Improving the Crop

Dr. Dean Ethridge says that cotton is one of nature's most valuable raw materials,"The best cotton in the world is going to be the longest, the strongest and the finest." Ethridge directs the Fiber and Biopolymer Research Institute at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

Cotton is a major crop in the U.S. It's grown from California to Virginia and American farmers produced some 19 million bales in 2007 alone. The commodity accounts for more than 25 billion dollars in products and services each year. Ethridge says, "Our fundamental mission here is to add value to this raw material. in nanotechnology and chemistry applications. That enables us to add functionality. Special functionality to cotton."

While cotton has been around for more than 5 thousand years; the research here is geared to improving cotton fibers for use in consumer products. High volume instruments take multiple measurements on cotton that comes from potential new seed lines. Dean Ethridge says those measurements reflect improvements in cotton from the fields, "The breeding programs have been extraordinarily successful over the past decade at bringing forth genetics that did two things: improve both the yield per acre that you're making and the length and other quality attributes of the fiber."

If you take a look at a standard bale of cotton. It weighs about 480-500 pounds. The warehouse here holds about 45 thousand pounds of cotton in smaller and larger bales. But this is only a fraction of the cotton that the fiber institute will go through in a year's worth of testing. Looking around, you can see part of the more than 150 thousand samples the lab will test each year. Part of the research involves actually putting cotton through its paces. Cotton from those bales is cleaned and combed. Then fibers are "lined up" into long strands called Slivers.

Ethridge holds up a long strand that looks like rope but isn't, "And I want to make the point that some people might be fooled into thinking that this is like a rope of some sort. But this fiber is nothing but parallel. It just pulls apart. It has just been made completely paralleled. This is like cotton candy almost. But Cotton's unique properties allow those loose fibers to line up; ready to be twisted into yarn. As he says, "We're going to twist it. And when we twist it, we've got something here. It's much stronger. That you and I cannot pull apart. Our fingers are going to hurt too badly to break that."

In addition to process testing, Dean Ethridge points to fiber examination takes a much more detailed approach, "With this instrument, we're measuring fibers one by one. We not only get average length, but we get the entire distribution of the fiber length and we've learned that we can do amazing things just by controlling that distribution. That kind of research is used, for example, in blending fabrics giving them stretch or making them wrinkle free or water repellent. We think we're on the verge of getting underneath to the genetic level to the molecular level to understanding the structural impacts and what they mean for the performance of the fiber."

Dean Ethridge says that research could impact the fiber's role in every aspect of production from cotton field to consumer sales, " We are very aware that cotton is going to live or die as an industrial raw material and that material, that raw material had better be competitive."