The Story Behind the Star Prize: Creating the 2023 Star Prize for Digital Winner

By Jane Craigie, British Guild of Agricultural Journalists

The world grows 27 million tons of cotton every year – led by China, India, the US and Brazil. It is a natural fabric that sustains 32 million growers – almost half of them women – and benefits over 100 million families across 80 countries in five continents.

As a crop cotton gets a bad rap for its sustainability, and unlike food, the majority of consumers don’t give the origins of a pair of jeans a second thought – who grew the cotton, how environmentally conscious is the ginning or dying process and what happens at the end of the garment’s life?

Hosting BASF’s global podcast, the Science Behind your Salad, gives me the opportunity to shine a light on farming, its realities, the innovations and where agriculture needs to do better for the planet. It is part of BASF’s Farming the Biggest Job on Earth advocacy campaign, highlighting the crucial role that farmers play in our society.

The cotton podcast story got me involved with a group of farmers from Greece where 85% of the EU’s cotton is grown and BASF’s passionate and driven cotton team. The farmers that I spoke to farm in Thrace, a region that borders Turkey and Bulgaria. All have been involved in a blockchain-based supply chain, established by BASF, which aims to be transparent and effective at reducing cotton’s environmental footprint.

From every seed planted, to every t-shirt sold, a digital footprint, or transaction, of each practice, process and person involved is recorded. What’s central to making the program work is that farmers receive a premium for their cotton sales, which rewards them for their work, whilst assuring consumers of the fairness, provenance, and sustainable production practices.

The topic was huge, because it touched on all parts of the chain, and because cotton is dependent on so many processes, so it felt, as a communicator, that I had to, not only record the voices of the farmers, ginners and the end fashion market, but also to tell the story of the blockchain technology and to back to the basics of how cotton starts as a seed and ends as a pair of jeans.

So, the story was told via a series of interviews in a podcast, as a web-story and using a range of infographics and films that linked anyone interested back to the content, however they wanted to consume it.

I was thrilled to win the IFAJ Star Prize for digital, for two reasons, that the work was recognised for its comprehensive nature, but, importantly for us communicators in IFAJ’s membership, that our work can be as powerful in influencing as independent journalism, something that can get forgotten.

The BASF podcast is targeted dominantly at non-farming audiences, to help them learn, appreciate and respect farmers and their supply chains. And the podcast has been very successful, a follow up episode I recorded and produced on sustainable agriculture has had 10,300 downloads.