Enhancing Biodiversity in Cotton Farming: A Scalable Methodology

Dec 13, 2024

By Emma Dennis

A month on from COP29, where calls grew for increased finance and resources for nature, the importance of conserving and restoring biodiversity has never been more critical.

Biodiversity is an essential ecosystem service for agriculture, as well as climate adaptation and improved resilience, but terrifyingly, WWF’s recent Living Planet report found that wildlife populations have dropped by an average of 73% in 50 years.

The growing demand for agricultural land has become one of the major threats to biodiversity globally. We need a solution to integrate biodiversity conservation and enhancement into agricultural practices to ensure sustainable production and the protection of nature. Cotton production – as a crucial cash crop and the most widespread non-food crop grown around the world – is central to this.

At Better Cotton, we have prioritised biodiversity within our Principles and Criteria (P&C), our global standard followed by over 2.2 million growers across the world. Our Natural Resources principle encourages farmers to adopt key regenerative practices that improve their soil health, conserving and enhancing biodiversity and natural ecosystems, and optimising the quality and availability of water.

But how can we effectively adopt these biodiversity practices into agricultural systems on a global scale? A recent case study in Punjab, Pakistan, offers valuable insights.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids