Cotton cultivation in the Mississippi River Valley now costs between $900 and $1,300 per acre, with per-acre losses in parts of the Cotton Belt running $200 to $300, Mead Hardwick told attendees at Sourcing Journal's annual fall Sourcing Summit in New York this week.

Hardwick, a partner in family-owned Hardwick Planting Company, has operated the Louisiana-based farm across thousands of acres in Tensas Parish since 1980. He framed the upstream economics for a room of brand sourcing executives during a panel moderated by Angela Velasquez, executive editor of SJ Denim.

What does the cost stack actually look like?

Hardwick said his 2026 fuel bill will roughly double year-on-year. "If you put that in real dollars, that's roughly $200,000 as compared to almost half a million this year for my operation. That's not just cotton; that's our entire farm."

He tied the fuel spike to a broader squeeze on inputs:

• Seed and fertilizer prices have ticked up globally and locally
• Equipment costs have climbed at the same time
• Industry consolidation has accelerated under six years of inflationary pressure

"We've seen that at the equipment levels as well," Hardwick said, "along with, of course, the cost of fuel."

Why aren't brands seeing this?

Hardwick argued that most apparel buyers have not internalised the capital risk embedded in a single season's cotton crop. "I think it's really difficult for those outside of production agriculture to really get a grasp on just how complex our side of the industry is," he said.

He added that brands struggle with "the sheer amount of capital investment and financial risks on the table" for any farmer committing to commodity-cotton production in 2026. Commodity prices, he noted, are now broadly back to levels last seen 20–30 years ago, despite the input inflation absorbed since.

How is the upstream tier responding on genetics?

Brendan Collins, CEO of Avalo Inc., said the input model itself has broken. "It's all about selling farmers more inputs, and that just increases farmers' prices without necessarily showing their efficacy into better improvements," he said. Avalo uses artificial intelligence to breed non-GMO, climate-resilient cotton that requires fewer natural inputs.

Collins said Avalo collects on-farm data before each breeding cycle. "If we're specifically targeting creating the cotton that is ultra-drought-resilient for the Texas high plains, it'd be a very different cotton than what we would grow" elsewhere, he said.

His regionalisation pitch: "What resilience is, is really trying to breed crops for a given region to try and have those natively adapted crops that actually grow in the region, instead of trying to change the region and be this fake Eden."

What do brands need to do?

Tillman White, program manager at the U.S. Cotton Trust Protocol, said most brands source globally and lack farm-level visibility. "Unfortunately, they might not have some of that insight on what's physically happening at the farm," he said.

He argued traceability and credible measurement data must anchor the next decade of sourcing decisions if brands want to meet environmental standards and certifications. Direct partnerships with growers, Hardwick added, have historically been the route through which farms can adopt and scale advanced production practices.

White also flagged a domestic-sourcing opportunity. The U.S. exports a large share of its cotton, he said, but a significant portion returns in finished goods. "I think the opportunity is bridging the gap and making the connection from the field level with our growers and then our brands, helping them with their sourcing and purchasing decisions, and obviously creating value for the textile supply chain that's in the middle."

The sourcing decision this forces

Brands buying U.S.-origin cotton will need to move from programme-level sustainability claims to line-item underwriting of grower risk — absorbing input volatility, funding regenerative or low-input seed programmes such as Avalo's, and building traceability that ties a finished SKU back to a specific Cotton Belt county rather than a country of origin.