Noah Hardgrave and "Transitional Cotton"

Just recently I heard that Noah Hardgrave at Screen Gems Silkscreening Co. (Los Alamitos, CA) had passed away. He supervised the printing of two of our favorite shirts: our dragon and burning castle, and our toddler knight in armor. The packing slips from Screen Gems that accompanied our shirts read, "Thank You for Buying Organic" (referring to the blank shirts we selected). Once I had a conversation with Noah about organic shirts and how frustrating is was that the selection of them is still so limited.

He introduced me to an idea I was unfamiliar with: transitional cotton. I'm going to paraphrase, in my uneducated way, what he explained: A farm that grows organic cotton can't sell its product as "organic" until the fields have had three years to allow chemicals from conventional farming to work their way out of the soil. Cotton grown in those fields during the three years is called "transitional cotton."

Since farmers are uncertain about the marketability of transitional cotton, it's a big financial risk for them to go organic, because for three years they will have to grow cotton they aren't sure they can sell. Noah Hardgrave said that if shirt makers bought transitional cotton to help farms go organic, more farms might make the change.

So The Mighty Squirm would like to say that if any shirt makers decide to support transitional cotton by buying it and marketing "transitional cotton shirts," we sure would be interested in printing on them! Going transitional is going green! In fact, even though we're using more organic blank tees, we sometimes feel uneasy about it, because to get organic cotton many shirt makers have to go pretty far outside the U.S. to get it, and this doesn't do the U.S. economy much good. If we all used more transitional cotton, we could all use "Made in the USA" labels in our shirts a lot more often.

Well, that's how we at The Mighty Squirm feel. And we also keenly feel the loss of Noah Hardgrave, an excellent screen printer who strongly advocated environmentally conscious apparel manufacturing.