In 1896, Carver started to teach and do research with plants at the Tuskegee Institute. He taught classes on agriculture, and through his experiments he found new ways to help the poor, struggling farmers of the South. Here, farmers had been growing cotton, which wore out the soil. He showed farmers how to plant different crops like peanuts to make the soil richer. After a while, farmers did what he said and were growing more and more peanuts. They were now making more money from peanuts than from cotton.