PULSE, launched by the Government of Punjab, uses advanced geospatial technologies to demarcate and map urban and rural land. Better Cotton plans to leverage PULSE's capabilities to validate farm-level data and strengthen its Assurance Programme.
The collaboration addresses a significant challenge in smallholder countries like Pakistan, where the large number of small farms—often less than two hectares in size—makes data collection difficult without digital tools.
By partnering with PULSE, Better Cotton aims to corroborate field-level data of licensed farms and reduce the cost of manual data creation and validation.
Hina Fouzia, director at Better Cotton Pakistan, commented: "PULSE has had great success in modernising field boundaries demarcation across Punjab. For us, it presents a great opportunity both to streamline data collection and ensure it mirrors the results validated by the province's government."
The partnership is expected to enhance Better Cotton's data accuracy and efficiency, building on its recent initiative to digitalise field data collection for the 2024 cotton season.
By sharing farmer data with PULSE for validation, Better Cotton Pakistan will strengthen its Assurance Programme, which ensures licensed farmers comply with the organisation's Principles & Criteria and its efforts to support the production and processing of Traceable Better Cotton, which launched last year.
Muhammad Qadeer, field digitalisation manager at Better Cotton, highlighted the benefits: "This partnership will add a new layer of credibility to Better Cotton's footprint and outreach data. The validation of seasonal area under cotton through satellites and machine learning models will enhance transparency, data traceability and trust in the supply chain."
PULSE will share attributes of its 'Digital Gurdawri', a bi-annual record of crops grown across the province, to which Better Cotton Pakistan can contribute. Additionally, PULSE will offer technical support and training on its geospatial data capture methods.
Nasir Ashraf, geographic information system specialist at PULSE added: “Being the official custodian of geospatial data on land in Punjab, PULSE has a vision of providing an enabling environment for farmers, businesses and supply chain actors by ensuring that records are transparent, centralised and authenticated.”
Last week, (16 August), two US cotton growers told Just Style the consumer appeal of being able to trace the sustainable fibre throughout the fashion supply chain will boost demand in future.
