- [Narrator] In 1921, a scientist from Tuskegee Institute named George Washington Carver went to Congress.

He brought with him instant coffee, candy, ice cream, milk, flour, cooking oil, ink, dye, and animal feed.

Those are some strange things to bring to Congress.

He brought them because they all had one thing in common.

They are all made from peanuts.

The peanut has a high nutritional value and in his research, Carver came up with over 100 ways it could be prepared as food.

Carver's trip to Washington helped Congress pass laws to protect the peanut and then the peanut helped to save Alabama.

How did the peanut help save Alabama?

After the Civil War, formerly enslaved people were set free, but they had no money or land to farm.

So many became sharecroppers.

Sharecroppers are farmers who do not own the land that they farm but instead rent a piece of land on a larger farm.

In exchange, the crops they raised went to the landowner to sell.

Sharecroppers get part of the money, minus money for rent and food.

Sharecropping left very little money for the poor farmers.

It was a lot of hard work for not a lot of money.

At the time, cotton was the main crop being grown in Alabama.

Cotton is very hard on the soil because it takes most of the nutrients out of the soil.

Cotton crops began failing.

Many farmers felt cotton was the only reliable crop to sell but it was a hard crop to grow because it was affected by things the farmers couldn't control, like weather, insects, and market prices.

In the 1910s, an insect named the boll weevil made its way to the state of Alabama and devastated the cotton crops.

But George Washington Carver and the peanut was here to save the day.

The peanut not only helped make the land fertile and profitable again, it also helped the poor sharecroppers get out of poverty.

The peanut helped to revitalize the soil.

After many years of studying soil, George Washington Carver knew that cotton used up most of the nutrients in the soil, leading to crop failures.

His experiments showed that crops containing high levels of nitrogen like peanuts, cowpeas, and sweet potatoes would revive the land and expand a farmer's food supply.

His experiments helped him develop new farming methods to increase crop harvest, protect the health of the environment, and revitalize or improve soil destroyed by the overproduction of cotton.

One method he developed is called crop rotation.

Farmers rotate their crops by planting different crops at different times on the same plot of land.

Planting peanuts in between seasons of cotton would help the farmers keep their land healthy and increase the amount of cotton they could produce over time.

Soon, farmers found themselves swamped with peanuts to sell.

The peanut created a new cash crop for Alabama.

A cash crop is a crop that is grown for money.

As more and more farmers grew peanuts to improve their soil, they found themselves with a large supply of peanuts.

Carver gave all these peanuts a lot of thought.

He discovered that the peanut is remarkably useful and developed a long list of inventions and uses for the peanut to create a marketplace for this new cash crop.

By 1940, the peanut had become one of the six leading crops in the nation and the second cash crop in the south, after cotton.

Through chemistry and dedication, Carver revolutionized Southern agriculture and raised the standard of living of his fellow man.

The peanut helped sharecroppers out of poverty.

The peanut played a major role in Carver's greater mission, helping poor Southern farmers, including formerly enslaved people, grow enough food to feed their families and free themselves from the oppression or difficulties of sharecropping.

Carver taught white and Black farmers in the South how the peanut could help them become self-sustainable farmers.

Self-sustainable farmers grow all or most of their food on their farmland.

He hosted free classes and shared farming advice and recipes.

He designed a mobile classroom called the Jessup Agricultural Wagon, and visited counties that were far away from Tuskegee Institute to offer hands-on demonstrations.

For example, he encouraged farmers to feed acorns and peanut shells to their hogs because they were cheaper than store bought feed.

By teaching farmers about the peanut, they could improve their farms and keep the soil healthy and productive.

Carver understood that when the land suffers, we all suffer.

The land needed to be protected and by doing so it helps to sustain us.

Today, over half the peanuts grown in the United States are from Alabama and that's how George Washington Carver and the peanut saved Alabama.

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