American Agriculture History Minute: Agriculture Continues Expansion and Diversification

I’m Mark Oppold with an American Agriculture History Minute.

In the early 1900s, American agriculture continued to expand and diversify. The first ten years of the century, George Washington Carver, who was director of agricultural research at Tuskegee Institute at the time, pioneered finding new uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes and soybeans, and thus helped diversify Southern agriculture.

Additionally, the average annual consumption of commercial fertilizer at that time was over three and a half million tons. Fast forward to 1810 to 1819, the average annual consumption of commercial fertilizer jumped to over six million tons.

That’s today’s American Agriculture History Minute. I’m Mark Oppold. Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.