Fields that haven't been sprayed are still green, their fibers hidden beneath a sea of foliage.Among my traveling companions are twenty European journalists representing such publications as The London Observer and Le Monde. For the cost of a few full-page magazine advertisements, the high-end sportswear company Patagonia has offered these writers all-expenses-paid junkets in hopes that they will return to report on the crisis in California's cotton fields, as well as the news of the emerging organic alternative. Also on the bus are a dozen Patagonia employees, activists from Mothers & Others and the Sustainable Cotton Project, representatives of a number of rival clothing companies, and a pollution prevention officer from the Environmental Protection Agency. Three years ago the board of directors of the privately-owned Patagonia swore off conventional pesticide-laden cotton and declared that they would only use organically grown fibers for cotton products or stop making them altogether. The company remains committed to organic fibers, as well as to educating competitors, consumers, regulators and others about the importance of growing the industry.

For most of this century, California farmers have grown one single variety of cotton, Acala, which yields a long-staple fiber marketed as the highest quality in the world. Expanding the output of long-staple cotton fiber has been possible only by replumbing the San Joaquin's waterways: drying up inland lakes and wetlands, damming and diverting rivers, and constructing a labyrinth of aqueducts and irrigation canals–not to mention pumping deep water aquifers.

"We're going to stop at a settlement pond," says Allen, and the bus navigates a narrow dirt road between two crater-like depressions in the parched earth. We file out onto a moonscape of shallow bowls a few hundred yards in diameter, crusted over with a white film that looks like powdered detergent. The smell of metal and chlorine causes our eyes to tear and lungs to constrict. "Because there are no longer any wetlands out here," Allen explains, "there is no other place for all this toxin-laden irrigation water to go. For the birds who have no other place to stop along the Pacific flyway on their way south, this is a major problem." (A 1997 article in Audubon magazine estimated that pesticides unintentionally kill at least 67 million birds in the U.S. each year, and it's likely they kill many more.)Back on the bus, the conversation turns to finance.

According to Allen, the average cotton farmer borrows $750 an acre to grow a crop in California. That means a farmer growing an average of 1,000 acres is $750,000 in debt at the beginning of the season, gambling that his or her profits won't be sabotaged by the cyclical, roller-coastering of international cotton commodity price fluctuations, bad weather or insurmountable pest infestations. In order to secure the loan, most lenders require that farmers have a chemical spray program in place as crop insurance despite the fact that 500 insects, 270 weed species and 150 plant diseases are now known to be resistant to one or more pesticides.

Once farmers have paid the rent for their ground (75% of U.S. cotton farmers are renters, according to Allen) the 17.5 pounds of pesticides, 290 pounds of synthetic fertilizers and four to seven acre feet of water (which can vary in cost from $9 to $300 an acre foot), a farmer is likely to net between $50 and $500 an acre for all the work, anxiety and insomnia. At the time of this tour, global cotton prices have plummeted to 49¢ a pound, well below the 72¢ average, triggering a national subsidy program for eligible farmers to recoup production losses.

"Cotton is called 'poverty weed' for a good reason," explains Allen. While the costs of farming have risen dramatically each year for decades, global competition and ubiquitous over-production have kept the international commodity price of fibers at 1970s-levels. According to the Pesticide Action Network, not only has the total amount of pesticides been increasing each year on cotton fields, but the use of the most toxic categories has also been rising.

The bus speeds north and the European journalists fire questions at Allen, trying to get a handle on the size and scope of the cotton farming issue. We pass banners draped across empty cotton bins that proclaim "Water grows our food and clothes," and "California farmers caretakers of the environment." At a gin workers siphon huge mounds of raw cotton fiber up galvanized vacuum tubes. Inside the noise is deafening. Continuous streams of cotton fibers and seed are separated from one another in tumblers resembling enormous slot machines. At one end of the production line, refrigerator-sized cotton bales emerge every few minutes. Each bundle weighs 480 pounds and is automatically sheathed in burlap. Outside, cottonseed pours out a tube into a conical mound about 30 feet high. Our next stop is Harris Ranch; not the oasis-like restaurant, hotel and airstrip complex that offers up some of the only non-fast food along I-5, but the feedlot, one exit north, where a stadium-full of cows stand on a feces-strewn dirt yard that spans what looks like 600 square acres. Covered in muck, they are crammed tightly on the grass-less lot. "Here's an idea," quips Allen. "In the name of efficiency, let's raise our cows on shit."

Everyone climbs out of their seats to scribble notes and snap pictures of the deplorable conditions of the thousands of beef cows which are rendered somewhat beautiful by the October sunlight. Many are lined up at troughs fattening themselves for slaughter on, among other things, corn, ground up chicken manure and cotton seed. "After they defoliate the cotton with organophosphate nerve poisons like DEF, Folex and paraquat, or bomb-making materials like sodium chlorate," says Allen, "they feed the seeds and other gin trash–untreated–to beef and dairy cattle. Cows frequently eat a diet of up to ten percent cottonseed and gin trash because it contains so much protein and fiber."

On most years, you can drive through the San Joaquin Valley for nearly two hours and still be passing the Boswell's cotton fields, but this year, the El Nino snow melt reclaimed more than 50,000 acres of the wetlands the company usually plants in conventional cotton, according to Allen. The scale of the Boswell operation is gargantuan. The equipment yard necessary to manage so many acres of cotton seems exponentially larger than the biggest farm supply yard I've ever seen.The city of Corcoran exists for their Oz-like gin which is flanked by a sea of bales and forty-foot modules of cotton waiting for processing. The company also owns several airports for the crop-dusting fleets that help it transform Tulare County, once home to the largest freshwater lake east of the Mississippi, into a grid of industrial cotton fields.

After lunch we meet Roger and Sandy Sanders, a Bakersfield couple who have spent three decades farming, and who ten years ago joined the handful of growers pioneering the market for organic cotton. Roger is an excitable man, tall and stout, never without a Dr. Pepper or a couple of dozen figures on the tip of his tongue. "It's been a tough year for cotton farmers," he says, "because of El Niño we got planted so late and a lot of fellows in my area are going to lose their butts. But I feel fortunate that I've diversified. I sell at twenty farmers markets, and I have both organic and IPM (Integrated Pest Management) cotton." The Sanders sell melons and other fruits and vegetables at farmers markets every year, and grow a thousand acres in cotton. What is most surprising once we see the Sanders' fields is that they can grow anything at all. They farm a parched expanse at the edge of the Buena Vista Lake Bed, twenty-five miles southwest of Bakersfield. "This is $250 an acre foot water out here," says Roger. "This is what separates the men from the boys, and I love it!"

They periodically release beneficial insects to prey on cotton pests rather than using pesticides. And they grow habitat strips on the perimeters of the fields to attract insects to the area. Despite it being a bad year for conventional cotton, Roger Sanders is very optimistic about his crop. Now that he has shut off the water supply, he predicts the cotton bolls will open up naturally in a month, without defoliants. More importantly, even though he uses some of the most expensive water in the state (and therefore uses it sparingly), he still has less money invested in his crop than many of his neighbors who he reports are teetering on the edge of fiscal ruin, partially because of expensive and often ineffective spray programs.

Organic cotton has allowed him to eliminate costs. "After five or six seasons you really figure this organic thing out," he says. "You put one-third of your land in grain, one-third in cotton and the other third in beans. With rotations like that you have a diversified crop strategy and ground that is naturally pumped up to grow a heavy feeder like cotton." Even with six years of successful organic cotton harvests, the Sanders are still financing their crops with less than a third of the funds that a conventional grower can muster. "Most bankers show you the door when you mention the O-word," says Sandy Sanders. "Because of the late planting we won't have high yields this year," admits Roger Sanders, "but quantity isn't what counts in organics." It's quality, and for the time being, scarcity.

Of the estimated 85 million bales of cotton grown this year world-wide, perhaps only 20,000 will be organic. (Most of that is already pre-sold.) California organic Acala growers, like the Sanders, will fetch $1.15 to $1.35 for each pound of fiber. Their conventional counter-parts might make $.72 per pound including 23¢ in government subsidies. "Why don't more farmers go organic if the economics make that much sense?" asks a Dutch journalist. It's a complicated answer that lies as much with the monolithic power of pesticide corporations and conventional agribusiness as it does with manufacturers and consumers.

In the 1995, the organic cotton market crashed when a number of companies were forced to pull out of the movement due to lackluster consumer sales for 100% organic cotton clothing. That left many organic farmers with high production costs and nowhere to sell their fiber. U.S. organic production dropped from 40,000 acres to the present 10,000 as farmers diversified into other crops. Now that the organic cotton industry is moving into a second phase, growers want to see contracts from manufacturers before they plant their crops in the spring. And groups like the Sustainable Cotton Project are encouraging companies to blend products with a small percentage of organic cotton in order to make them more affordable, thereby slowly growing the market.

As we head back toward Ventura and the coast, the idea that we're all traveling on the same bus, for better or worse, really sinks in. From what I've seen today, it seems obvious that the conventional cotton growing bus–the one that creates "the fabric of our lives," as the Cotton Incorporated jingle phrases it–needs a change of drivers. And seeing what I've seen, I wonder if too much damage has already been done by chemical-intensive cotton farming to ever turn the bus around. The next ten years will be critical and pivotal for California agriculture in general, as the struggle heightens to make cotton a more "natural" fiber.