His parents separated and his father worked at a government arsenal in Texas and later remarried, but his mother and the two children remained in Mississippi on the family farm.
[1] From 1965 to 1970, Watson served at Southern Baptist College in M'Lang, Cotabato, on the island of Mindanao, as an agricultural consultant, and also worked with rural farmers and churches in the area.
[1] Observing that the steep slopes of the region made traditional farming impossible, Watson established a 50 acres (20 hectares) site, on abandoned mountain farmland, to develop a system that would allow the Filipinos to better feed themselves.
Over many years he was able to develop a method, called Sloping Agricultural Land Technology (SALT), that enabled farmers to produce food on badly eroded hillsides.
[4]: 121 In 1998, he established the Asian Rural Life Development Foundation for the purpose of extending awareness of farming technologies, suitable for poor upland farmers, to other countries in Asia.