Consider the Decisions You Make!! Generations may be affected!! (Part II)

Henry A. Wallace inherited a passion for the modernization of agriculture, a talent for genetics, statistics and agricultural research and a conviction that farmers, who had not shared in the fabled prosperity of the 1920s, required federal support to achieve stable incomes.

Wallace was a shy young man, something of a loner, devoted to hybrid corn, econometric analysis of farm prices and the McNary - Haugen bill to raise farm income.

He was born on a farm in Iowa in 1888. He became a corn scientist who realized the commercial implications of cross-breeding and started Pioneer Hi-Bred International, the world's first commercial hybrid seed corn venture. He was also a prominent agricultural economist and a long-time editor of Wallace’s Farmer, a leading farm publication founded by his grandfather, "Uncle Henry," the first Henry Wallace.

Named as Secretary of Agriculture in 1933 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wallace became a powerful spokesperson for sound conservation practices, believing they should be a central part of farm policy. The high cost of soil erosion, he often said, was of more importance than the low cost of production. Wallace favored certain practices which have been referred to as organic agriculture, and lately as alternative or sustainable agriculture.

Wallace also launched the Rural Electrification Administration, the Farm Security Administration, the first food stamp plan, and dozens of other programs designed to help American farmers. His goal was to establish a viable farm economy and, at the same time, conserve the nation's natural resources. Wallace was responsible for the creation in 1938 of the "ever-normal granary," which played a critical role in supplying food to Americans during World War II, and was one of his proudest achievements.

Wallace is considered the greatest secretary of agriculture. In 1933, a quarter of the American people still lived on farms and agricultural policy was a matter of high political and economic significance. Farmers had been devastated by the depression. His ambition was to restore the farmers' position in the national economy. He sought to give them the same opportunity to improve income by controlling output that business corporations already possessed.

In time he widened his concern beyond commercial farming to subsistence farming and rural poverty. For the urban poor, he provided food stamps and school lunches. He instituted programs for land-use planning, soil conservation and erosion control. And always he promoted research to combat plant and animal diseases, to locate drought-resistant crops and to develop hybrid seeds in order to increase productivity.

Today, as a result of the agricultural revolution that in so many respects Wallace pioneered, fewer than 2% of Americans are employed in farm occupations--and they produce more than their grandfathers produced 70 years ago.

He is said to be the greatest Secretary of Agriculture of all time!!

Maybe he should have gotten the Nobel Prize!!

But wait!! There is more!!!

The Boomer Blogger