Our t-shirts started here or near here anyway,
on a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta. America, it turns out exports more cotton
than any other country in the world. For about a century, America maintained
its cotton dominance by using slave labor. Today, it does so using technology. This is a John Deere app and it shows
where the pickers and tractors are. We can go into the screen on a
picker and see what the picker driver is actually seeing on this screen. Bowen Flowers is a third-generation
Mississippi cotton farmer. Even the seeds he uses are a feat of engineering to
rival the iPhone. Most American cotton seeds are made in a lab, like this one in the Monsanto Corporation. Genes from bacteria are added to the cotton to make it more pest resistant and tolerant of herbicides. There's a debate over the safety
of genetically modified crops. For American cotton farmers though, it's mainly been settled. 20 years ago, there was no GM cotton. Today, over 90 percent
of American cotton is genetically modified. And all this technology, the
machines that automatically bale the cotton, the specially designed
trucks to haul those bales away, the high speed gins that remove those lab designed seeds, all this technology has an impact. Since the 1950s cotton yields have almost tripled. Oh gosh! I- It's- It's It's- It's no telling. Do ya'll happen to know that
answer? How many that it is? We didn't know, but we went back and looked it up. The answer from just this one farm in
just one year, there's enough cotton for 9 million t-shirts. That's a t-shirt for every single person in New York City.