“What is believed to be the largest field in the country under one fence was broken and sown to wheat this fall by Hickman Price, the most extensive wheat farmer in the Panhandle of Texas,” the Kerrville Times reported on Nov. 13, 1930.
One sure way to get off on the wrong foot in any small town is to treat the inhabitants like a bunch of ignorant yokels. The well-dressed stranger was smart enough to grasp that fact of life, but he did not let something as trivial as common courtesy stop him from straightening out the editor of the Plainview paper.
Brothers Hickman and Andrew Price made the long trip to the Panhandle in 1914 to take a look at 30 sections of farmland a rich relative left them. Walking into the office of the local semi-weekly, Hickman recited his media credentials, which included his present position as publisher of the Nashville Democrat, before proceeding to tell the editor that Plainview needed a daily newspaper.
Herbert Hillburn knew better, but he was not about to argue with a stranger who seemed so full of himself. He offered to print the publication but only if the bigshot footed the bill. Price agreed but, as Hillburn suspected, quickly lost interest in the project.
That was the last the good people of the Texas Panhandle heard from Hickman Price for a decade and a half. Then in 1929 he quit his $80,000-a-year job with Fox Film and went back to Plainview with a grand plan to apply the assembly-line methods of his hero, Henry Ford, to the production of wheat.
“If there is one thing that agriculture can learn from other industries,” Price said over and over again with total confidence, “it is the certainty that the 20th century ushered in the passing of the individual producer.” The inherent inefficiency of the small farmer doomed him to a life of poverty, but like the white knight riding to the rescue of the helpless princess Price had come to change all that.
By leasing his brother’s share of their inheritance along with the 7,000-acre “Nanny Pasture” in Swisher County, Price increased his holdings to 34,000 acres or close to 54 square miles. Next, he hired a legion of employees — “wheat men” from the northern Plains and everyone else, such as bookkeepers, mechanics, laborers, drivers and the like — from nearby towns and the countryside.
Price even put a barber on the payroll for the exclusive use of his employees. Shaves and haircuts were free of charge as were shampoos and massages, when the barber was not too busy.
“Soon special carloads of equipment and supplies — trucks, tractors, plows, combines, lubricating oil and repair parts — began arriving in Tulia and Kress,” wrote Vance Johnson in the 1947 book “Heaven’s Tableland.” “Gasoline was delivered in tank-car lots (and) a special ‘tractor farm’ was established with shops for quick and efficient repairs.”
Messengers on motorcycles brought up-to-the-minute reports to Price from his far-flung fields and relayed his orders on the return trip. Twenty-five giant combines and eight windrowing machines hummed around the clock at harvest time and moved from one location to the next on a specially constructed truck.
At first, it looked like Price might pull it off, at least according to the July 27, 1931, issue of Time. “Last week he was getting in a 500,000-bushel crop from 23,000 acres. One hundred trucks haul the wheat to Kress where Mr. Price sells it direct to the big city terminals in carload lots at a price 5 cents or 6 cents above that which the small farmer gets at the local elevator.”
Popular Mechanics also sang Price’s praises in a piece that portrayed the ex-executive as the working man’s best friend: “He has set a new standard of wages for farm hands which is the most generous ever paid in this country.” The magazine described in detail the company train that served as the workers’ home away from home complete with sleeping, dining and fully equipped club cars.
Secure in his conviction that he had allowed for every contingency, Price bet the farm — literally — on an even bigger and better harvest in 1932. But that was before a late freeze, hailstorms, cutworms and drought destroyed 90 percent of his crop.
At a meeting of his creditors that August in Plainview, Price broke the bad news that he was busted. He begged for more time to somehow find a way to avoid bankruptcy, but a hardware company insisted upon immediate payment of a $600 bill. When Price could not come up with the money, the hard-headed creditor took him to court and the whole house of cards collapsed.
That was that for the “factory farm” visionary, who locked himself in his study and cried his eyes out for 14 straight hours. His big-as-Texas dream cost Hickman Price everything he owned, and he spent the last years of his unhappy life in impoverished seclusion.
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