Develop & Expand

As a 14-year-old student at a high school in Quitman, Ga., Farm Boy Wesley Patrick got a class project--the care of a gilt and a boar. He did so well that he won second prize at a local swine show. Much encouraged. Patrick asked his vocational agriculture teacher how he might get into full-time farming. Advised Teacher Drawdy Willis: "Develop and expand."

Patrick developed and expanded so fast that the 382,000 members of the Future Farmers of America named him the 1956 "Star Farmer of America," and successor to igss's winner, Joe Moore of Tennessee (TIME, Oct. 24. 1955). This week, in celebration, Patrick's Brooks County farmer friends held a giant barbecue for him (6,000 chickens, i.ooo pecan pies). The Ford Motor Co. got into the act, picked up the food tab. gave Patrick one of its new combination pickup truck and passenger cars which the company will start producing for the farm trade next month.

Since he won his gilt and boar prizes, Wes Patrick's success pattern has been sure and steady. Even before his June 1953 high-school graduation, he persuaded his father to let him work part of the family farm, planted six acres of oats and crimson clover, planted ten acres of sweet potatoes and corn and marketed ten hogs. He finished the first year by copping county awards in corn production and winter grazing. In 1953. after his father, Paul Patrick. 53. had moved to another farm. Wes bought the 130-acre family farm for $10,400, promising to pay in installments.

Wes put in cotton, oats, tobacco. 55 acres of corn, put some land in pasture. and steadfastly brushed off his family's insistence that he go to college. (He finally went, stayed a quarter, then quit.) He pushed a soil-conservation program, fenced the farm, terraced the land and planted good, soil-building cover crops; soon he had a well-managed farm with a net worth of $17,145. Said his old teacher: "He's not an exceptional fellow, but he's eager to learn and determined to be the best farmer in the whole country. For its size, his farm is one of the best-run anywhere."

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