“I should be training young people to do my work.“

September 4, 2018 8:43 AM

Meet the ‘Fanatic’ Breeding Colored Cotton, Growing Heirloom Wheat, and Building Soil Carbon. (Civil Eats)
posted by The Whelk (9 comments total)

Great read. Fox should really be commended. Finding a profitable way to enrich the soil and enhance the viability of organic, naturally colored cotton is no small chore. I also can think of about several hundred middle aged ladies that would plunk down good money for an organic colored cotton/merino blend blouse that was machine washable.
posted by Dillionaire at 9:05 AM on September 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

Lovely article! I have some experience spinning coloured cotton. The browns are caramelly and beautiful, but the green is especially great, since there's no animal fibre anything like it.

You can buy Sally's cotton, in fibre, yarn, or sock form, at her website. I see she also sells coloured merino wool, wheat, and other bits.
posted by Gordafarin at 9:24 AM on September 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

Loved this, thank you. It's taking several bones in my body not to just throw everything away and move out there with her, it really sounds like she could use a personal assistant.
posted by FirstMateKate at 9:37 AM on September 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

This is wonderful. I this it's wild that the color actually grows deeper with washing!

I, too, would go out there in a heartbeat to learn from her.
posted by Elly Vortex at 9:44 AM on September 4, 2018

Heads up, makers. AVFKW stocks both fabric and yarn from Sally Fox-grown products.

I’ve linked to a search on her name so you can see both products and also blog posts about the California Wool Project, etc.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 10:27 AM on September 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

A good article with a worthy subject but I wish it had made mention of her staff or assistants. 75 acres of organic cotton and 150 merino sheep are not going to be managed by a single person: I'm sure that she has a few full-time staff and probably several seasonal workers.

It's not only that the laborers deserve recognition; it's also important that these stories not promote unreasonable expectations for people interested in the field. I know from my own experience that even a couple acres of mixed veggies requires more labor than a single person, and it'd be irresponsible for me to tell other potential farmers otherwise. Non-corporate-monoculture farming is a community project and has to be framed as such.
posted by Rust Moranis at 11:07 AM on September 4, 2018 [14 favorites]

Well, Rust Moranis, there’s info about that in one of the sub links from the AVFKW site I linked above. Some specifics:

...couple of her neighbors at Riverdog Farm help her with farm-work and machinery, but the bulk of the farm labor is done by Fox herself. The sheep are valued members of a team: people, animals and plants that cooperate to form the life-cycle of her farm...
posted by bitter-girl.com at 6:32 PM on September 4, 2018

So sad that agribusiness forced her to pick up and move multiple times because of worries about cross-polination. If only we could make them pick up and move. (I'm a bit salty about it since I have an anaphylactic reaction to a particular major pesticide, which means I can't consume honey (or indeed most conventionally-grown crops).)

The article paints her as "fanatical" and "doomed", but it seems to me that, since the industry itself is unsustainable, we need more people like her or we'll be in a bad way in a few decades. I agree she should be training young people, or her decades of experience will be lost.

Thanks for posting.
posted by ragtag at 6:30 AM on September 7, 2018

I'm curious about how her work played out in the long history of coloured cottons, which were mostly developed by indigenous farmers in and around Peru. I'm not calling into question whether she improved the product, I assume she did, but I always get a little concerned when I see someone taking a western IP protection approach to something they couldn't have developed without existing indigenous knowledge.

Here's another article about James Vreeland, who is another white person, but who works directly with Peruvian communities to produce and market naturally coloured cotton. His company, Peru Naturtex, produced the cotton I used in knitting my undyed stripey sweater.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:36 AM on September 8, 2018 [2 favorites]