Interview: Marshall Hardwick, Cotton Farmer (USA Cotton vs. the World)
I chanced upon Marshall Hardwick at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. Marshall, an American, is a partner at family-owned Hardwick Planting Co. in Louisiana near the Mississippi border. He is also an advocate for American-produced cotton. If the term “down-to-earth” could be personified, Marshall would be the mold.
A: Family-owned business. We grow grains and cotton, and we’re along the Mississippi River.
Q: Is it advantageous for a cotton farmer to be close to a water source?
A: No, not necessarily. Vast majority of cotton in the United States is grown in West Texas, where there’s little to no irrigation. Cotton does not require much irrigation. We do irrigate, but it’s more supplemental irrigation. The vast majority of American cotton farms, I think two-thirds of the acres, do not irrigate.
Q: If water or rain is not a problem, then what are other problems farming cotton?
A: The main issue is pricing. It is a traded commodity, and it is very volatile. One year the price might be extremely high, and when input costs catch up to it, then the price will drop relatively quickly. [But] Inputs don’t usually fall quickly enough to realign themselves with the volatile trading [on the downward trajectory], so it can be challenging.
Another challenge is too much heat. Louisiana can be very humid, and that can stress the plant and interfere with the production of seeds and future generations.
Q: You said earlier cotton is typically grown in areas without irrigation, so I assumed cotton wasn’t as weather-dependent as other “crops.” Now I realize weather does have an impact on cotton. How so?
A: It doesn’t have to be cotton. Any plant. High temperatures and lack of water is detrimental to any plant… corn, soybeans. Some crops can handle heat better than others, but without water, any plant will die. Cotton can grow in Florida to Texas to New Mexico, California, Virginia, the Carolinas, year-round in South America, and all the way to Pakistan and India, so it is adaptive to a lot of different regions and climates. It will survive in a lot of different scenarios, but we need it to thrive. Producing lint is what we need.
Q: You mentioned commodity pricing fluctuations. Do you hedge at all on exchanges like the Chicago Board of Trade?
A: We do very little of that. We do some speculation, but it’s not the best business plan for us because we’re small. We don’t have a lot of financial resources, so if things go south, it can be very detrimental.
Q: If you can’t hedge on the exchanges, how do you stabilize your revenue?
A: We price our cotton based on the December market for cotton. Each farmer has his own merchant or cotton buyer, so if the price is good for you, you can ask to price x amount of bales based on the price today. We’re pricing the crop we’re expecting to produce.
Q: What happens if the yield is unexpectedly poor one year? Are there contingencies in the contract?
A: Well, no, it’s all case-dependent. If you promise to deliver 100 bales, and whatever happens, you deliver 80 bales, then you have to go out and buy 20 bales to make up the shortfall. [Note: Volatile weather and volatile pricing conditions are clearly a devilish mix.] A contract is a contract. If you have a good working relationship, you might be able to roll over 20 bales to the next year. For the most part, a contract is a contract.
Q: How does the contract specify quality assurance? From the consumer standpoint, sometimes we look at thread count, but what about from the producer/buyer viewpoint? How does one judge cotton quality?
A: Every bale of cotton produced in the United States has what’s called a Permanent Bale ID. We’re a unique country that does that. [From USDA: a Permanent Bale Identification (PBI) tag "gives each bale a unique 12-digit number that is not repeated within a five year period. The Classing Office scans the bar codes to enter the PBI into its computer prior to classing the sample. The gin code number is composed of the first five digits of the PBI."]
Every single bale–480 pounds–that is pressed together and shipped has a sample taken out of it. The sample goes to the USDA office and is assigned HVI–that’s basically how they classify the quality of the cotton. [From USDA: “Universal HVI Micronaire Calibration Cotton Standards are samples from bales of ginned and carded cotton lint with established standard values for micronaire.”] They look at strength, color, micronaires… [I look at him in puzzlement] the maturity of the fibers. Long story short, fibers at the bottom of the plant are much more mature. Lint at the top of the plant is more immature, not as developed. A mixture of those two components gets a micronaire. I don’t know the details, but when micronaires are taken to mills for dyeing, they absorb color at different parameters.
Q: I imagine manufacturing costs vary based on color absorption efficiency. What are other factors in judging or growing cotton?
A: That’s about it… also the length of the lint and how strong it is. Bayer, BASF, anyone buying or developing seed is trying to improve those qualities and the seed’s relationship with the weather. You could have the best variety [or strain] in the world, but if you have a terrible growing season, the harvest won’t have optimal yield. You might have hurricanes [in Louisiana]... too much rain, too little rain, it really has an impact on the quality.
Q: What are ideal weather conditions for cotton?
A: Very hot days and very cool nights.
Q: Deserts? Ah, Texas makes sense.
A: Texas, California [San Joaquin Valley], New Mexico… West Texas has very hot days, very cool nights. Cool nights allow the plant to relax and just decompress from the heat. Louisiana has very hot days and very hot nights. Think of yourself as being outside and your body having to work overtime just to keep it cool.
Timely rains are helpful. Rain over 10 to 14 days. But, depending on weather conditions, sunlight, heat also dry out the ground.
Q: Growing up, I remember seeing the phrase “USA Cotton” above a small American flag in retail stores. Today, it seems the branding has shifted away from the United States and towards fancier Egyptian and Turkish cottons. I haven’t seen “USA Cotton” stamped or imprinted on any of my clothing today. Why should someone pick USA cotton over Egyptian cotton?
A: California grows long-staple or pima cotton, a very high-end quality of cotton. We grow on our farm “upland cotton.” It’s in your jeans, your nice polos, your nice button-downs–it’s a good overall cotton. Really high-end t-shirts and bedsheets are going to be Egyptian or pima cotton but US Trust Protocol is a platform we use to tell our story, how we’re the most sustainable, reliable, responsible cotton grower in the world. We can supply mill needs, brand needs while also sustaining our environment, where we live, and not degrading the soil, wildlife, or animals. We are trying to create a sustainable environment where everything is thought of, and everything is about surviving for the next generation.
Q: If I am a wholesaler or buyer of cotton for clothing, what should I be looking for?
A: I think most buyers today are curious where their food or clothing come from. If you’re a meat eater, you want to know the animal lived a good life, a happy life and was not in a tough environment. It’s kind of the same, in my opinion, for cotton. You want to know you’re taking care of the land, reducing pesticides, respecting biodiversity, you’re having clean water on your farm, and clean water leaving your farm… for us, to tell that story, we rely on the US Trust Protocol.
Q: Unlike my childhood, most of my wardrobe today is not 100% cotton. Nike and Lululemon have made hundreds of millions of dollars incorporating polyester, nylon, and other fabrics. What changed?
A: A lot of people like the performance of athletic wear, and women like [non-cotton] leggings. They have a reputation of wicking moisture away from your body, but in my opinion, cotton can do as good a job. Cotton Inc. has done a great job incorporating technologies into cotton to make it performance-based, and you get the breathability of the fabric from cotton. Synthetic shirts don’t breathe well, they stink after several uses. It’s not for me.
A: US Trust platform might be your best bet. It’s a platform that’s only been around for four years, and they serve about 1.6 million US acres of cotton growers under their umbrella. We have a long way to go. Anywhere from 10 to 15 million acres in the United States are not part of the Trust US Cotton Protocol.
Q: Where can I find the best cotton clothing as a consumer?
A: I don’t know the answer to your question, other than to do some research. They’ve got about 40 brands and 1200 mills signed up to be members. Levi’s, Gap, Live Well, Target are involved. Everyone’s trying to figure out how this path is working. In general, clothing brands have to answer a lot of questions. There are problems with forced or child labor in China, and it’s an issue with all industries importing goods from China. No one wants to answer the question or be faced with the question, “Can you prove your cotton didn’t come from China?” Brands don’t want to say, “Yes, we’re against it, but we didn’t know, and we bought it.” They’re scared to death of that situation, and the best way to avoid it is to source your cotton from a known supplier like Trust US Cotton.
Q: What is something an outsider might not know about the cotton industry?
A: Several things. The US farming industry has gotten a bad reputation of being corporate-owned, [i.e.] they don’t care about the land. Majority of farms in America are family-owned. I am the fourth generation landowner. We’ve got a fifth generation, and they’re sixteen to ten years old. Our plan is to produce a business that [future] generation will want to enter, and keep that tradition going. It’s a family-oriented industry. Handshakes are contracts sometimes, and you don’t have to sign on the dotted line to hold someone accountable. People here when they say something, they mean it, so a handshake can be just as good as signing a piece of paper.
Q: Is that part of the culture that would fall under “Southern gentility”?
A: Yes, and I say that lightly. Sure, there’s been plenty of times when people have taken advantage of that [chuckles], and if it’s a big enough deal, you do need to have it written down on paper. For smaller deals, if someone says, “I’ll be there Monday morning at 7:00AM,” you expect him to be there.
[With respect to other issues] Roundup™ is in the news a lot as a negative aspect of farming. I think people have this idea that every Monday or every Wednesday or whatever day it is, we spray Roundup™ and kill everything. That’s not the case. It’s extremely expensive to run our machinery and put any herbicide or pesticide out. We use an economic threshold where we try to let our beneficials in the field do all the work, but once you have a threshold for test pressure, you trigger an application.
Also, we’re all working in closed cabs, we use personal protective equipment (PPE), we take a tremendous amount of precaution to take care of our employees and our environment.
Q: My rudimentary understanding is that some pesticides and chemicals destroy the longevity of the soil. What do big corporations gain to offset the damage, if any, used by mass deployment of certain pesticides?
A: I can’t answer that–I can’t answer a question directed to them. Chemistry has allowed us to do a lot of things in the world. Our industry relies on chemistry. Back in the day, in the 90s, we would go out there every Monday and start plowing the fields. We now know plowing the field in that way is detrimental to soil structure. Herbicides allow us to avoid that kind of trip. We’re not burning as much diesel. We’re not putting out gallons to the acre any more, we’re talking about ounces today.
Q: So everyone uses some form of weed and pest killer, and the main difference is the strength and quantity of those killers. Is that a fair statement?
A: Some herbicides require different amounts per acre, and toxicity is different. That’s a fair statement.
Q: Is the reason you don’t utilize industrial-strength pesticides in the same way as large corporations a matter of crop volume or something else? Does volume play a part?
A: No… these companies, when they come out with a product, they usually got a twenty year license on ‘em. Then generics come out. To answer your question, I don’t know.
Q: Is there anything you’d like to say before wrapping up?
A: This has been great. I appreciate the opportunity.
Q: Thank you for your time.
© Matthew Rafat (2024)
Disclaimer: The above is not a verbatim transcript of the discussion. Words and comments have been edited for clarity.
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