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Show Secretary of Agriculture Is Experienced Farmer Progressive Farming Methods Won Him Medals; War Causes 'Class Feeling' To Decline in England. By BAUKHAGE National Farm and Home Hour Commentator. (Released by Western Newspaper Union.) WASHINGTON. Rough - hewn seems to be the word I'm after. I sat in the office of the secretary of agriculture, a big empty-looking room, and thought of a new axe biting bit-ing into a log. Chips were flying. Then, there was the cut, clean and fresh. Then another. And another. Not smooth, machine edge, such as a new saw makes with the regular lines the teeth leave across the surface. sur-face. But a good straight job, the mark of each blow, surely placed, across the grain, clear through. That's what I was thinking about as I talked with Claude Wickard, the big round-faced, homely fellow, a little awkward behind the mahogany mahog-any desk but not awkward, I felt sure, standing up in a farm wagon, reins in his hands, confident and solid, sol-id, his feet apart as the wheels bumped over the field. Not so much at home but sure of what he was after behind the desk, the way he was that night when he called the meeting in the little Indiana Indi-ana schoolhouse, a kerosene lamp that hadn't been cleaned for a long time sputtering beside him, 14 or 20 farmers sitting in front of him as he organized the first Farm Bureau meeting in his community the first one he ever attended, too. COMES TO WASHINGTON That scene, as he described it, stuck in my mind because it seemed to be the turning point in his career, ca-reer, or perhaps the first milestone on the road that at last took him reluctantly away from the acres that had been in the Wickard family since the 1840s and brought him WINS STATE MEDALS Soil building brought him state medals later for success in increasing increas-ing crop-yields and hog production. It also got him a request from the State Farm Bureau organization to get busy and organize a unit in his community. There wasn't any farm organization in his county then. He was supposed to go to the county seat and learn how to do it but he was too busy with his chores to get away so he just called a meeting in the schoolhouse and told his neighbors neigh-bors what he thought ought to be done. "I guess I sort of overstated what we could do," he said to me as he repeated the anecdote, "some of the fellows asked me afterward where all the reforms I talked about went to." He smiled that wide smile of his. Some of these ideas worked out. And the Master Farmer, in 1932, was chosen by the three rural counties that were his district to go to the state senate. The next year he was chosen Indiana delegate to the National Corn Hog conference at Des Moines. All this time the farm was his chief preoccupation, was then as it still is, his only source of income besides his salary. OFFERED POSITION The conference had hardly started start-ed when A. G. Black, whose room was on the same floor of the hotel as Wickard' s, buttonholed him. Black was then head of the Corn Hog section sec-tion of the Triple A. He wanted an assistant and he wanted Wickard for the job and wanted him right away. It seemed a pretty important offer, of-fer, but it also seemed impossible. You can't lock up a farm like a city flat and walk oft with the key in your pocket. But Black was persistent per-sistent and after a mental and physical phys-ical struggle, the Master Farmer mastered the situation, and with many a backward look set off for Washington. He managed to keep in pretty close touch with Carrol County while he was Corn Hog boss, but now it's harder because a secretary of agriculture agri-culture is kept very busy. And right now Secretary Wickard wants to see more hogs all over the country than there are. He's worried about the pig crop report we've heard so much about lately and the last word he had to say to me, while a secretary was pulling pull-ing his sleeve for his next appointment, appoint-ment, was on this subject: "People don't understand what I'm after," he said as I rose to go, "when I say the farmers ought to hold back some of their breed sows and gilts now because pork is going to be higher later on. I had quite a time with three cabinet ladies. (He r- l.. ,....,,.,.-x JmA i wftTl ' CLAUDE WICKARD ' Rough-hewn is the word. down to Washington into the government gov-ernment where he has been trying to put into, practice the ideas he thought would be good for other farmers and other acres from Maine to California. Claude Wickard first came to the capital in 1933 to become assistant and later chief of the corn-hog section sec-tion of the Triple-A. He was made secretary of the department of agriculture ag-riculture last August when Secretary Wallace resigned to run for vice president. But his heart is still back in Carrol county, Indiana, where his 71-year-old father and two men are running his farm. Corn and hogs were on Secretary Wickarcfs mind when I talked to him the other day, and it was corn and hogs that brought him to Washington Wash-ington in the beginning by way of Des Moines, Iowa, but it really goes back further than that. The school-house school-house meeting. I spoke of, was the milestone, but the day he told his father he was going to college was really the beginning. In those days and it isn't so long ago because Wickard is only 47 a lot of farmers thought that all a boy would get in college was a lot of darn-fool ideas. Only one of the Wickard's neighbors neigh-bors had been to college, but Purdue university was only 30 miles away and the idea percolated. Young Claude went and when he was graduated gradu-ated (agricultural course, of course) in 1915 he was ready to take over the farm. Twelve years later, the Prairie Farmer named him as a Master Farmer of Indiana. That was the only thing he boasted about in the half-hour conversation I had with him. cnucKiea.; iney tnougni an i was worrying about was the price of pork chops. What we want to do is to try to take the peaks and valleys out of farm prices and if the farmers farm-ers save some of their hogs for breeding now, they'll get more money mon-ey for them later and it will tend to keep the price level stabilized." That's Wickard all over the practical prac-tical farmer who has learned to think. ENGLISH FARMERS WORK UNDER FIRE "I farm in Wiltshire myself," said Anthony Hurd, a British farmer, telling about conditions in England while the bombs were dropping, "500 acres, and we average 45 bushels bush-els of wheat to the acre. In the 14 years I've been farming there has never been an easier harvest." Farming has been revolutionized revolution-ized in England. In the first place, like it or not, class feeling separated separat-ed England into groups. The farmers farm-ers (not the "gentry" were a proud folk, but still not of the "upper classes") have taken a new role in English life. They were given a big job, the outworking of that job is going to help kill the class system. Listen to my Wiltshire friend again: "We were asked particularly to get another 2,000.000 acres under the plow in the United Kingdom and convert that amount of permanent grassland into crops of wheat, oats, barley, potatoes and so on, which yield much more food per acre. That has been done. We have produced pro-duced a big extra tonnage of cereals, ce-reals, particularly oats and barley possibly as much as 1,000,000 tons extra more potatoes than usual, and more roots and fodder crops for dairy cows and other live stock." Great Britain and Germany are competing for Spanish favor. The Nazis have agreed to purchase around 7,873,000 boxes of Spanish oranges and 1,260,000 boxes or mandarins, man-darins, according to information received re-ceived by the office of foreign agricultural agri-cultural relations. This is about half -the 1940-41 Spanish exportable surplus sur-plus as estimated by the Spanish government. The British government govern-ment is also reported to be negotiating negotiat-ing for some of the fruit but no agreement has been reported. |
