Californian Lyng Named Head of USDA

President Reagan today named Richard E. Lyng, a longtime Reagan supporter whom the President called “a sound and solid friend” of the nation’s financially stricken farmers, to succeed John R. Block as secretary of agriculture.

Passed over once before in favor of Block, an Illinois farmer, the California businessman and agricultural marketing consultant served as No. 2 man in the Agriculture Department during Reagan’s first term.

Acknowledging that “we have a farm problem,” Reagan said Lyng, in implementing the farm bill adopted last month, “will help get farming more into the market economy and rectify some of the things that have been wrong” with federal farm programs.

With Lyng standing next to him in front of a roaring fire in the Oval Office, Reagan told reporters, “I have every confidence the farmers are going to have a sound and solid friend in Secretary of Agriculture Dick Lyng.”

Asked why he didn’t choose “a working farmer” for the post, Reagan said Lyng “has been a pretty hard-working farmer most of his life.”

The new secretary-designate, who faces Senate confirmation proceedings, has spent most of the last two decades involved in agricultural marketing.

Lyng, 67, served as California secretary of agriculture from 1967 to 1969, during Reagan’s tenure as governor, and in 1980 headed the Reagan-Bush campaign effort among farmers and ranchers.

He had served four years as an assistant secretary of agriculture in the Nixon Administration, and Reagan brought him back to Washington as deputy secretary.