Back to GWC- and Booker T. Washington

So what did Carver recommend for one-horse farmers to eat? What they could produce for themselves, in their climate, with the tools they had. Back then, the dreadful sharecropping system  (curiously, they called it a "mortgage system") was in full effect (and some of my direct ancestors were caught in it as well as their African-American neighbors). A tenant agreed to grow a crop on an owner's land, giving the owner some of the crop in exchange for the privilege. Sounds OK, but the land owner often charged the penniless tenant rent for a shack or cabin, and provided food, seeds, fertilizer, and necessities from a plantation store, on credit so exorbitant that most went deeper and deeper in debt until they finally gave up and abandoned the bargain to start over elsewhere. There was no motivation to conserve or better the soil, and people lived in genuine misery, desperately planting increasingly impoverished soils from fencepost to fencepost with a "cash crop", trying to pay their debts. Debt-induced poverty is nothing new.

Carver proposed a solution that sounds simple, but Booker T. Washington's book, Working with the Hands, has many testimonies to its effectiveness. Stop borrowing. Grow your own food. When you sell your crop, don't splurge on cheap buggies or expensive Saturday nights in town. Buy seed for legumes to enrich the soil in winter. Dig up muck from the swamp or leaf mold from the woods to fertilize. Use this year's money to build next year's crop, and save for a rainy day. Soon you'll be able to buy a little land of your own. Washington and Carver actively promoted this agenda through the Tuskegee Institute. With a few changes for our different occupations, it could be applied well today.