TEXTILES.ORG
Whether traveling the countryside in the United States or around the globe, it doesn’t take long to spot a storage building, livestock or poultry shelter, or agriculture storage structure made of a textile. It could be a framed Quonset-hut style building with a textile skin rather than a metal shed in North Dakota. It could be a mobile, umbrella-like tarp that protects cattle from the sun in the Australian Outback. It could be braided-mesh trellis structures that keep birds and pests away from grapes in Bordeaux, France.
Agriculture is traditionally slow to adopt new technology and ideas, but saving money with less expensive solutions, generating more profit with better products and addressing emerging threats brought about by climate change may push some in the agriculture industry to adapt.
“To be very honest, I think Charles Darwin is more accurate than ever with his theory of evolution,” says Jens Klotmann, CEO of Julius Koch GmbH. “At the end of the day, it’s neither the most intelligent nor the strongest species that survives but the most adaptable to change, and that is what we try to do.”
Julius Koch is a 130-year-old company with sites in Germany, Ukraine and Poland. While it is a global leader in the sun screening industry, the company pivoted in 2019 to launch the startup Braided International GmbH, which focuses on innovative solutions to challenging problems. It manufactures textile protection systems that use cords and tapes and can withstand increasingly volatile weather conditions. Its products include snow fences, mining erosion barriers and agriculture protection systems.
Klotmann has big plans for the future, including a new trellis system that can be installed in days. Using new knitting structures and UV-resistant materials, it provides structural supports that allow vines to flourish, and it can also protect against large hail, pests and birds.
Rather than just selling these products to farmers and ag businesses, Klotmann is also seeking endorsements from companies that offer crop insurance. Extreme hail and weather disturbances not only affect crop yields but can destroy vines, bushes and lianas that take years to mature. Insurance companies don’t relish those kinds of payouts and likely will require protections against them.
The textile circle of life
Like Julius Koch, Gale Pacific Ltd. is thinking about the future. While many recognize the company’s Coolaroo® outdoor brand, agriculture was the foundation of its operations and still accounts for nearly 30% of its commercial portfolio, according to Andrew Nasarczyk, global director of innovation and sustainability.
One of Gale Pacific’s standout innovations in this space is Landmark®, a recyclable coated polypropylene grain cover engineered to outperform traditional PVC alternatives. These covers deliver a higher strength-to-weight ratio while remaining durable and flexible enough for demanding agricultural environments.
Far from just a tarp thrown over a pile of grain next to a field, Landmark is used to create large horizontal bunker canopies capable of protecting millions of dollars’ worth of stored grain. This offers a lower investment compared to permanent silos, faster filling and emptying, reliable storage, and flexibility for changing crop volumes.
Because the Landmark fabric is a monopolymer, it can be recycled into raw material for coating subsequent generations of product, something Gale Pacific has already achieved four times.
“There are two key benefits, from our perspective. One is that it’s reusing or re-diverting end-of-life products that would normally go to a landfill into a new-generation product, so there’s an immediate environmental benefit,” Nasarczyk says. “Additionally, from a carbon footprint and resource-intensive perspective, a lower reliance on virgin raw materials has a greater positive impact across the whole value chain.”
Gale Pacific’s circular model involves coordination with fabricators, recyclers and other businesses that together move materials from manufacturing through recovery and back into new products. Nasarczyk believes that this type of ecosystem is helping drive change in Australia and could serve as a model for other countries.
Innovation never stands still, and for 2026, Nasarczyk is particularly excited to create the next generation of greenhouse fabrics to help growers fine-tune environmental conditions.
“One of the things that we’re exploring is how to incorporate smarter functionality into our fabrics to optimize growing conditions or enable a grower or farmer to regulate the environment that little bit better,” he says. “So, engineering intelligence into the material itself.”
Made in the USA
While Australia is moving forward with broader ag textile innovation and adoption to reduce plastic waste, Renegade Plastics® Corp. president and co-founder Curran Hughes is quite clear that the U.S. is lagging behind.
“We were supplying USAID [United States Agency for International Development], which was abruptly disbanded. USAID, actually, has historically been at the forefront of the adoption of new agriculture technologies for the U.S. government,” Hughes says. “When I worked in California agriculture, there was tech that was validated by USAID. Then USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] would test that technology on a very small scale; then, if it was successful, the private sector got interested.”
The Denver, Colo., company offers an alternative to PVC-coated fabrics, producing long-life, lower-carbon, coated fabrics that cut plastic waste and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The polypropylene fabrics have high UV, thermal and chemical resistance. Eschewing PVC, PFAS or phthalates, Renegade uses polypropylene (often used for plant containers) that is easier for growers to recycle.
“In the agricultural space, the primary advantages are that the material is nontoxic and more UV stable,” he points out. “So it lasts longer in harsh agricultural conditions, and it’s lighter weight than PVC, which makes it a lot easier to work with.”
Applications include hoop houses, greenhouse side curtains, high tunnels, stockpile covers and tarps for silage, grain, hay and almonds.
Agriculture (especially pistachio nurseries) was up to 50% of Renegade’s revenue when it launched in 2021 but is now less than 10%. This dip is due to many factors, including China’s response to the White House’s tariffs in 2025. Formerly one of the biggest consumers of U.S.-grown pistachios and nuts, China applied a retaliatory 125% tariff on American pistachios, sharply reducing U.S. exports to China.
Despite the change in the percentage of revenues for Renegade from agriculture, Hughes is an ag market lifer. He loves the clients. “When I ask an ag customer, ‘Can I stop by?’ they’ll usually say, ‘Yeah, I’m here!’ Farmers are always excited to show off what they’re doing,” he says. “They love hosting people and they love talking about what they do in a genuine way, and that is hard to find in other industries.”
Innovation faces headwinds with farmers
Farmers like to talk shop. Still, premium products, even if innovative, can be a hard sell across the board. Ag corporation buyers have the financial means to purchase innovative products, but they work years ahead. Any turnover means a deal brokered with one buyer after months of groundwork may be canceled by the next person in the position.
Independent farmers stick around but generally resist change. They subsist on thin margins and often find it difficult to justify a major expense that deeply impacts a year’s bottom line, even if a particular fabric might save money in the long term.
Intertape Polymer Group (IPG®) is based in Sarasota, Fla., and has facilities in North America, Europe and Asia. Carey Ewanik, market manager, NovaShield/MBI Products at IPG, lives in Alberta, Canada, and has insight into farmers’ reluctance to change: He comes from a farming background. Even he has difficulty selling his family on the benefits of IPG’s textile membrane structures over inexpensive tarps or traditional wood or metal structures—and some product lines offer 20-year warranties.
“I’ve had those discussions with my relatives,” says Ewanik. “I ask, ‘Why don’t you buy one of our NovaShield-clad buildings?’ You can use it for so many things, including equipment storage, livestock shelters, in addition to just hay storage.”
He explains, “They often don’t understand how fabric structures work. In fact, they may refer to them as a tent.”
Educating a customer goes beyond fabric structures’ versatile applications and extends to their permanence and comparability as well as the benefits of the translucent fabric, which may reduce electricity use by bringing in natural light. On the opposite end of the spectrum, IPG also offers blackout curtains for the poultry market that keep light out, helping the birds grow more quickly and larger.
Within the Engineered Coated Products (ECP) division, approximately 25% of the revenue is agricultural-based, including NovaShield structure fabrics and AquaMaster® geomembrane liners for reservoirs and other containment.
An area of continual concern for farmers is the balance sheet. Innovation needs to be affordable. To that end, businesses sometimes need to meet customers where they are. For Hughes, it means really listening to the challenges farmers talk about when he visits them.
“If our price is more expensive up front, we can figure out incremental structures over the life cycle of the product,” he explains. “It’s patience and collaboration.”
Certifications and sustainability
IPG is the first membrane structure fabric company in the world to achieve the Cradle to Cradle® Bronze (C2C) certification. Based in California and Amsterdam, the organization identifies products designed for a safe, circular and responsible economy, recognizing achievements across multiple sustainability categories based on life-cycle thinking, similar to that embraced by Gale Pacific in Australia and Renegade in Colorado. The organization looks to Sustainable Value Networks to ensure there is no “greenwashing”—where companies make claims about their products that minimize their waste and negative impact.
These companies and others work hard to earn many certifications, and there is nothing wrong with highlighting sustainability and innovation. Still, Klotmann worries about complacency. His company was one of Germany’s 2025 Top 100 Innovation Awards recipients. While he called the recognition “very nice” and the company features a winner’s badge on its website, Klotmann worries that certifications and awards could slow innovation in the agricultural and farming markets and elsewhere.
“Lots of companies are ISO certified,” he explains. “Our philosophy is that the certificates have one weakness, and that is that once you have reached a certain level, you get the certificate and then you stop. In our companies, we practice the lean philosophy, striving continuously for excellence and optimizing processes permanently.”
Tad Hendrickson is a freelance writer who lives in Minneapolis, Minn.
SIDEBAR: Staying positive
We asked the sources interviewed for this story: “What makes you optimistic about the ag and farming textile market’s future?” Here are a few of their answers.
“I’d say the average age of the agricultural buyer that we supply to is in their 40s. They’re finally coming into their own as a manager, and they’re the ones who kind of want to change some things. They’ve got kids, and they’re thinking 30 years down the line.”
—Curran Hughes, President and co-founder, Renegade Plastics® Corp.
“I think one of the things is that we are a domestic manufacturer within North America. So, where it matters if it is domestically made, we have an advantage, not only in our quality but also in the supply chain. So we can get product delivered to customers much quicker than if they’re purchasing offshore.”
—Carey Ewanik, Market manager, NovaShield/MBI Products, Intertape Polymer Group
“I think it’s creating an ecosystem of participants that really want to drive this change, followed by the development of products that enable alternate end-of-life solutions and then adapting technology through the full value chain. Unless you can do all these things, it becomes very difficult to actually execute.”
—Andrew Nasarczyk, Global director of innovation and sustainability, Gale Pacific Ltd.