In 2006, only 18 of the 154 marketed Upland cotton varieties were conventional (non-transgenic). In the future, even fewer commercially marketed cotton varieties will be non-transgenic. This represents a growing problem for cotton breeding programs still involved in the development of conventional cotton in that benchmark check varieties become unavailable. A potential solution is to retain seed samples from year to year but this raises questions about maintaining purity and stability of performace. We report on the effect of retention and inhouse seed processing on check variety performance.