The Kind Who Can Cope

To hear them talk about him in little (pop. 6,000) Wasco, Calif., one would think that P. D. Spilsbury was both mayor and millionaire benefactor. Actually, he is a high school teacher of vocational agriculture, and his chief achievement is the Future Farmers of America chapter that he and his students have built up. To the citizens of Wasco, this is achievement enough. "By golly," says Fred Fry, co-owner of the Wasco Hardware Co., "we just couldn't get along without P.D."

Though P.D.'s F.F.A. chapter is only one of some 9,000 now operating across the U.S., it provides a spectacular example of what this particular kind of U.S. education can do. Begun in 1928 under the Federal Board for Vocational Education, the national F.F.A. program is an attempt to combine academic work in agriculture with practical after-school experience. The boys who join can buy livestock from their chapter and grow crops on ground leased through it. These they can sell for a profit, while the chapter uses whatever is left over to make a profit of its own. Under P.D. (for Paul Duane) Spilsbury, this learning-by-earning process has paid off handsomely in Wasco. When he took over in 1938, the Wasco Union High School's chapter was worth $275. Its assets today: $120,000.

Keep the Cull. A Mormon farmer's son with an Iowa State College master's degree in crop breeding and genetics, stocky, callused P. D. Spilsbury was determined to do something about his future farmers. He begged parents for land and animals, persuaded the school's trustees to put aside $5,000 a year to buy livestock, and then sell it to the boys at cost. Then he and his students began experimenting with feed, found that the blemished cull potatoes discarded by farmers could provide, when dried, 90% of a fat steer's diet. So a whole new industry grew up in Kern County. Instead of paying $65 a ton for corn and $42 for barley, local farmers now had a good substitute for only $29 a ton.

P.D.'s boys made the most of their various earnings. After the war, they began investing in machinery and equipment, though not the sort that most farmers would think of. From surplus Marine Corps bread-baking pans, they made racks for tools, nuts and bolts. From rolled steel sheets, they produced automatic watering troughs, and from big scrap oil pipes, they turned out portable cattle shelters. The boys have made everything from children's glider swings to an 18-ft. "tillpack" to break up clods of earth before planting. For seven years straight, they have won 90% of the mechanics' prize money at the Kern County Fair.

Each year the chapter buys from 250 to 400 steer calves, uses $40,000 worth of feed. Once, it bought 40 acres of sagebrush land, leveled it, tested its soil, built up its fertility, then gave it to the district as a $35,000 gift. The boys have proved such able businessmen, in fact, that the Wasco bank thinks little about making them loans. One boy--the son of a Swiss immigrant who works for $1.37 an hour--has borrowed and repaid $4,200.

Barbecues & Banquets. Wasco's steers command prices of 1-c- to 1 1/2-c- Ib. more than those at the Los Angeles stockyards.

Its fat hogs have won more top prizes in the past ten years than those of any other California high school, and in 1951, Wasco's livestock won $60,000 in prizes and sales at the Great Western Livestock Show. In the last 15 years, P.D.'s students have won seven Armour Trophies, five Swift Trophies, nine Safeway Stores Trophies. Their activities, however, go far beyond taking prizes. Each year they have staged a rodeo, a community barbecue, and an annual parents-and-sons banquet for about 400 guests.

Last week, as his boys were planning for this fall's fairs and shows, P.D. could not help feeling proud of their financial accomplishments. "But we're prouder still," says he, "of what they turn out to be--aggressive, intelligent rural leaders, the kind who can cope with the increasingly difficult problems in agriculture today. No boy, no matter what his background, should be denied the privilege of becoming a small independent businessman."

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