Does Organic Farming Have African Roots? Uncovering an Uncomfortable Truth

George Washington Carver was an amazing man. But did his composting method have African roots?

When I started researching the history of organic farming in 2020, everybody was reading Leah Penniman’s Farming While Black and Monica White’s Freedom Farmers. Based on brief, undocumented statements in these books, many people began claiming that organic farming was a traditional African system brought to the United States by George Washington Carver and later promoted by J.I. Rodale. It was an appealing narrative that fit seamlessly into antiracist teachings, and I was under strong pressure to repeat it without questioning. But first I had to figure out if it was true—and what I discovered was so disturbing that I didn’t dare share it with anyone. Until now.

First of all, many African farmers traditionally used good farming practices that would be classified as organic today. But if any of that knowledge came to the US, it was lost before the twentieth century. Booker T. Washington said that the impoverished Black sharecroppers he visited planted cotton up to the front doors of their houses, didn’t plant vegetable gardens, and definitely didn’t compost. They were using the same soil-depleting farming practices as their white neighbors.

Secondly, George Washington Carver was an orphan, raised and educated by white parents. He studied scientific agriculture at Iowa State College, where he was the first Black student. As far as I’m aware, the knowledge transfer between him and Black farmers at Tuskegee went only one way—Carver taught them the scientific methods he’d learned in college. There is no record of Carver learning traditional African farming methods in Alabama, and he never went to Africa.

And the alleged Carver-Rodale connection? There’s no surviving correspondence between Carver and J.I. Rodale. In August 1942, J.I. reprinted a letter from an Iowa farmer who mentioned Carver’s composting work, but did not follow it with a comment or article. The next mention of Carver wasn’t until 1949, when Bob Rodale ran across one of Carver’s composting bulletins for the first time. The first article specifically about Carver didn’t appear until 1953, when J.I. used him as an example of the “universality” of organic farming. There’s no evidence that J.I. Rodale heard of Carver’s composting work until after he was already farming organically.

After five years of looking in every possible place I could think of, I’ve come to the conclusion that the narrative about organic farming having African roots via George Washington Carver is not true. This puts me in a very uncomfortable position. I want to give people of color all the credit they deserve. I would love to write a nice racially diverse history that leaves the impression that the organic farming movement historically had the same mix of different cultures and ethnicities that we see in large American cities today. But the reality is that few African Americans were interested in organic farming before the early twenty-first century.

Until now, I’ve kept this revelation secret because I didn’t want to say anything negative about the Black farming leaders who created and promoted this narrative. I strongly support efforts to get more people of color interested in organic farming. But that interest shouldn’t be based on a lie. The fact that the organic farming systems that came to the United States in the 1940s were rooted in mainly Asian and European traditions doesn’t mean that people from African descent are excluded from using them. On the contrary, what makes organic farming different from traditional or Indigenous agriculture is that it’s always been open to everyone from every racial, cultural, and ethnic background. And that definitely includes African Americans.