Broccoli Kingdom

At the Indianapolis speedway 18 years ago, husky, young William Richards drove his racing car over the side of the track, smashed up, and was carried away with a broken pelvis. "When you're hurt and broke," Richards later related, "you naturally come home." Back he went to his native New England, looking for something less dangerous. Said Richards: "I stumbled into farming."

Last week, it looked as if Bill Richards, now 41, had stumbled into a gold mine. On Cape Cod, where he farms 300 once-scrubby, sand-swept acres by intensive irrigation, neighbors call him "the broccoli king." This summer, barring a hurricane, he will harvest close to $200,000 worth of broccoli and lettuce from a farm which, by Texas standards, is hardly more than a pea patch. He will probably gross as much again from the sale of irrigation pipes and pumps to farmers who want to adopt his system.

A onetime newsboy, dark-haired Bill Richards hustled at odd jobs to pay his way through Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With a degree in chemical engineering, he landed a research job in the Studebaker plant at South Bend, Ind., but was soon booted out because he spent all his time fooling around with racing cars. After the Indianapolis crackup, he worked as a truck farmer's assistant, spotted the scraggly Cap Cod patch at Sandwich and bought it cheap.

Richards cleared the land of trees, used his engineer's training to build it up with chemical fertilizers. He rigged pipes through it, brought in two 100-h.p. pumps to sprinkle it with 1,000 gallons of water a minute from a nearby pond. His only cost was gasoline for the pumps, labor to move the sprinklers, a total of only $10 to $15 per acre a season. This year, when drought withered the crops of thousands of New England farmers, Richards' well-watered acres flourished.

Last week beefy Bill Richards stood in the midst of his 1,000,000 heads of iceberg lettuce (he will plant his broccoli this week), watched the slowly circling sprays of water soak the light brown soil. He was sorry, he said, that other New England farmers were having it so bad, but he was certainly grateful for that smashup on the race track.

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