Abstract

William Jasper Spillman (1863-1931) developed wheat hybrids at Washing? ton State Agricultural College in 1899 and was the first to explain Mendelian theories to an agricultural audience. He moved to the USDA in Washington, DC, where he pioneer ed the field offarm management and helped establish cooperative programs that evolved into the Agricultural Extension Service. Spillman, an iconoclast of sorts, straddled the rural world of empirical thinking as well as the world of professional science. He remained linked to his Missouri roots by participating in the National Grange his entire adult life, while he also was a member of the American Academy of Science and re? ceived an honorary doctorate for his pioneering work in genetics. The plant genetics work he participated in was largely responsible for agricultural over? production and ultimately the depopulation of rural America by the 1930s. He sought to resolve the situation with his plans for a national agricultural al? lotment program, which eventually became the foundation for federal farm programs. His books, The Law of Diminishing Returns (1924) and Balancing the Farm Output: A Statement of the Present Deplorable Conditions of Farming, its Causes and Suggested Remedies (1927), helped shape agricul? tural policies for decades.

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