Cotton Incorporated, US-based research and marketing company representing upland cotton, has launched Cotton Cultivated, a new website designed to give the cotton growing community quick and easy access to important industry information. Cotton Cultivated (cottoncultivated.cottoninc.com) integrates web sites, downloadable documents, social media, and real-time news feeds that have been “cultivated” in an effort to reduce the time spent sorting through pages of search results. The site’s home page is a dashboard for easy access to all of the site features and information. In addition to a customised search tool, there are four primary widgets on the home page that include Cotton News that displays recent cotton-related stories of national, regional or global interest from agricultural media sources, Daily Monitoring which provides local weather conditions, current cotton market reports (fibre and seed), and the latest crop quality report summarised by Cotton Incorporated, Research & Reports that displays the latest information uploaded to the site. Once all material is displayed, there is an option to filter by growing region and topic, and the Resources Directory which provides a preview of the most recently-added web resources. Materials in this section are trusted resources that are useful across the spectrum of the cotton growing community, according to a press release. Ryan Kurtz, director of agricultural research for Cotton Incorporated and lead on the launch of the new site said, “The cotton growing community has indicated that searching for and isolating cotton production information can quickly become an overwhelming task. The Cotton Cultivated site is aimed at helping users find cotton-specific information as quickly and easily as possible”. In addition to the four primary widgets, there is a Cultivated Twitter feed which follows cotton-related media, research and extension experts. The tweets can be filtered by region and provide real time information without the need for a Twitter account.
