100% Organic Cotton

For millennia, cotton has been harvested all over the world.  The earliest evidence has been found in Mexican caves, dating to 7000 BC.  During the third millennium BC, cotton was exported from India to Mesopotamia and traded with the Egyptians as well.  In Greece, the historian Herodotus wrote of Indian cotton, "There are trees which grow wild there, the fruit of which is a wool exceeding in beauty and goodness that of sheep.”

Centuries later, with British expansion into India, cotton enabled the textile industry to become Britain’s leading export.  Manchester, England was known as “Cottonopolis” and became the center of the global cotton trade.  By the 1800s, however, plantations in the southeastern United States outpaced India and today is the #1 exporter of cotton and the world’s third largest producer of the crop.

To satiate demand and keep up with such production and competition, farmers have employed unprecedented amounts of carcinogenic pesticides and fertilizers to keep their crops as robust as possible. It takes approximately 8-10 years and $100 million dollars to develop a new pesticide for cotton.  It only takes 5-6 years for weevils and other pests to develop immunity to a new pesticide. Of the global pesticide consumption, cotton fields absorb 25% of these chemicals.  For every pound of cotton, 300 pounds of fertilizer are used throughout the year to accelerate its growth.  In California’s San Joaquin Valley alone, it has been estimated that less than ¼ of the pesticides sprayed among the cotton fields actually reach the plants…the remaining ¾ are carried by the wind to neighboring crops, forests, soils, waterways, and all forms of wildlife in our ecosystems.

Conventionally grown cotton is the most common fiber found in all of our clothing, bedding, and furnishings. Similarly, it is the same that is used for all of our babies, their clothes, their bedding, blankets and their toys.

Conventionally grown cotton is the second most pesticide-laden crop in the world.

Organically grown cotton is sustained responsibly, in a manner consistent with the earth’s natural cycles, without pesticides and without fertilizers. It was the original way and is the way of the future. sheababy naturals was created to produce clothing made solely with 100% organically grown cotton for a pure and natural beginning in life. It is a vital step toward natural living, for our babies and our environment.

"There grew in India a wonderful tree which bore tiny lambs on the ends of its branches.”
Sir John Mandeville, circa 1350.

So pure. So Natural. So sheababy.