Organic cotton also uses less water. While traditional cotton requires, on average, 2210 l/kg of water to produce, organic cotton only uses 182 l/kg of total irrigated water.

Madhya Pradesh organic cotton farmers on average earn 17,079 rupees (about $227) from a harvest, almost 21 percent less than conventional cotton farmers, according to a 2017 report by Organic ...

In 2003, that amounted to about 55 million pounds of pesticides being sprayed on 12.8 million acres of cotton, according to the Organic Trade Association. Some of these chemicals are considered to ...

Workers load cotton bolls on a truck in India. Organic cotton only accounts for about 1% of world production. Image by Adam Cohn via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Organic cotton has been a steadily growing market in the past decade. In 2009-2010, organic cotton farmers worldwide produced nearly 242,000 metric tons of cotton, up from 37,800 metric tons in 2005.

Pepper used to farm more than 1,000 acres of organic upland cotton alongside his brother in the High Plains region of Texas, a fertile zone where more than 60 percent of the state’s cotton crop is ...