Sustainable
GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER’S RESEARCH WAS ABOUT MORE THAN PEANUTS
NO AMERICAN IS MORE closely associated with peanuts than George Washington Carver, who developed hundreds of uses for them, from Worcestershire sauce to shaving cream to paper. But our insatiable curiosity for peanuts, scholars say, has obscured Carver’s greatest agricultural achievement: helping black farmers prosper, free of the tyranny of cotton.
Born enslaved in Missouri around 1864 and trained in Iowa as a botanist, Carver took over the agriculture department at the Tuskegee Institute, in Alabama, in 1896. His hope was to aid black farmers, most of whom were cotton sharecroppers trapped in perpetual debt to white plantation owners. “I came here solely for the benefit of my people,” he wrote to colleagues on his arrival.
He found that cotton had stripped the region’s soil of its nutrients, and yet landowners were prohibiting black farmers from planting food crops. So Carver began experimenting with plants like peanuts and sweet potatoes, which could replenish the nitrogen that cotton leached and, grown discreetly, could also help farmers feed their families. In classes and at conferences and county fairs, Carver showed often packed crowds how to raise these crops.
Since his death in 1943, many of the practices Carver advocated—organic fertilizer, reusing food waste, crop rotation—have become crucial to the sustainable agriculture movement. Mark Hersey, a historian at Mississippi State University, says Carver’s most prescient innovation was a truly holistic approach to farming.
“Well before there was an environmental justice movement, black environmental thinkers connected land exploitation and racial exploitation,” says Hersey. A true accounting of American conservation, he says, would put Carver at the forefront.