Back to Troublesome Creek : Encounters in Developing Countries, Washington?s Bureaucracy, and on the Farm

A former university president tells about his later encounters in the federal bureaucracy, including an agency with more people than work to be done and how "special projects" get included in appropriation bills.

He also relates global encounters, including a four-acre Philippine farm that financed two children through college, Guatemalans being paid with food aid for digging the trenches for their sewer system, a Bolivian farmer proudly showing his harvest of drying coca leaves, and Eastern Europeans' difficult transition to free enterprise.

Back in Washington, he describes political pressure to finance a cigarette manufacturing line in Turkey and a pork research center in his home state, and how membership in his home town country club risked his nomination to be assistant secretary of agriculture.

Returning to operate his home farm yielded more anecdotes, including a near collision in the cornfield with a somersaulting Plymouth, potential embarrassment of dragging an implement's tongue mid-field, and the obstacles in building an egg layer facility that now employs twenty eight local people.

Duane Acker studied animal husbandry and served at five universities before becoming president of Kansas State University. He then served six years in Washington, including administrator of the Foreign Agricultural Service and as assistant secretary of agriculture, before returning to operate his Iowa farm, where he and his wife live.