George Washington Carver: An Uncommon Life

George Washington Carver: An Uncommon Life

PBS (2020)

Film Review

This is an intriguing documentary about the highly controversial African American George Washington Carver. The latter has come under heavy criticism from anti-Jim Crow activists (starting with W.E.B Dubois 1868-1963) for his failure to challenge the institution of racism.

I should note that two of the corporate financial interests that sponsored the making of this film (DuPont and Alliance Energy) have appalling record when it comes to acknowledging any kind of racial or social justice. Thus I suspect the history they portray may be somewhat “sanitized.”

I  myself knew almost nothing about Carver’s life prior to watching this film. Born into slavery in 1864, Carver and his mother were illegally abducted when he was only a few months old and resold to an Arkansas plantation owner. The family’s former slave master Moses Carver traveled to Arkansas to retrieve the family.

Because George Washington’s mother had disappeared, Moses and his wife raised him and his older brother as their own children. The brother helped Moses around the farm, and George Washington, who was sickly, stayed in the house and learned cooking, knitting, sewing, and other womanly skills.

At 12, a Black family adopted him to enable him to attend a black school eight miles away. His adoptive mother was a midwife and folk healer.

After high school, he applied to Simpson College in Indianola Ohio to study painting. Concerned Carver couldn’t make a living as an artist, his art teacher encouraged him to transfer to Iowa State  Agricultural College. After completing his bachelor’s and master’s degree, he became the first African American on the faculty of Iowa State University. While there, he became close friends with three successive US Secretaries of Agriculture, including Henry Wallace, who served as Vice President under Roosevelt.

In 1896 Booker T Washington (also attacked by DuBois for being an accommodationist) invited him to start a department of agriculture at Tuskegee University in Alabama. Despite a substantial pay cut, Carver, hoping to improve the miserable lives of Alabama’s black sharecroppers, accepted.

In addition to working in his chemistry lab and teaching classes, Carver assisted thousands of Black sharecropper to improve their yields. Because only 1/5 of 5 million sharecroppers owned their on land, sharecropping and tenant farming were essentially an extension of slavery. (See Sharecropping: The Hidden History)

The biggest contribution Carver made was to teach sharecroppers to diversity away from cotton, which was depleting their soil. He also taught them to replenish their soil with organic fertilizers and with crop rotation involving legumes and sweet potatoes. He particularly encouraged them to grow peanuts, a legume with extremely high nutritional value.

During his lifetime, Carver discovered 300 products farmers could make from peanuts, including peanut butter.

Never marrying, Carver (who counted Henry Ford, FDR and Edison among his circle of friends) lived alone in a dorm room and rarely socialized.

 

 

 

 

Civilian Conservation Corp: Lessons from the Great Depression

“American Experience”: Civilian Conservation Corp

Directed by Robert Stone (2009)

Film Review

Between the COVID19 lockdown, curfews in many cities, and impending martial law if the riots continue, the US economy is taking a severe hammering – which many predict will produce higher unemployment than the Great Depression.

This 2009 documentary looks at the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) Roosevelt created when he took office in 1933. It served the dual the dual purpose of putting 2-3 million men to work and repairing the vast environmental damage wreaked by 200 years of laissez-faire agriculture. Prior to the 1930s, US farmers were unaware of the importance of using windbreaks to prevent erosion, replenishing soil nutrients with fertilizers, or rotation cropping. Until 1900, farmers and plantation owners simply abandoned their land when it became infertile and moved west.

In the 1930s, thousands of US farmers were forced to abandon their land, due to droughts, brought on by rampant deforestation, and massive topsoil loss in dust storms.

Roosevelt’s CCC was the very first national environmental program in the US. CCC members planted 2.3 billion trees, created 800 billion state parks, fought forest fires, and restored healthy pastures on thousands of farms. In addition to cutting ski trails in New England (thus launching the US ski industry), the CCC built Camp David,* the Carlsbad Caverns National Park, and the Appalachian Trail.

Closed to women, the CCC was run by the Army with rigid army discipline. There were 200 men each camp and all US states had several. They received $1 a day for six hours work, plus all the meat and eggs they could eat.** All recruits who were illiterate learned to read. There was also an opportunity to undergo vocational training in the evening (mainly typing, plumbing and electrical work.

Most men sent $25 a month to their families, which was instrumental in reviving many local economies.

After Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the CCC was dissolved, and nearly all 2.3 million recruits were mustered into the US Army.

---

*Camp David is the country retreat for the US president.

**As with the COVID19 lockdown, farmers were forced to slaughter most of their cattle prior to the formation of the CC. Owing to massive unemployment, no one could afford to buy their meat.

 

 

Farmers of Forty Centuries

Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea and Japan

By F.H. King

(1911, reprinted in 2004 by Dover Publications)

Link to free PDF

Book Review

I don’t typically review (or read) 100 year old books. Farmers of Forty Centuries is an important exception. It has become a classic of the permaculture/sustainable economics movement for several reasons.

First, it dispels the myth that fossil fuel-free agriculture will produce much lower yields than industrial farming. Without access to oil and natural-gas based pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, agriculture will be much more labor-intensive. However with global population at more than seven billion (as of last October), the world seems to have no shortage of human labor. Second, Farmers of Forty Centuries paints a detailed picture of tried and true regional models of food, fuel, and construction materials production, as well as regional water and human waste management. Third, it provides detailed descriptions, almost in cookbook fashion, of a broad range of permaculture and terraquaculture* techniques.

As a backyard organic gardener and member of the lawn liberation movement, I have found it really easy to incorporate a number of the techniques King describes into my routine. I was also intrigued to see Charles Eisenstein cite King’s book in Sacred Economics (2011 Evolver Editions), supporting his argument that more intensive production techniques could easily produce the same or better yields as current factory farms.

Briefly, Farmers of Forty Centuries describes the voyage agronomist and former US Department of Agriculture official Franklin Hiram King made to to China, Korea and Japan in the early 1900s. The purpose of his trip was to study how the extremely dense populations of the Far East could produce massive amounts of food century after century without depleting their soils. What he discovered was a highly sophisticated system of water management, crop rotation, interplanting and rational utilization of ecological relationships among farm plants, animals and people.

The 248 high resolution photos of Chinese, Korean and Japanese farmers and their fields are even more remarkable (especially for 1911) than the text. Unfortunately King died while the book was in production, and it was published posthumously by his wife.

Seasonal and Rainfall Differences

King notes at the beginning of the book that much of China has a longer growing season than the US. Moreover in China, Korea and Japan, most rain falls during summer months when it’s most conducive to crop growth. He notes that China enhances their summer rainfall with an extensive system of canals and that both China and Japan have elaborate schemes to capture run-off from uncultivable mountain areas. However he also presents strong evidence that water management alone fails to explain these countries’ amazing crop yields.

Human Excrement and Green Manure

He’s equally impressed by the extensive time and effort put into collecting all human waste (even from cities), processing it by drying or fermentation and distributing it to farmers, who would apply it more or less continuously to their fields. Noting the high price human sewage fetched for the men who collected and processed it, King bemoans the incredible waste in the US system of sewage disposal, which flushes so many rich nutrients into inland waterways and out to sea.

He also describes in detail the extensive use of soybeans, peanuts, clover, pulses and other nitrogen fixing plants in crop rotation schemes, as well as “green manure,” fibrous plants (either grown in the fields or collected) that farmers continuously plowed into their soil to increase organic matter.

Succession Sowing and Interplanting

Finally he stresses the systematic effort by Chinese, Korean and Japanese farmers to maximize their limited cultivable land. In one example, he describes how land flooded as a rice paddy in summer would be planted with leaks and other vegetables as winter crops. He frequently describes the presence of three crops (for example radishes, cabbage and wheat) in the same field simultaneously at different stages of maturity. According to King, farmers in southern China would typically cultivate one plot of land continuously throughout the year. In addition to two rice crops during the winter and early spring, they would also grow rape, peas, beans, leaks and ginger as a third or fourth crop during summer and fall.

The Economic Hardship of Japanese Farmers

King’s description of farming in Japan is striking in its heavier use of chemical fertilizer (as was increasingly typical of US agriculture in the early 20th century). He notes that Japanese farmers had to be encouraged (via a contest for the best compost heap) to compost kitchen waste and green manure to provide organic matter for their farms. He also describes the fines the Japanese government levied against farmers who applied excessive lime to their fields. Japanese soils are volcanic and quite acid (like the soil here in New Zealand).

King is also extremely sympathetic to the heavy tax burden carried by Japanese farmers (to pay for the Russo-Japanese war, which ended in 1905), as well as their struggle to pay extremely high rents. It was his view that their economic hardship seemed to sap their initiative. He offers this as a possible explanation for their eagerness to use chemicals and take labor saving short cuts instead of embracing traditional organic methods.

*Terraquaculture is the practice of farming living water flowing through the landscape. It is the traditional farming system of the Asia-Pacific region where it has been practiced for thousands of years and is arguably the only truly sustainable farming system. See http://www.terraquaculture.net/