P. O. Davis

Posey Oliver Davis, known as P.O. Davis, born August 15, 1890, near Athens, Alabama, and died in 1973 in Auburn, Alabama, was an American agricultural educator, editor and broadcaster who served as director of the Alabama Extension Service, its longest-serving leader. A graduate of Alabama Polytechnic Institute, now Auburn University, he advocated agricultural diversification, urging farmers to move beyond cotton dependency and, in 1937, to consider poultry and livestock as good options, and he pioneered extension education through radio broadcasts and a tabloid publication that reached 100,000 weekly readers across Alabama newspapers.