Word: wickard
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...elder Wickard himself built the gabled house in which Claude was born to young Andrew and Iva Leonora Kirkpatrick in 1893. Here Claude lived, married and raised two daughters-the only home he knew until he moved to Washington in 1933. At 17, Claude got fancy notions about going to Purdue University's School of Agriculture at Lafayette, 25 miles away. He graduated in 1915, with old-fangled resolve and new-fangled ideas, went back to Section 29. He tested the soil, found it sour, made a homely epigram: "We're mining the soil-not farming...
...Wickard became a good farmer, won ten gold medals from the Farm Bureau for coaxing a yield of 100 bushels to the acre from his cornfields. He went in heavily for hogs, got into the ton-litter competition, won another half-dozen medals. In five years he had bought another 100 acres abutting his ancestral 280 and had paid off a $5,000 mortgage. In 1926 he became the second Carroll County farmer to be singled out for the Prairie Farmer's widely recognized distinction of "Master Farmer...
Hired Man. Claude Wickard was growing beyond his own soil. Wickard began working in extension projects, traveling the State, talking to farmers. In Indiana, farm politics and State politics are often the same thing. In 1932 Wickard became Democratic precinct captain. A slim, dark young fellow, Wayne Coy, then publisher of the Delphi Citizen (now rapidly becoming President Roosevelt's No. 1 trouble-shooter), got Wickard's friends to persuade him to run for the State Senate. Wickard...
...July 1933 the corn-hog problem was a big chunk of the whole farm problem. Wickard became a member of a committee representing the corn-hog States, talked so earnestly in Des Moines that Al G. Black, then head of the Department's corn-hog section, was impressed. He asked Wickard to come to work in Washington...
This was a stunner to Claude Wickard. He knew what it was to walk all day behind a plow pulled by a restless team; to pick corn with cold fingers and an aching back, to spread manure by hand, to shock wheat all day under a hot sun. He knew that hogs could suddenly stop getting fat and die of cholera; that if they didn't die they could sell so cheaply there was no profit in the year's long work. He wanted to do something about that. He wanted to help make farm life better...