We have been thinking of having some farm t-shirts made for a couple of years. Naturally, we would want them made as local and sustainable as possible.

A google search, just by luck, turned up a facility in Monroe that made t-shirts. Initial thought was “that is local”.

More investigation turned up TS designs in Burlington, NC. Whoa! They run their facility on bio-diesel and are doing all they can to reduce pollutants that are part textile production. Dig around their site for more information.

The plant in Monroe will run as few as 12 shirts for $24 each, and for a 200 shirt run, it is less than $4 each

TS Designs requires a 200 shirt min. with shirts costing $12-$15.

TS Designs offers 4 choices in t-shirts. Shirts made with 100% organic cotton manufactured entirely in NC, shirts made in LA out of organic cotton, organic cotton t-shirts that are fair trade, and conventional cotton t-shirts that are produced entirely in NC in a program called dirt to shirt.

Here is where it gets ethically challenging. How far and what direction do we take to locally grown?

One of the farms and the gin that is involved in the dirt to shirt program just happens to be neighbors of ours, the farm and gin is located about a mile away across the creek and through the woods as the crow flies.

The kicker is that they grow Monsanto Round-Up Ready gmo cotton.

Round-Up Ready

All the farmers around here, my dad included, are growing round-up ready corn, soybeans, and cotton.
So do we by-pass local farmers that are neighbors whose cotton is genetically modified and use organic cotton for our t-shirts?

There is some organic cotton grown in the US but not much. I was wondering where all this organic cotton is grown. Apparently India and Turkey.

“India took over Turkey’s long-standing position as the leader, seeing its production increase by 292 percent to reach 73,702 MT, or about half of world organic cotton production. Other leading organic cotton producers, according to rank, were Syria, Turkey, China, Tanzania, United States, Uganda, Peru, Egypt and Burkina Faso.” Source

Notice that the US is between Tanzania and Uganda in organic cotton production…

Apparently, organic cotton has to be picked by hand.

Hand-picking cotton

It makes most of the older folks around here that grew up doing it shudder. They hate the sight of cotton.
The three years my dad grew cotton, the neighbors around the fields would come out to watch it be harvested by machine and share how awful it was to have to hand-pick cotton when they were growing up in the late 40’s and 50’s.

Organic cotton seems hip but if it is hand-harvested.. it is close to slave labor. Good intentions start to fall by the wayside…

“For a while now, many of us have used the word ‘local’ as shorthand for food that meets a certain, somewhat ineffable quality standard. In this context, ‘local’ means something like this: This food is grown near here, on a human scale, by people who care deeply about the land and make thoughtful, conscientious choices for its stewardship. It is nutritionally intact and fantastic tasting. It thrives here, unpropped by excessive resources or technology. Its history is knowable and unsullied.”

“local” has been corrupted just like the term “organic”. A chef friend of ours asked his wholesale distributor what they meant by local and was told it was anywhere they could get a truck to in 24 hours. Not round trip, one way. That makes CA, Mexico, and Canada local…

Growing up, there were 3 feed mills, 2 farm supply stores, and a hardware store where you could buy anything from a chainsaw to a deer rifle and refrigerators and stoves in between within a 6 mile radius. All that is now gone.

I maintain a running dialogue with David at Renfrow’s about this subject. We don’t always see eye to eye but I am enlightened every time I walk into Renfrow’s.

One of the things that Renfrow’s does but does not advertise, and they should, is they take old high-quality shovel and hoe heads and replace the handles with high-quality ash or hickory handles. I bought a re-conditioned shovel and hoe last fall and they make new shovels and hoes from Lowe’s or Home Depot look like a joke.