Endearing ‘Millennials’ to Cotton

Cotton Incorporated’s “The Fabric of Our Lives” television advertising campaign has successfully created an emotional bond between U.S. consumers and American cotton for more than three decades.

Today, there is a new generation of consumers we must endear to cotton. To help accomplish that goal, in 2005 we launched Cotton’s Dirty Laundry Tour (CDLT) — an experiential mobile marketing event that visited college campuses across the United States. The success of last year’s tour has led to the addition of more college campuses for this year’s tour.

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An important part of that initial CDLT was a denim drive where students were asked to donate old denim apparel to be processed into insulation and donated to the rebuilding efforts in hurricane-ravaged counties of Louisiana. We called the denim drive “Cotton. From Blue to Green.”

The willingness of those college students to participate in, and show their desire for, preserving the environment — especially when it comes to cotton — was so tremendous, this year we decided to make it a stand-alone event. Some of our Public Relations staff traveled to Louisiana to help rebuild homes using the reprocessed denim insulation.

These and other Cotton Incorporated consumer-marketing events are helping to build a long-term bond between cotton and this new generation of consumers we call “millennials”.

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COTVAR: Comparing Varieties Online

Thanks in part to a creative idea by Cotton Board vice chairman Bob McGinnis, cotton farmers in the Mid-South now have a convenient online tool to compare cotton varieties.

Funded by Cotton Incorporated and developed by University of Arkansas’ Dr. Fred Bourland, the program, called COTVAR, is completely free and needs no installation. “I felt a tool like this would make it easier for producers in this region to understand which varieties would be best agronomically suited to their farm and Dr. Bourland has done a great job with the execution of this project,” says McGinnis.

COTVAR allows users to compare varieties based on technology, location, soil type, irrigation and any combination thereof.

Additionally, the online program reports a quality score that is determined by four HVI measures – upper half mean length, micronaire, uniformity index and strength. To use COTVAR , visit http://cotvar.uaex.edu.

Adding Value to Gin Trash With Fuel Briquettes

Cotton Incorporated’s Tom Wedegaertner and USDA Ag Engineer Greg Holt have created a new densification process that turns cotton gin trash into cost-effective briquettes that can be used as a replacement for fossil fuels, such as oil or coal.

“The market for cotton briquettes definitely exists,” says Wedegaertner. “We just need to find someone who is located in the appropriate market-use area and is willing to work with us to investigate the commercial feasibility.”

The effort was part of Cotton Incorporated’s Biofuels Initiative where research was targeted to identify opportunities to add value to the 2.5 million tons of gin trash from each season’s cotton crop.

Research, funded by Cotton Incorporated, conducted at the USDA-ARS Gin Lab in Lubbock, has demonstrated that briquetting is a more cost-effective and easier to manage process than pelleting.

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