By David Statham: Moree, New South Wales, Australia
Our brand is called Good Earth Cotton because we’re good to the earth and it’s good to us. Good Earth Cotton means that we sequester more carbon in our farming practices than we emit.
But it’s not just a brand. It’s a way of doing business. We can do well and do good at the same time—and we can even make farming fashionable.
Here on our farm in Australia, we’re telling a carbon-positive story about agriculture. We’re meeting both the needs and expectations of consumers by supplying companies with raw material for clothes and doing it in a regenerative way that helps the environment.
My wife Danielle and I run Sundown Pastoral, a conglomerate of 15 properties aggregated together between 1984 and 1998, encompassing 64,500 acres, including 26,000 acres of irrigated cotton, 25,000 acres dryland farming, and 10,000 acres of cattle pastures in New South Wales, about 600 km north of Sydney. Our major product is cotton, and we also grow wheat, chickpeas, faba beans, and canola in rotation. The cattle graze on oats and Lab Lab. The cattle operation is a background operation. We don’t own the cattle. Instead, we’re paid by how much weight they gain while they’re in our pastures.
Our family has been at it ever since my father started buying farmland in the early 1980s, when I was just becoming an adult. I’ve devoted my working life to this project. Today, we’re well established and thriving. We are constantly adapting to circumstances, taking up new technologies, and seizing opportunities.
That’s why we founded Good Earth Cotton.
It started out of sheer economic necessity. We live in a dry area and must conserve water, which is our scarcest resource. Our constant goal is to grow more crop per drop.
This led us to regenerative practices that keep moisture locked in the soil, where crops can use it. Over the last two decades, we’ve moved from tilling our fields to a minimal and zero-till approach. This also happens to be good for biodiversity, keeping our soil healthy and nutritious for crops as well as birds, insects, worms, and other wildlife.
Along the way, we’ve kept careful records on everything from inputs to yield. This allows us to take a long view as we analyze our performance and improve our methods. We took a big step forward about six years ago, when we began to use Downforce technology, allowing us to measure carbon content by satellite, gaining information about every ten square meters of our farm every ten days while giving you records looking 7 years back.
The Downforce technology clearly shows that our change of practices has increased soil carbon over the whole property and can measure the year-on-year change, reflecting this information in our annual reports to our customers.
When I started farming, this would have felt like science fiction. Now it’s science in action.
One of the lessons we’ve learned lately is that if we farm the right way, we can sequester more carbon in the soil than we emit in greenhouse gases.
Farmers are often blamed for exacerbating climate change through carbon emissions. Our farm is proof that farmers are part of the solution—and that we can develop methods that make economic sense for our operation as well as environmental sense for everybody.
Consumers increasingly want to know that what they buy comes from sustainable sources. This means that brands want to work with farms like ours. We have the traceability of the product, using Fibretrace, to validate to them that net-zero production begins right here. Then we can become a part of their marketing strategy. A positive story about sustainability starts on our farm.
My wife Danielle deserves much of the credit. I know a lot about farming, but she’s the one with the fashion sense. Under her influence, Good Earth Cotton and the Fibertrace business lets consumers trace their clothes back to us, learning about how we work in harmony with nature.
I’m pleased to say that demand for our cotton now outstrips the supply.
And we’re still striving to do better. By this time next year, we expect to be fully self-sufficient in fuel and fertilizer. We’re working with a New Zealand-based company to transition to hydrogen fuel and producing our own anhydrous ammonia. This green-energy initiative is good for the climate. It will also make us more resilient at a time of tumultuous energy and nitrogen prices.
As we do good, Good Earth Cotton keeps doing better.
David and Danielle Statham are creating the world’s first carbon positive farm, in northern North South Wales, Australia.As co-founders of Sundowner Pastoral, Good Earth Cotton, and FiberTrace Technologies, they are at the forefront of technology, innovation and the application of regenerative farming as they produce cotton, cattle, wheat, canola, and pulse crops. David is a member of the Global Farmer Network.www.globalfarmernetwork.org
