Renbin Shen, CEO of Jintian farm—a medium-sized family farm in China’s largest cotton-producing region—is a visionary. He embraces organic farming as not only good for the planet but an opportunity to improve his farmers’ lives.
When Rare met Renbin in 2017, he was already transitioning away from conventional cotton-growing and toward organic. He joined the Better Cotton Initiative in 2013 and rotates his crops every three years (a technique rarely practiced in the region, even by organic farmers). But deep down, Renbin knew that it wasn’t good enough to be ‘slightly better than’ business-as-usual.
As he likes to tell his 200 farmers who work and live on the over 3,000-acre farm, “Organic starts from the soil, not from the product.”
Intensive conventional cotton farming is one of the most environmentally destructive agricultural practices—harming the air, water, soil, and farmers’ health and safety. When Rare approached Renbin to discuss transitioning the farm to organic cotton, and replacing chemical fertilizer with compost made from the farm’s natural outputs, he was interested but uncertain.
“We were skeptical about whether cotton could grow without chemicals. But we saw it as a growing market trend and wanted to try.”
Working with Rare, Renbin set aside 176 acres for organic production, and applied 300 tons of compost to improve the farm’s soil.