Excerpt
The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, probably best known for its blimp's eye view of sports events, this December once again quietly airlifted farmer-conservationists and conservation district representatives from across the country to Arizona to participate in one of the nation's oldest and most elaborate conservation awards programs. Indeed, as Bud Mekelburg, president of the National Association of Conservation Districts, pointed out at the closing banquet of this year's 36th annual session, the Goodyear Conservation Awards Program has been in existence nearly as long as the soil and water conservation movement in this country.
Participants in the three-day, “vacation-study” program included representatives and outstanding cooperators from conservation districts judged to have their state's best resource management program. The “study” part of the program included tours of Phoenix-area agriculture, including Goodyear's 12,000-acre farming operation near the program's headquarters, a luxurious resort Goodyear owns in Litchfield Park. (Goodyear established the farms in 1917 to produce cotton for tire cord when the company's overseas supplies were shut off by boll weevils and German U-boats. The acreage now produces …
Footnotes
John Walter is assistant editor of the JSWC.
- Copyright 1984 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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