a chance. People were reopening mills, restarting…

Sally Fox
Exactly. What happened was regenerative came in, and everybody jumped to the word “regenerative” and dumped “organic.”

Dave Chapman
The brands.

Sally Fox
The brands went to regenerative. You can see it on the shelves. One of the things I learned in my old days was whenever I go to a city, I walk. You go and you count colors. There’s this whole thing that the people taught me how to do in retail. The other thing you do is you go in and you look at all the labels of everything. “Regenerative” became the buzzword. Here’s an example. I was at this Bremen Cotton Conference. Did I tell you about this guy from Candiani denim?

Dave Chapman
No.

Sally Fox
Okay, so there’s one denim mill left in Italy. One. Italy is a sort of very special place for textiles. Some mills have survived. In fact, I’m just beginning to work with a new one there. But the guy who owns Candiani denim was speaking at this technical conference in Germany that I got to go to a few years ago. Did I tell you about it?

Dave Chapman
Please tell me again.

Sally Fox
Okay. He had been in a car accident, and he was on all these painkillers. He said, “I’m going to say things that I know I’m going to regret.”

Sally Fox
He said, “We were using all this so-called organic cotton when it was 20% more, and we knew it wasn’t, because how can anyone grow any organic thing for 20% more? We knew it was fake, but we were just thinking we were supporting the concept of promoting organic. Twenty percent more, we could put that in our thing, and it wasn’t going to put us out of business and all that. Then now GOTS came down on everybody, and you have to be real organic. Now, all of a sudden, organic is double the price,” which is, of course, what everybody knew it was supposed to be.

Sally Fox
But everybody liked it being 20% more, not double. He said, “Now we have regenerative, and it’s 20% more.” That’s what happened.

Dave Chapman
Is there any certification, or is it just the claim?

Sally Fox
I’m sure there’s tons of service. You look at regenerative, and they’re all there these days. As you said, there are genuine, good people who are like I was when I was 25 years old. They’re very devoted, and they really care. I don’t think there’s any advantage in putting anybody down. But here we had this chance to grow our market back for our organic growers, and boom – gone again, because all the big brands just went to regenerative.

Dave Chapman
The regenerative brands aren’t claiming no pesticides or no chemical fertilizers.

Sally Fox
No, they’re just saying “regenerative.” It’s such a good word, right? Just like “natural,” “regenerative,” whatever – these words without a definition. I understand that. I just went through my certification. I hate it. Every year I say, “I’m never going to do this again.” I can’t take certification anymore. I have my own trademark – why don’t I just use that? I just can’t take it anymore. It’s so cumbersome.

Sally Fox
The people who care more about money, process, and paperwork love that kind of stuff. The people who farm, in general, are not motivated by recordkeeping. It’s a very challenging thing, because we need documentation and certification, but I can’t take it anymore. I know I’m not alone.

Sally Fox
So, when I look at regenerative without any definitions, there’s this attraction, like, “Wow, well, maybe I should just go…” You could just say the word, and you do not have any of the stupid paperwork. I don’t know. It’s just a mystery.

Dave Chapman
Yeah, what to do. One thing that I see – and it is the great issue around real organic – is that it is more expensive. I was interviewing somebody, and they were kind of unhappy with real organic because they went, “Well, of course, that’s just for affluent people, because it costs more, and most people can’t afford that.”

Dave Chapman
They’re getting stuff that’s really bad for them. Things that they do pay for – they just don’t pay for it at the cash register. What her suggestion was, is, what we need to do is change the regulation so that they can’t do the things that they’re doing in chemical agriculture, and make it illegal.

Sally Fox
Wouldn’t that be nice? Isn’t that what we all wish? I remember Amigo Bob saying they should be the ones that have all the lists of all the chemicals. There’s the apple, and then you put “apple,” and then you put all the chemicals. Us, we just put “apple.” This is how it should be. But we sort of went down this path that has taken us to this place that’s untenable in terms of paperwork, fees, and all this stuff – inspectors making more than we make. All this.

Sally Fox
It started out, and this is where we are. And then we have this whole other thing of cheap clothes that people wear two times and throw away. The bizarre thing is – not you and I – but the average person in China supposedly wears clothes two times and throws them away. I know that’s also true in the U.S. That’s how cheap clothes have become.

Sally Fox
I design yarns and fabrics for products that are going to last 30 to 50 years. That’s how all yarns and fabrics used to be designed – for 30- to 50-year lifespans – useful lives. This idea that you need all these clothes that you’re going to throw away – where does this idea come from? I don’t know. Influencers? You can’t wear the same thing more than once. No, no. The culture changes, and I’m not part of that.

Dave Chapman
I think part of it comes from clothes being so inexpensive. The question is, what if clothing wasn’t so inexpensive? Well, obviously you would own less of it and take better care of it. Is your life impoverished because of that? The problem is, it’s a very difficult thing to say, because people go, “Well, nice for you. You can afford it, but I’ve got two kids and I’m working two jobs, so don’t tell me.”

Sally Fox
We’re hearing this right now with the tariffs. There’s this whole, “I want two dolls…” whatever the conversation is of the moment, all these cheap toys from China, or cheap clothes from China. Instead of looking at it that way, I like to look at it through this vision of us being the only animals without any hair or fur.

Sally Fox
Clothing and textiles are an act of magic. They are our chance to transform ourselves and be more than just ourselves. They become our mechanism of connecting with each other. They’re our mechanism of expression. They’re an homage to skill and creativity. If we start talking about textiles as art and craft and something we treasure, then it changes the conversation from, “Why can’t I have clothes that I can throw away after two uses?”

Sally Fox
We don’t want to throw our clothes away after two uses. We want to remember all the processes that went into them and the love and connection that everyone had along the way. I think that is a story that is crucial for this switch. The other little switch – this habit of wearing clothes twice and throwing them away – is because so many of them are made out of polyester. We used to have cotton and all natural fibers making up the predominant composition of textiles.

Sally Fox
Now it’s back to 60–70% polyester, which is oil, which creates these microfibers that get into our brains and throughout our bodies. These microfibers are building up and gumming up the works. It’s actually highly toxic. People wearing those clothes – yes, they’re cheap – are poisoning themselves. Just like we used to be aware of the poisons in food, the textiles made from man-made fibers are getting into our bodies, the animals’ bodies, and the soil. They do not biodegrade, and we don’t have a mechanism for getting rid of them.

Sally Fox
So the argument of, yes, we need clean, cheap clothes can be solved by high-quality raw materials produced at scale for simple garments. T-shirts and jeans are simple, easy to produce with machinery that doesn’t require a lot of labor. There are plenty of products that can be made inexpensively in the US and in places where you’re not exploiting people. Exploitation is not required to make inexpensive clothing.

Sally Fox
But I don’t think the business community will move until they’re off their addiction to 60% profit margins – 50% profit margins, even. Until they get back to the 20% profit margins that used to exist when manufacturing was closer to where the products were sold. When we get back to that, it’s not that the prices are going to be way higher – it’s that the take of the corporations has to come down. It’s not the material; it’s the margin of profit that the stockholders are demanding of the corporations that are making the things.

Dave Chapman
Fantastic. I love it.

Sally Fox
Sorry. I went on and I’m getting tired.

Dave Chapman
No, no. I think I promised you we wouldn’t go this long, but we did. Sally, next time I come to Full Belly Farm, I hope to continue this, because we didn’t even get to genetic engineering.

Sally Fox
I know.

Dave Chapman
We have other things to talk about, but thank you so much. It was great.

Dave Chapman
All good.