The Studio

I am amazingly bad at keeping this blog updated! Where does the time all go?

I recently had a chance to visit a few ginners who are participating in this season's pilot of contract farming. The purpose of my visit was to train them on how to use the existing incarnation of the information system that was built to record information about contract farming, but also to get some feedback about the application from the ginners who have tried to use it. The application is remarkably bad, having been built in a vacuum absent of any input from the people defining operation processes as well as absent of input from users. The result is an application that doesn't really make sense and is incredibly cumbersome to use. That's why my team has been tasked with redesigning the application.

At any rate, I took advantage of the visits to also learn more about how ginners go about buying cotton, transporting it back to their ginning facilities, and processing it into lint cotton, and preparing it for sales. The month of March and April are quiet times at the ginneries, so I was able to get a tour without being very disruptive.

When you hear of how cotton gets from the 2-acre farm of a smallholder farmer and all it has to go through before it can become a shirt, you develop a whole new appreciation for the textiles supply chain, and you wonder how on earth clothing can be as cheap as it is. Here's a brief run-down.

Ginners in Tanzania setup buying posts in each village where there are cotton farmers they want to buy cotton from. Some ginners have as many as 300 buying posts. These buying posts are almost like small warehouses. A farmer will bring his/her harvest to the buying post, where it is weighed, and the buying agent manning the buying post will pay the farmer accordingly. In the competitive model, farmers may visit a couple different buying posts in his village to find the ginner who is offering the best price that day. And because cotton doesn't all get harvested in one go, the farmer may sell up to half a dozen times throughout the 3 months of marketing season.

On the ginners side, they have teams of people called route managers, who each visit 15-20 buying posts each day, for every day of the marketing season. For ginners who have 300 buying posts, each of the 300 buying posts is visited by a route manager every day of the marketing season. When the route managers visit the buying posts, they check how much cotton has been acquired at the buying post, reconcile that against the amount of cash that has been distributed, top-up the cash supply at the buying post, and make note of which buying posts have acquired enough cotton to fill a truck load and is ready for a pick-up. These route managers do all of their accounting on paper, and travel to their buying posts usually on motorbike.

When a buying post has enough cotton to justify a pickup, a truck is sent to collect the cotton for transport back to the ginnery. Once the truck arrives at the ginnery, it is weighed, and notes are made about which buying post(s) the cotton came from. The cotton is then unloaded into a warehouse. Up to now, all of the cotton we've been talking about is called seed cotton, that is, it's cotton with seeds mixed in with it.

At the ginnery, there's one building where all the cotton gins live. These machines separate the fluffy parts of the cotton from the seeds. To move the seed cotton to the ginning building, they don't move it by truck. Instead, there's a network of adjustable pipes and fan/vacuum system that just sucks the cotton from one building and blows it into the ginning building. I thought this was so cool. Once in the ginning building, the cotton is blown down a central main, where women push the cotton into the gins.

Once the lint has been separated from the seeds, it is blown to the end of the line, and against these screens which help compact the lint cotton into sheets and layers of cotton. These sheets are packed together to make huge bales of cotton, which will ultimately be sold to textile companies so that they can weave it into threads and fabric.

The logistics of all this was mindblowing and fascinating at the same time. I've always really loved logistics - there's just something so satisfying with seeing a well designed system work.

Here are additional interesting tidbits:

• 3kgs of seed cotton produces 1kg of cotton lint
• 1kg of cotton lint produces about 3 yards of demin, 12 yards of gingham, or 14 yards of calico.

When I think of the number of people involved in farming the cotton, making the fertilizers and pesticides, transporting the cotton, manning buying posts, ginning the cotton, weaving the cotton into thread/fabric, and manufacturing the clothes, I can't figure out how it's possible to buy a $2 t-shirt. *boggles*