When we talk about making fashion more sustainable, the conversation often starts with the finished product: what a jacket is made from, how long it will last, whether it can be recycled and what happens to it at the end of its life. Far less attention is paid to the landscapes at the very beginning of the supply chain. But as climate change places increasing pressure on agriculture and rural landscapes across the UK, perhaps that is exactly where we need to look.
Farmers are already experiencing increasingly unpredictable conditions, from prolonged heat and drought to extreme rainfall, flooding and wildfire. This summer has been a stark reminder of how our future will look if we don’t look into alternative ways of working with this new climate.
For generations, many peatland landscapes have been drained to make them suitable for conventional agriculture. As our climate becomes less predictable, maintaining that relationship with water becomes increasingly difficult. But what if, instead of continually fighting water, we learned to farm with it? And what if the fashion industry could help make that transition economically viable?
Farming with water, not against it
Leading the marketing at Ponda, a Bristol-based biomaterials company operating at the intersection of agriculture, wetland restoration and fashion, I get to see first-hand what this different way of working with the landscape can look like and share these stories with the world.
We partner with farmers to grow bulrush on previously drained agricultural peatland, raising water levels to restore wetland conditions. Once harvested, the bulrush is processed and transformed into BioPuff®, our plant-based insulation for clothing and accessories.
A few weeks ago, I travelled to Goose Meadow Farming Ltd in West Lancashire, where one of our partner farmers, Cameron Edwards, was harvesting bulrush for the first time on his family farm. He was doing so in a machine unlike anything you would ordinarily see harvesting a wetland crop: a bespoke harvester, adapted from machinery previously used for apples.
But what struck me most when I arrived wasn't the machinery. It was the landscape itself. After months of extreme heat and dry weather, so much of the countryside I had seen looked brown, dry and stressed. At Goose Meadow, I stepped into something completely different. The wetland was strikingly green and vibrant.
Standing there, the idea of climate resilience suddenly felt tangible. This wasn't a landscape struggling against the presence of water. Water was part of the system. And crucially, it was a system capable of generating an income for the farmer too. Cameron had reached a similar conclusion from a farmer's perspective.
“We weren’t quite sure if we were mad to start growing bulrush,” he says. “Certainly other local farmers thought we were, but we knew we had to look at alternative crops for the peatland on the wettest part of the farm.”
The approach is known as paludiculture: the productive use of wet and rewetted land. Its premise is remarkably simple. Rather than continually draining peatlands to accommodate crops that require drier conditions, farmers can maintain higher water levels and cultivate species naturally adapted to thrive there. Bulrush is one of them.
Why wetlands matter
Peatlands are extraordinary ecosystems and extraordinary carbon stores. Yet across Britain, many have been degraded through decades of drainage and extraction. When peat is drained, the soil begins to degrade, stored carbon can be released and the landscape loses many of the characteristics that make a healthy wetland so valuable.
Restoring wetter conditions can help protect those carbon stores while creating habitat and landscapes better able to hold water. Wetter peat is also less vulnerable to the devastating fires that have become an increasingly familiar sight during hot, dry summers. For Lancashire Wildlife Trust, which works alongside Ponda and farmers including Cameron, the consequences of losing these landscapes are already clear.
“Peatlands are some of our most important habitats, yet 98% of the peatbogs in the North West of England have been destroyed and degraded due to a combination of drainage for agriculture and peat extraction for horticulture,” says Kirsty Tyler from Lancashire Wildlife Trust’s peat team.
“We are beginning to dread spring and summer as wildfires are now the norm. These uncontrolled blazes are devastating for wildlife and we have lost so much nature over just a few short weeks that will take years to recover.”
“We need these peatlands to be healthy to safeguard our future. They can protect against drought, fire and flooding, while safeguarding local communities and significant populations of insects, birds, amphibians and mammals.”
But restoring landscapes at scale raises an unavoidable question: how do we make restoration economically viable for the people managing the land? This is where fashion has an opportunity to play a very different role.
What if fashion could create demand for restoration?
For wetland farming to move beyond trials and conservation projects, farmers need more than an environmental argument for changing how they manage their land. They need an income. And for that, they need to grow something somebody wants to buy.
The fashion industry has enormous purchasing power. Usually, we think about that power at the point of manufacturing: choosing one fibre over another, reducing synthetics, improving traceability or reconsidering how a garment is made. But what if we looked further upstream? What if the materials fashion chooses could create an economic incentive to restore landscapes?
This is what we are beginning to see at Goose Meadow. Ponda purchases the harvested bulrush and processes its fibres into BioPuff, creating a commercial destination for a crop grown as part of restoring wetter conditions.
“To complete our first harvest and see the bulrush heads being processed by Ponda and made into sustainable clothing has been really satisfying and opened up a lot of options for the farm going forward,” Cameron says. “As we deal with the unpredictability of climate change, developing a new income stream based on wetter farming whilst still growing cereals and potatoes will make the farm more resilient for the future.”
“As a young farmer I know I won’t be able to farm in the way my parents have, and I’m really excited to be part of developing an innovative way of farming on peat.” His experience gets to the heart of why creating a market matters.
Wetland restoration cannot rely indefinitely on asking farmers to make changes purely for environmental benefit. If regenerative land management can also produce commercially valuable crops, restoration begins to have an economic engine of its own.
Our clothes begin somewhere
Fashion can sometimes feel remarkably disconnected from the natural world. We see the finished jacket hanging from a rail, but not necessarily the landscape that produced its fibres. We know the name of the brand, but rarely the farmer. Yet every material begins somewhere. And if we want a genuinely regenerative fashion industry, perhaps it isn't enough to make materials that simply aim to do less harm. We should also be asking what their production can actively support.
Can demand for a jacket help make restoring a wetland economically viable? Can choosing one insulation over another create demand for a crop that enables a farmer to raise the water table? Can a fashion supply chain create value for landscapes as well as extract it from them?
This is why wetland farming is something far more people than farmers and conservationists can get behind. Brands can create demand for materials grown through regenerative systems. Designers can consider the landscapes behind the fibres they specify. And as consumers, we can ask not only what is this made from? but what kind of landscape did it support?
The idea isn't that bulrush will replace every conventional fashion material, or that wetland farming alone can solve the industry's environmental impact. It is about demonstrating that another model is possible. Farm to fibre to fashion, with wetland restoration built into the journey.
It turns restoration from something that can feel distant from the fashion industry into something tangible that brands, designers and companies can actively participate in.
Perhaps that is where some of the most exciting possibilities for sustainable fashion lie: not simply in making lower-impact versions of what already exists, but in asking whether the things we wear could help regenerate the landscapes they come from. Because our clothes begin somewhere. Why shouldn't they begin with restoration?
