Not long ago, a colleague and I were swapping war stories when he asked what my worst time as a reporter had been. A run-in with a crusty editor? A source who denied knowing me? A threatened lawsuit?<br>


No, no and not even close.<br>


By far the worst job I ever had, I related, was the time I followed then-former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz to the microphone at an Illinois farm policy forum.<br>


It was brutal. Not only did no one even pretend to listen to me, I doubt that anyone – short of Raquel Welch in a red-white-and-blue bikini singing the Star Spangled Banner – could have quieted the 500 or so buzzing farmers after their hero, “Secretary Fencerow-to-Fencerow,” finished his loaf-of-bread-and-apple routine. I was toast before I started.<br>
Afterwards, however, the secretary, whose razor intellect was matched only by his hacksaw tongue, stepped up to shake both my hand and a dash of salt into my wounds.<br>


“Say,” he offered, “after listening to you, I’m not surprised that folks in Illinois are still raising hogs in the weeds.”<br>


Several years later I bumped into the then- nearly 90-year-old on the campus of his beloved Purdue University.<br>


“You still preaching socialism?” he asked. “Yes,” I replied, “but it beats raising hogs in the weeds.”
“Hah!” he clucked, then smiled. “You just made my day.”<br>


Butz, who died at age 98 on Feb. 2, had a lot to smile about even though every one of his obituaries prominently featured the “vulgar racial comment,” as the New York Times described it in their Feb. 4 edition, that brought an ignominious end to his princely reign as secretary in 1976.<br>


None, however, mentioned perhaps his most remarkable achievement: living long enough to see his rock-ribbed, free market orthodoxy deliver not one, but two stratospheric economic boons to American agriculture. The first he rightfully could – and faithfully did – take credit for: the go-go 1970s.<br>


Like Earl’s public career, though, that brief interlude, fueled by the Soviet Union’s explosive, unforeseen U.S. grain purchases, came to a swift and ugly end. When Soviet buying failed to keep up with expanding U.S. production, the American balloon it had over-inflated burst.<br>


That boondoggle, also explosive and unforeseen, smashed farmers and lenders so fast and so badly that even Butz’s acolytes in the Reagan White House and Congress swiftly forsook his free market legacy to pull American farmers back into the safe bosom of Momma USDA.<br>


Butz would have none of the new schemes – PIK and CRP are two yet standing – and he spent much of the next decade speaking against the resurgence of “ill conceived, ill begotten” government farm programs to any group who’d have him.<br>


And most did. Sure, in Washington he was a political pariah, but in the countryside he was a policy maharishi. He was, after all, Earl Butz, the first secretary of agriculture who didn’t just preach higher prices; he delivered ‘em. Personally.<br>


Indeed, when Butz served Richard Nixon as USDA chief, his cult was so strong that during Nixon’s 1972 re-election bid a commonly seen bumper sticker in farm country read: “Re-elect Nixon or lose your Butz.”<br>

Even now, 35 years later, to speak ill of Earl in farm country is similar to burning the flag at the Lincoln Memorial on CNN at noon on the Fourth of July. Do it and someone’s gonna’ stomp the tar out of you.<br>

But was Earl Butz the savior farmers made – and still make – him out to be?<br>

What do I look like, a socialist who wants the tar stomped out of himself and his hogs out there in the weeds?<br>

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with questions or comments for Alan Guebert may write to him in care of this publication.