The world’s biggest retailer is spending millions to revive domestic farms and factories with the help of startup American Giant.
Blackman’s grandparents established Warren Farms in 1941. Until the 1960s, roughly 95% of the clothes Americans wore were made domestically, so cotton from Warren Farms would travel by truck to nearby mills and factories to become Fruit of the Loom T-shirts and Levi’s jeans. But over the past five decades, the U.S. apparel industry has been decimated. Today, 97% of the clothes that Americans buy is imported, largely from China, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. The majority of Blackman’s crop will be shipped to Asia where it will be turned into fabric, then cut and sewn into garments at low-wage factories.
Blackman often feels he is at the mercy of geopolitical forces. He’s competing with farmers in developing countries who produce more cheaply because they pay lower wages and have weaker environmental protections. China, the world’s biggest cotton importer, has an outsized influence on the commodity’s price. This year, Blackman expects to lose money on his harvest because the price of cotton is less than 70 cents a pound, down about 10 cents from 2024, which was already considered a bad year. “The weather determines the crop, and the market determines what we get for it,” he says. But Blackman believes that if apparel manufacturing returned to the United States, there would be more demand for domestic cotton, allowing him to earn more. “Bringing the factories to America—opening them back up—will create a market for my cotton right here,” he says.
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