Earth Day Celebration of G.W. Carver, Early Conservationist!

George Washington Carver came to Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute in 1896 to establish its agriculture department, but over his 47-year tenure, he also worked as artist, mentor, scientist, and inventor whose influence far exceeded his time and place in American history (Figure 1). Born in Missouri in 1864, Carver attended Iowa State College (now Iowa State University), where he earned a bachelor’s degree in botany in 1894 and a master’s degree in 1896. His work focused on scientific agriculture, which addressed national farm productivity challenges through the use of commercial fertilizers and crop rotation. Although popularly known for his experimental work in Tuskegee with the peanut and other alternatives to the cotton crop, Carver’s most important role in history was that of one of the earliest agrarian conservationists, an approach that did not become widely popular in the United States until the 1970s.[1]

Figure 1. Portrait of Carver made around 1896. TU Archives.

Carver’s path to conservation did not come directly from his Iowa State training, but arose instead from his realization, once in Tuskegee of the challenges of teaching scientific agriculture to a people trapped in a cycle of sharecropping and poverty. Despite Carver’s outreach programs, he found that most black farmers in Macon County, where the school was located, could not practice those techniques because they worked within in a cycle of sharecropping and the crop lien system through which few could escape.[2] This forced Carver to begin to address these problems through a conservationist’s eye, encouraging farmers to use of local resources in a sustainable way.

As the head of Tuskegee’s departments of Agriculture and Research, and director of the agricultural experiment station, Carver was allowed to pursue any projects he saw fit as he shaped his mission to serve the particular needs of poor black farmers.[3] Experiment stations of the period were set up to conduct experiments in scientific agriculture, which focused primarily on the use of chemical fertilizers and, in the South, cotton production. Knowing, however, that the people he served could little afford such products, Carver also experimented with soil-building techniques using organic fertilizers, including green manures (cover crops of cowpeas, beans, clover, etc.) and composts of leaves, muck, and manures, all of which could be gathered locally for free (Figure 2). He also looked for alternatives to cotton as cash crops and experimented with soil-building crops like sugar beets, cowpeas, peanuts, sweet potatoes, and soybeans.[4]

Figure 2. Carver, left center with large flower in lapel, teaching agricultural students. TU Archives.

Carver reported at least twice a year on his experiments in agricultural bulletins that he wrote and typed himself, completing twenty-four of these reports, covering everything from how to improve soils and increase yields, to how to treat plant diseases. In straightforward language, Carver produced these bulletins based on his “three-fold idea,” so that they generally contained cultivation information for the average farmer, scientific information for teachers, and recipes for housewives.[5] His bulletins were very popular, and some were revised and reprinted more than once. Carver also produced bulletins about raising livestock and poultry, and wrote about the use of native materials in the home and home landscape. For example, in Bulletin 21, he described how native clays could be made into washes to add color to the interiors and exteriors of homes (Figure 3). In Bulletin 16, he wrote about using native plants of Macon County to ornament yards (Figure 4).[6]

Figure 3. Exhibit of Carver's local clay house paints at the George Washington Carver Museum. Laura Knott.

Figure 4. Carver's bulletin about native plants for the home landscape. TU Archives.

The best books and articles about Carver include Hersey’s My Work Is That of Conservation: An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver (2011), which describes Carver as principally a conservationist; Gary P. Kremer’s George Washington Carver: A Biography (2011) and George Washington Carver: In His Own Words (1991); Linda O. McMurry’s George Washington Carver: Scientist & Symbol (1981); and Peter Burchard’s Carver: A Great Soul (1998). Each presents Carver in a slightly different light, and some describe in more or less detail his complicated and often antagonistic relationship with president of Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington, while others gently overlook it, preferring to focus on Carver’s artistic and spiritual relationship with the world.

References:

[1] Mark Hersey, My Work Is That of Conservation: An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver (2011).

[2] For more about this issue, read Hersey and Karen J. Ferguson, ‘“No Man’s Land’: The Negro Cooperative Demonstration Service and the Ideology of Booker T. Washington, 1900–1918,” Agricultural History 72, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 33–54 and Edward Royce, The Origins of Southern Sharecropping (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010).

[3] Hersey, 125–156. [4] Linda O. Hines, “George W. Carver and the Tuskegee Agricultural Experiment Station.” Agricultural History 53, No. 1, “Southern Agriculture since the Civil War: A Symposium” (January 1979): 78–79. [5] Hines, “George W. Carver,” 77. [6] 138138 Hines, 81–82.