George Washington Carver Improved Agricultural Practices

When Carver arrived in the South, there were roughly five million black farmers there. Only about one-fifth of them owned any land. Almost all of them shared a common problem, over-reliance on cotton as the region's main cash crop, together with the sharecropper system used to produce it, which depleted the soil and kept tenant farmers in a permanent state of impoverishment, improving the practice of Southern agriculture and the lot of poor farmers became Carver's chief concern. I think that Carver quickly recognized whatever preconceptions he had about the South when he went down there, he quickly recognized the enormity of the challenges he faced. And so I think, I think he concluded very quickly that he had to come up with some practical ways that would improve the lives of mostly the tenant farmers and the sharecroppers who were living in the South. And he tried to impact their lives in tangible, specific ways that would help them on a day-to-day basis. Carver began urging farmers to rotate crops and to use organic fertilizers. He preached the value of planting soil-restoring crops such as peanuts, sweet potatoes, black-eyed peas, and soybeans. He adapts it to the circumstance and develops a very different version of what scientific agriculture should be, one that emphasizes ecological thinking to a degree that very few, maybe no other progressive era endeavors did. In the late 1930s, he looks back over his career and says, my work is that of conservation. And what did he mean by that? What would change about the way we understand America's conservation tradition if we took him seriously, if we look at his work as a part of that broader American tradition of conservation? He issued bulletins that uneducated farmers could understand, explaining how these soil-restoring crops should be grown and what they could be used for. He devised a traveling demonstration wagon called the Jessup Wagon and traveled dusty roads to teach small groups of farmers how to improve their lives. Start where you are with what you have, he would say. Make something of it. Never be satisfied. He demonstrated in a prophetic manner two major current problems, the need for sustainability and conservation.