Cotton comes from the seed pods of plants in the genus Gossypium, a flowering shrub that produces soft, fluffy fibers inside protective capsules called bolls. These fibers are essentially single cells that stretch outward from the surface of the seed, growing longer day by day until they fill with cellulose and become the raw material for textiles. Today, cotton is grown commercially across dozens of countries, with China, India, Brazil, and the United States producing the vast majority of the global supply.
How Cotton Grows on the Plant
Cotton isn’t picked from a leafy canopy or harvested from a root. It grows inside a hard, green pod (the boll) that forms after the plant flowers. The process starts when the plant develops a small bud called a square. About three weeks later, the square opens into a creamy white flower. Within 24 hours, the petals turn pink, and within a week they fall away as the fertilized interior begins swelling into a boll.
Inside that boll, each seed sprouts thousands of tiny fiber cells from its outer surface. These cells anchor at one end to the seed coat and stretch outward, reaching their full length in 15 to 25 days. At that point, each fiber is essentially a hollow tube. Day by day, layers of cellulose spiral along the inner wall of the tube, thickening and strengthening the fiber. After another 24 to 40 days of warm weather, the boll cracks open to reveal the familiar white puff of raw cotton. From planting to that first open boll, the whole cycle takes roughly 105 to 130 days.
Types of Cotton Plants
Not all cotton is the same. The two species that matter most commercially produce fibers of very different lengths, which determines the softness and strength of the final fabric.
- Upland cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) accounts for the vast majority of world production. It has relatively short fibers and is used for affordable, everyday products like t-shirts, jeans, and bedsheets.
- Pima and Egyptian cotton (Gossypium barbadense) produce extra-long staple fibers that are noticeably softer and stronger. These end up in premium sheets, dress shirts, and luxury textiles. Egyptian cotton is grown in the Nile River Valley, while Pima cotton is grown primarily in the American Southwest.
The longer the fiber, the smoother and more durable the yarn it can produce. That’s why Pima and Egyptian cotton command higher prices, even though they represent a small fraction of total output.
Where Cotton Is Grown Today
Cotton needs heat. Seeds won’t germinate well unless soil temperatures reach at least 58 to 60°F, and the plant requires a long, warm growing season free of frost. That limits commercial production to tropical and subtropical regions, plus warmer temperate zones.
For the 2024/2025 marketing year, the top five producing countries are:
- China: 32 million bales (27% of global production)
- India: 23.2 million bales (20%)
- Brazil: 17 million bales (14%)
- United States: 14.4 million bales (12%)
- Australia: 5.6 million bales (5%)
Global cotton mill use is forecast at nearly 118.7 million bales for 2025/2026, the second highest level in several years. In the U.S., production is concentrated in Texas, the Mississippi Delta, and parts of California and the Southeast.
Cotton’s Ancient Origins
People have been using cotton for a remarkably long time. The earliest known example in the Old World comes from Mehrgarh, a Neolithic site in what is now Pakistan. Mineralized cotton fibers, preserved by contact with a copper bead in a burial, date to the 6th millennium BC, roughly 7,000 to 8,000 years ago. Researchers can’t confirm whether those fibers came from a fully domesticated plant, but the find pushed back the known timeline for cotton use by more than a thousand years.
Cotton was domesticated independently in at least two regions: South Asia and the Americas. The Old World species eventually became Gossypium barbadense and its relatives, while New World cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) was cultivated in Mexico and Central America. These two lineages gave rise to the upland and long-staple varieties grown today.
From Boll to Fiber: The Ginning Process
Raw cotton straight from the field is a tangled mess of fiber, seeds, stems, and leaf debris. Before it can become yarn, it passes through a cotton gin, a process largely unchanged in principle since Eli Whitney’s original design.
At the gin, cotton goes through three stages: drying, cleaning, and separation. First, dryers reduce the moisture content to between 5 and 8 percent, which makes the fiber easier to work with. Then mechanical cleaners pull out large debris like sticks, stems, and burs. Finally, the cotton enters the gin stand, the core of the operation. Rotating saws grab locks of cotton and pull them through a set of ribs that strip away hulls and remaining debris. The saws then draw the fiber into a roll box, where it separates from the seeds. A rotating brush or blast of air sweeps the clean lint off the saws and sends it to a final cleaning and combing system.
The separated seeds aren’t waste. About half of all cottonseed is crushed at oil mills to produce cottonseed oil (used in cooking and food processing), meal for livestock feed, and hulls. The short fuzzy fibers still clinging to the seeds, called linters, are scraped off and processed into a surprising range of products.
More Than Just Fabric
Most people think of cotton as a textile crop, but roughly 90 percent of collected cotton linters end up in non-textile industrial products. The chemical industry converts linter pulp into dissolving pulp, which becomes the base material for plastics, food casings for products like sausages and bologna, pharmaceutical coatings, lacquers, cosmetics, photographic film, and even smokeless gunpowder and rocket propellants.
First-cut linters, which are longer and whiter, go into more familiar products: medical gauze, absorbent pads, twine, wicks, carpet yarn, and batting for mattresses and furniture cushioning. There’s even an edible grade of cotton linter, a flavorless, odorless flour that’s more than 99 percent dietary fiber, used as an ingredient in baked goods, snacks, dressings, and processed meats.
From an 800-pound batch of cottonseed, a typical breakdown yields about 360 pounds of meal, 200 pounds of hulls, 128 pounds of oil, 72 pounds of linters, and 40 pounds of waste. Very little of the cotton plant goes unused.
Water Use and Environmental Costs
Cotton is famously thirsty. Conventional cotton farming requires significant irrigation, and in water-scarce regions this has contributed to environmental damage, most infamously the near-disappearance of the Aral Sea in Central Asia. Organic cotton production practices can reduce water consumption by as much as 91 percent compared to conventional methods, largely through healthier soil that retains moisture better and eliminates the water needed to manufacture synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. In certified organic processing, water use in later stages of fabric production is limited to around 50 liters per kilogram of fabric.
The gap between organic and conventional water use is significant enough that it has driven major clothing brands to increase their organic cotton sourcing, though organic cotton still represents a small share of the global market.