Record agricultural production combined with declining demand spurred the growth of the chemurgy movement ("chem" from chemistry; urgy, Greek for work), which was composed of scientists, agriculturalists, and industrialists determined to put chemistry to work to find nonfood uses for agricultural surpluses. The public voice of this movement was the Farm Chemurgic Council which had the support of Henry Ford and Irenee DuPont and which bombarded Congress with its message that through research new industrial products would be developed from farm commodities.

Congress was receptive to this message because of the excellent track record of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in sponsoring research. USDA scientists made many significant advances in the decades after the department's creation during the Civil War, and numerous subsequent agricultural adjustment acts established experimental stations and research laboratories around the country. These facilities proved their value by developing new uses for agricultural products.

The crop surpluses, the influence of the chemurgy movement, and the USDA's research record encouraged Congress, in a small part of the 1938 Agricultural Adjustment Act, to instruct Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace "to establish, equip, and maintain four regional research laboratories, one in each major farm producing area, and at such laboratories to conduct researches into and to develop new scientific chemical and technical uses and new and extended markets and outlets for farm commodities…." A subsequent law directed the USDA to conduct a survey to determine the best locations for the regional laboratories and to recommend areas of research for each.

The four sites chosen were Philadelphia, the San Francisco Bay area, Peoria, Illinois, and New Orleans. Congress appropriated four million dollars to build and equip the laboratories, and sites were quickly obtained. In New Orleans, the site was a swampy part of City Park near Bayou St. John. The New Orleans municipal government donated the land to the USDA. Contracts for construction were let quickly, and by early 1941 all the buildings at all four sites had been completed and equipped, and the first scientists were hired and on the job doing research.

The first director of the New Orleans facility, Daniel F. J. Lynch, said in 1939 that "one important line of attack [to solve the surplus problem] is by means of research… carried on with the specific aim of finding new and extended uses for farm commodities. We believe that research of this nature will pay (not immediately of course - that would be too much to hope for) but more and more with the passing of each year. We believe, moreover, that such a program is long overdue." Each center was commissioned to focus on problems affecting crops in its region: for the southern center, that meant sweet potatoes, peanuts, and cotton - especially cotton. In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, as much as 80% of the budget was on cotton research. "Not how to grow cotton," says Clark Welch, a scientist at the SRRC for 46 years. "I don't know a thing about that, but how to chemically process it to make it suitable as a flame retardant and wrinkle resistant material."

Charles H. Fisher was the director of the SRRC from 1950 to 1972, when much of the important early research into the chemical modification of cotton took place. Many of the scientists who worked there then and later - the lengthy tenure of so many of the researchers at SRRC is striking - speak highly of Fisher as an administrator. Robert. Reinhardt, for example, says "I think Dr. Fisher was a great director… getting us the materials we wanted and the money from Washington. He was very, very good at that." Another SRRC veteran, Ruth Benerito, points out that "the 50's was the golden age of science, when they put a lot of money into science because we were competing with Sputnik. Wherever you were, it was a good time to be in science." She adds that the administrators in Washington, who decided what research would be done and allocated resources, were all scientists: "That was before the days of the Harvard School of Business Administration."