I have spent most of my working life inside fashion. For more than a decade I modelled clothes for some of the world’s great houses and magazines, and I loved it: the craft, the people, what a garment can say about who wears it. What I never did was ask who grew it.
When I finally asked, the answer took me out of the studio and onto farms. I volunteered, listened to farmers and learned how cotton, wool and leather come out of the ground. I had built a career in an industry whose raw materials I barely understood, and so had most people around me.
On those farms I learned that soil is alive, and that it is either built up or worn down by the way it is farmed. The farmers restoring theirs were doing it with little support, and rarely because anyone buying their fibre had asked them to. I founded DIRT Charity in 2021 to close that gap. Not to criticise fashion from outside, but to work on it from within, with the love and knowledge of someone who has spent her life there.
DIRT works globally to advance biodynamic agriculture, a certified form of organic farming that treats the farm as a single living system, and to make it something fashion can source from. We do that through research, education and work with the industry on standards and sourcing.
This month, DIRT and researchers at the University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment published The Climate and Agricultural Impact of Textile Production. I presented it for the first time at Eco Age’s Convening the Next-Generation Materials Transition Forum at the Fashion Institute of Technology during Climate Week NYC.
It was the right room, full of brands, suppliers, innovators and investors discussing the future of materials. My point on the panel was that part of that future is already growing in fields, and that how we farm it matters as much as what we invent.
Our headline estimate is that the fashion and textile industries influence around 1.45 billion hectares, almost a third of the world’s agricultural land.
Influence, not ownership
When I first saw that figure, I felt the weight of it. Then I felt something closer to hope. A footprint that large is also a lever that large.
We did not measure the land textiles are solely responsible for. We measured the land this industry is in a position to shape.
A harvested cotton crop is roughly 40% lint for textiles and 55% seed for oil and feed. We counted the whole field, because every farmer I have spent time with thinks about the whole farm, not one part of one plant. If a brand asks for its cotton to be grown differently, the whole field changes.
The leather and wool question
Most of that land is grazing for cattle and sheep, which also supports meat and dairy. Fashion shares this footprint, and we chose not to carve it up.
But sharing a system is not the same as having no say in it. Walking away from leather and wool does not restore a single hectare. It hands the decision to someone else.
The better question is what staying in could look like. Grazing can be managed with soil, biodiversity and animal welfare in mind. Very little fibre or leather comes from farms certified to care for the whole system, so the supply brands need does not yet exist at scale. That is a demand problem as much as a farming one, and fashion can help solve it.
Method beats material
The finding I most want brands to take away is that how a fibre is produced often matters more than which fibre it is.
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The honest case for organic and biodynamic
This is where DIRT has a view. The more time I spent on farms, the more I wanted the evidence to catch up with what I was seeing in the soil. This report is part of that work. So is the Demeter Textile Standard, which we are developing with Biodynamic Federation Demeter International to follow a fibre from the soil to the finished garment and back into soil again at the end of the garment’s life; textiles made to the Demeter Textile Standard are compostable — which is groundbreaking.
A standard is only as strong as the evidence behind it. So I want to be precise about what we know, and honest about where the research is still thin.
Organic and biodynamic systems are associated with more species of beneficial insects, soil fauna and farmland birds than conventional farming. In Egypt, biodynamic insect control cut pesticide use to under 10% of previous levels while cotton yields rose by almost 30%.
Yield is where critics usually push back. Some studies find organic and biodynamic yields 20% to 34% lower, but they compare one field of a single crop against a conventional monoculture. A biodynamic farm grows many crops in the same space, often including perennials, and the report notes that a system like this may deliver a higher overall yield.
Biodynamic standards also set aside 10% of every farm for biodiversity. That is not land lost. It is habitat, and part of what makes the farm work. What the sector needs to fund is research that measures whole farms over whole years.
What should change
For brands, set sourcing targets on farming method and verified outcome, not fibre type. Write them into supplier contracts, and pay for the transition rather than leaving farmers to carry the risk.
For regulators, the EU’s Empowering Consumers Directive, which applies from September 27, requires sustainability labels to rest on independently verified schemes. The next step is to make farming method visible and verifiable, not just fibre content.
For investors, supply chain land is a material exposure that is largely unmeasured. Ask portfolio companies how their fibres are farmed, and whether they can prove it.
I do not want this research to land as a warning. If method matters this much, method can change. The figure is a map of the land we could still restore.
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by the authors are their own, not those of impakter.com
