Whatley, Booker T.

Impact on the world

A Tuskegee University agriculture professor following in George Washington Carver's footsteps, Whatley developed the “Whatley Plan,” a regenerative small-farm system built around a 10-to-200-acre pick-your-own operation supported by a Clientele Membership Club of loyal customers who paid an annual fee to harvest fresh produce themselves — the direct-marketing model that historians now identify as the true American origin of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), predating the commonly credited 1986 New England CSAs by more than a decade. Aiming explicitly to build an “agrarian Black middle class” as Black farm ownership collapsed under decades of discriminatory USDA lending, he secured a $250,000 Rockefeller Foundation grant to test the model at Tuskegee, bred several new plant varieties including the Carver sweet potato, and codified his philosophy in the widely read 1987 manual How to Make $100,000 Farming 25 Acres.

Life & background

Born November 5, 1915, in Calhoun County, Alabama, the oldest of twelve children on his family's farm in Anniston, Whatley earned a BS in agriculture from Alabama A&M University, then was drafted during the Korean War and assigned to manage a 55-acre hydroponic farm in Japan supplying safe food to U.S. troops. Encouraged by the scientist who had interviewed him for that posting, he enrolled at Rutgers University and completed a PhD in horticulture in 1957, then joined Tuskegee University's faculty, where his research on sweet potatoes, small fruits, and honeybees — he started Tuskegee's apiculture program after learning the school taught no beekeeping — evolved into a broader mission counseling Black farmers squeezed out by industrial agriculture. Beginning around 1970 he promoted “smaller and smarter” farming over commodity crops, developing his Clientele Membership Club system and presenting it to a standing ovation at a 1981 USDA small-farms symposium in Beltsville, Maryland, which led to national press coverage and his influential book. He later earned a law degree from Alabama A&M at age 73 and died September 3, 2005, in Montgomery, Alabama; his work is now widely credited by food historians and the Smithsonian as the uncredited American origin point of the CSA movement.

Sources

1. Smithsonian Magazine; Tuskegee University; Mother Earth News (1982 interview)