The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade. New Preface and Epilogue with Updates on Economic Issues and Main Characters, 2nd Edition

3Back at the Reinsch Farm

Today, Lubbock, Texas, is indeed the ‘‘cottonest city in the world,’’ and the surrounding farmland is the leading birthplace of the world's T-shirts. Lubbock has the world's largest cotton cooperative and the world's largest cottonseed oil mill, and the region produces nearly 30 percent of American cotton. Texas Tech University, on the west side of town, performs some of the most advanced cotton research in the world. And Lubbock is an international cotton center. A majority of the region's cotton is exported: loaded onto trucks and trains in Lubbock, and bound for ports on every U.S. coast. And at the bottom of this successful chain are neither plantations nor sharecroppers nor company towns nor even family farms, but people like Nelson and Ruth Reinsch.¹

No single factor explains the success that cotton farmers in west Texas have had in competing in international markets. The growers are embedded in a web of institutions that help them to continue their tradition of shifting market risks away from themselves, and they continue to win as much by limiting competition as by competing. Texas cotton farmers have solved, once and for all, the age-old labor market risk problem associated with cotton production, creatively applying mechanization, scientific research, and public policy to the challenge. These producers were also leaders in the development of the modern agricultural cooperative, a brilliantly simple organizational form that allows cotton farmers ...