Booker T. Whatley

Booker T. Whatley is among the modern pioneers of sustainable farming. As Jeff Helms wrote of him in 2005, Whatley was a man 30 years ahead of his time:

In 1985, Tom Monaghan, founder and former president of Domino's Pizza, Inc., was so inspired after reading in The Wall Street Journal about Whatley's plan to help small farmers make big money he called to ask him to develop a 100-acre (0.40 km) PYO corporate farm ecosystem at Domino's World Headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The farm was part of a $300 million 1,500-acre (6.1 km) project that was to raise fruits, vegetables and herbs, as well as lamb, venison, fish, duck, quail, pheasant, mushrooms, honey, and Christmas trees. The harvest was supplied to Domino's franchises in the Michigan area and to its employees through a Clientele Membership Club.

Upon retirement from academia, Whatley focused on promoting his system of small-scale farming, quickly becoming a nationally known expert and an inspiration to readers of Mother Earth News and Organic Gardening Magazine in the 1980s. To further expand his audience and to deliver his message for turning a small farm into a profitable enterprise, Whatley traveled extensively in the US and overseas, giving training seminars and sharing his ideas. Many of his ideas appeared over time in The New Farm Magazine and in his monthly Small Farm Technical Newsletter, which reached about 20,000 subscribers in fifty states and twenty-five foreign countries.

Around 1970, Dr. Whatley, who started his professional career at Tuskegee University, began championing "smaller and smarter" as a successful strategy for small farmers, rather than competing for the same market as large farmers, and going broke in the process. Small farmers, he advised, should not raise commodity crops such as grains, but should instead raise higher-value crops such as berries and grapes and market them to a loyal group of customers (target: 1,000), who would harvest the crops themselves and pay for the privilege of doing so as members of a Clientele Membership Club.

Raised on a family farm in Anniston, Alabama as the oldest of his parents' 12 children, Booker T. Whatley received his B.S. degree in agriculture from Alabama A & M University. Upon graduation, he was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Korean War, where he was assigned to manage a hydroponic farm in Japan to provide safe, nutritious foods for the US troops stationed there. After completing his military service, and encouraged by the scientist who interviewed him for his assignment in Japan, Whatley enrolled at Rutgers University to earn a doctorate in horticulture, which he completed in 1957. He later earned a law degree from Alabama A&M University in 1989.

Booker T. Whatley (November 5, 1915 in Calhoun County, Alabama – September 3, 2005 in Montgomery, Alabama) was an agriculture professor at Tuskegee University, Alabama, United States and one of the pioneers of sustainable agriculture in the post-World War II era. He also aimed to "generate an agrarian black middle class".