Jim McHale: Secretary of Agriculture for the State of Pennsylvania from January of 1971 to December of 1975.

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Pennsylvania is far more rural than most of us realize: of its 12 million residents, three and a half million (a larger number than in any other state) live in non?urban areas.

Pennsylvania is also a great deal more important agriculturally than we generally suppose. It ranks seventh in the nation in tobacco production, sixth in the slaughter of hogs, fifth in the production of grapes and chickens and milk, fourth in apples and peaches and tart cherries, third in eggs, and—alone?produces more of this country's cultured mushrooms (140,500,000 pounds, or 61 % of the annual U.S. crop) than all the other 49 states put together.

Altogether, the Keystone State produces over $1 billion worth of farm products annually. Or, to put it another way, Pennsylvania is not just your casual agricultural state.

And Jim McHale, Secretary of Agriculture for the state of Pennsylvania from January of 1971 to December of 1975, was most certainly not your casual modern secretary of agriculture.

For one thing, he didn't enter office straight from an exalted executive position in some huge agribiz corporation. Nor had he spent 15 or 20 years teaching in one of the country's agricultural colleges. (What the heck! Jim McHale didn't even make it to college as a student, much less a professor!)

And for another, McHale took office determined to make the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture responsive to the real needs of all the farmers and all the other three and a half million rural residents of the Keystone State. Maybe even the real needs of the eight and a half million urban citizens of Pennsylvania, too, if that's what was necessary. But, at any rate, responsive to the real flesh-and-blood needs of real people . . . and not the dollar and power demands of the corporate agribiz establishment.

And so, before the "good ole boys"of corporate agriculture could even believe what was happening, McHale was holding hearings throughout Pennsylvania on the subject of rural poverty. He was taking money out of Penn State University's comfortable dead-end "research" projects and plowing it directly into rural housing, health, sewage, and transportation programs. He was passing out free plants and low-cost seeds to 300,000 poor people who were willing to raise their own anti?inflation gardens. He was promoting farmers' markets and co-ops that allowed small producers to sell meal, fruit, and vegetables (at much higher prices than they'd normally receive on the farm) directly to inner city blacks and other urban residents (at much lower prices than they'd normally pay at big city supermarkets).

Naturally, the guys in the middle?the dealers, processors, distributors, and wholesalers getting fat, rich, and powerful at the expense of the family farmer on one end and the consumer on the other—didn't like these and other related programs at all. So they launched a campaign that eventually forced McHale out of office.

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