Gins already record most of the data needed to trace cotton back to the farm — but that information rarely moves beyond the gin, according to the fourth instalment of a five-year investigation into cotton origins in denim.

Released on World Cotton Day, "Step 4" is the latest output of the #WhoMadeMyCotton project run by denim professionals Ani Wells and Anne Oudard. The report draws on field visits and conversations in three major cotton-growing countries: Brazil, India and Turkey.

Its core argument: transaction records alone cannot reveal the conditions in which cotton is grown. Brands must also engage directly with farmers and their communities.

Why does the gin matter?

"Farmers don't operate in isolation," said Oudard, a former designer who leads sourcing and supply chain at Cotton Diaries, a platform focused on making cotton systems more equitable and resilient. A farmer's wider ecosystem includes:

• field and seasonal workers
• input suppliers
• agronomists and university researchers
• local traders and ginners

Gins sit at the junction where agricultural output becomes textile industry input. Because they pay farmers or intermediaries for delivered cotton, they hold essential origin data.

Yet the broader textile industry knows little about how they operate, leaving brands disconnected from ginners. Unless a gin works within a certified cotton system, its records may not follow a standardised format — making origin information hard to retrieve and compare at scale.

"The information doesn't get passed on, and so when at the end of the supply chain you want to retrieve this information, you have to go through a massive investigation that is unrealistic at scale," Oudard said.

She hit this bottleneck firsthand. Even with certified cotton backed by transaction certificates, tracing the fibre back through the supply chain took hours of painstaking work.

What would fix the data gap?

The main flaw, according to Oudard, is the industry's habit of starting with the finished product and working backward. If supply chain data were recorded systematically — with key origin information carried forward at each transaction, as in financial accounting — companies would not need to reconstruct the trail later. They would also learn about environmental degradation or labour exploitation early enough to intervene, rather than after the fact.

Records still have limits. They can show where cotton moved, Wells said, but not what the season cost the farmers who grew it.

"For that, brands need to know the people and the place," said Wells, communications director at Transformers Foundation, a nonprofit that positions itself as the denim industry's "supplier voice."

What is 'relational traceability'?

Wells and Oudard advocate an approach they call "relational traceability": pairing digital records with direct, long-term relationships with farming communities.

Direct contact gives companies insight into the environmental and sociopolitical conditions shaping production. When farmers can flag factors affecting prices and yields before harvest, "all of a sudden, your supply chain becomes way more resilient because you know what's coming at you," Oudard said. She framed this not as a "nice story" but as field intelligence for sourcing teams.

The report also warns brands against relying on "single-farmer" narratives that turn growers into marketing devices. Cotton farming is inherently communal, with farmers sharing risks, labour and support. Brands cannot realistically meet every farmer, but regular visits to farming communities can help them understand local conditions and address systemic problems at the source.

What does this mean for sourcing budgets?

Corporate practice has moved in the opposite direction, Oudard argued. Decades of cost-focused evolution have "squeezed" relationships "out" of the equation, and travel budgets are often among the first expenses cut.

Yet there is a difference between "a supplier that you've only emailed and a supplier that you've met in person," she said.

"We're often carried away by tech enthusiasm," Oudard added. "You don't pitch relationships to investors."

For denim sourcing leads, the report's implication is concrete: audit where gin-level origin data exists in your tier-three supply base, build record-carryover into transactions, and protect the travel and supplier-engagement budgets that digital traceability platforms cannot replace.