200 Miracles Ahead! 



believe it can be solved by finding new markets for farm 

 products and new uses for them in industry." 1 



"The very ancient art of agriculture," added Wheeler 

 McMillen, president of the National Farm Chemurgic Coun- 

 cil, "is today in possession of new tools of such surpassing 

 importance as we have barely begun to suspect. Organic 

 chemistry, one of these tools, applies terrific temperatures and 

 tremendous pressures and a pot of beans becomes an auto- 

 mobile part instead of a bowl of soup." 



Dr. George Washington Carver, famed Negro scientist, 

 who died in January, 1943, has been called the "first and 

 greatest chemurgist." Born of slave parents, he worked his 

 way through Iowa State College in 1896 and in that same 

 year was offered a position by Booker T. Washington, 

 founder and president of Tuskegee Institute, Macon County, 

 Alabama. He remained at Tuskegee all his life, demonstrating 

 how the South's "unproductive" soil could be made to pro- 

 duce rich crops and finding new industrial uses for farm prod- 

 ucts long before the word "chemurgy" was coined. 



Like most of the South, Macon County then grew cotton 

 and little else. Dr. Carver knew this open-row crop exposed 

 the land to deadly water erosion and destroyed the fertile 

 soil. 



Rackham Holt, author of an excellent biography of Dr. 

 Carver, told in the Christian Science Monitor, June 7, 1941, 

 how he helped break the strangle hold that cotton had on the 

 agricultural South: 



"If Southern farmers were to reduce their cotton acreage 

 they must raise other crops, and then a market for these must 

 be found. Sweet potatoes could be cultivated easily, but they 

 were highly perishable and yielded immense quantities of small 

 cull potatoes which could not be used as food. George Carver 

 abhorred waste, and from his laboratory by-products rushed 



1 Chapter XIV shows how a liberal diet for all American families also will 

 do much to solve our "farm problem." 



