Conventional cotton has been called “the world’s dirtiest crop” thanks to the heavy use of pesticides and other agrochemicals used in the growing process.
“Cotton is an aggressive and destructive crop on an ecological level,” Simon Wardle, CEO of UK startup Gooddrop, tells AgFunderNews. “It uses a great deal of land. It uses an enormous amount of water, and a lot of the chemicals that are used on the crops are pretty harmful — not only to the land and with the runoff into rivers and other water sources, but it can also be very damaging to the individuals that work in the field.”
Gooddrop’s solution? Grow the cotton inside a vertical farming environment, which uses no pesticides and can potentially be built closer to the consumers.
With this idea in mind, Gooddrop is building what Wardle calls a “grow-to-wear” cotton apparel business. The idea is to grow cotton in vertical farms, and keep spinning mills on the site of the farms, to cut out emissions from transport.
“We believe we’ve got a solution for cotton, but it will need to scale, and the scale potential is enormous,” he says. “We’ve chosen a type of cotton that is 90%-plus of the global market. We’re looking at the mass products to make the biggest impacts and the biggest environmental and financial impacts.”
Vertical farming for cotton was ‘dismissed too early’
Vertical farming is most commonly associated with salad greens and strawberries, not textiles.
Wardle, a longtime architect, says there have been attempts to grow cotton in a vertical farm environment in the past, but that these efforts were quickly dismissed as being unfeasible economically.
“It was dismissed too early,” he says.
“The fact we can stack a field is a big thing in terms of annual yield. We also don’t have the vagaries of temperature movements and changes throughout the year, and we’re not limited to the window of early May to the end of October, as growers are in the field.”
Of course one of the major gripes about vertical farming is the amount of energy required to run them, since plants in these settings get their light entirely from LEDs.
Wardle acknowledges the challenge here, and says Gooddrop’s business plan includes self-generation of electricity at the farms.
“A lot of that will be dependent upon the location of the farms; there are different resources and methods available in different parts of the world,” he says. “With that, we then have a projected business model to produce profit down the line.”
Meanwhile, the average cotton harvest in the field is between 130 to 160 days, he says. In a vertical farming environment, it is possible to get two or even three harvests per year.
A two-pronged approach
Gooddrop is pursuing two paths at once: an academic one and a commercial one.
The company has a three-year-long research partnership with the University of Nottingham, which is home to a large group of internationally recognized plant and crop scientists.
The partnership has already designed and built “research units” for growing cotton indoors. At the time of the partnership announcement, Wardle noted that the teams had also identified cotton varieties best suited to indoor farming and also determined “the cotton propagation strategy and breeding program necessary for us to deliver our own Gooddrop cotton, optimized for growing indoors.”
John Foulkes, an associate professor in crop science at the university, noted that “The added value of this new unit is significant as it will allow us to manipulate the growing conditions of the cotton, manipulate the light and its wavelength in unique ways to increase the water use efficiency, reducing the inputs and uptakes required to grow the cotton.”
Ideally, the work in academia will propel Gooddrop’s commercial strategy.
“The bringing together of the commercial and academic is working beautifully,” he tells AgFunderNews. “They can meet at given moments to enable the commercial side to evolve, but the science can continue to refine and improve and drive yield and quality.”
While the company has plans to release some apparel, it eventually hopes to license its tech out to others.
“Ultimately, it’s going to be a negotiation with retail,” says Wardle. “We have a couple retailers that are very interested, and we might be collaborating with them to deliver the first garments grown and manufactured in the UK. They’ve been to see what we’re doing at the university.”
What’s next
Currently, Gooddrop is still “two 40-foot containers of research,” says Wardle. The company also has three growing rooms for experiments, and is also growing under glass “to give us some kind of balanced data so we can understand how abundant our crop is in the controlled environment.”
The next stage for the company is to scale up, beginning with building its first R&D facility that will have roughly 1,200 square meters of growing space, says Wardle.
“It will have a spinning mill attached. It’s in the design phase. We’re drawing up the architecture at the moment, and we have a variety of different locations and types of location in the UK.”
Wardle expects Gooddrop to come to market with its first garment in 2027.
