Southwest cotton producers in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Kansas, who are Plains Cotton Cooperative Association (PCCA) members and grow e3 Sustainable Cotton now have access to a fully digitized bale-tracking platform that enables easier and more efficient cotton traceability. 

“Sustainable, responsible cotton farming is at the heart of what PCCA grower-owners do,” says Keith Lucas, PCCA vice president of sales and marketing. “We have invested in tools and services – and collaborated with programs like e3 Sustainable Cotton – to enable farmers to process and market their cotton through a fully traceable and transparent supply chain.”

BASF’s e3 Sustainable Cotton program traces every stage of the supply chain back to the exact field where the cotton was grown. Participants use MyFarms, an online farm management platform, to map their fields. Using MyFarms and PCCA’s smartphone apps and web-based programs for gin module inventory, farmers and ginners can digitize their field and bale information. Farmers, new to the e3 Sustainable Cotton program, using the PCCA system also streamlines the MyFarms registration and field boundary definition processes.

See, BASF offers e3 sustainability program to growers, provides incentive

"We’re excited about this new collaboration with PCCA and to be able to bring our Southwest growers this capability,” says Jennifer Gasque-Crumpler, BASF e3 Sustainable Cotton program manager. “Not only because it allows for more accurate, field-level traceability, but it ultimately saves the farmer and ginner time by simplifying the process.”

Based on information submitted by farmers, the PCCA gin software captures and identifies Permanent Bale Identification (PBI) numbers as e3 Sustainable Cotton, which are automatically sent to BASF – no longer requiring manual submission.

Click here to learn more about the e3 Sustainable Cotton program.