Percy S. Hardiman was born on June 7, 1909, in the town of Lincoln, south of the village of Sussex, in Waukesha County, Wisconsin. A progressive-minded farmer who owned an outstanding dairy operation in the town of Merton near the Waukesha-Washington county boundary, Percy Hardiman by the time he retired in the 1970's was concluding a career as one of Wisconsin's most active farmers' organization leaders. In so doing, he followed in the footsteps of his father Walter, a Farm Bureau activist who in the early 1930's with Gavin McKerrow and about twenty other farmers founded the Golden Guernsey Dairy Cooperative.
Percy Hardiman attended state-graded school in Sussex, commuted to high school in Waukesha, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1932. Faced with a scarcity of work during the depths of the Depression, he trucked petroleum products in Waukesha county before purchasing his first farm in 1940 and another in the spring of 1944. Over the years he rented additional land for cropping and pasturing; in 1973 he sold the farm he had purchased in 1944 (known in the neighborhood as the “Naylor Farm”); at the time of the interview he and his wife lived on the farmstead purchased in 1940 (known in the neighborhood as the “Van Norman Farm”) in a home the original portion of which was built in the same year that Wisconsin became a state.
The Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation, unlike its sister organizations in such nearby states as Illinois and Iowa, functioned sluggishly during its first several decades. In the early 1940's, at about the time Percy Hardiman helped to re-energize the Waukesha County Farm Bureau, the state organization under the guidance of Iowan James C. Green launched a successful organization drive in many eastern and southern counties. Hardiman became president of the Waukesha County Farm Bureau in 1944, and in 1950 began a two-decade stint on the state board of directors from District #1. Elected vice president in late 1957, a year later he succeeded Curtis W. Hatch as president. It was during Hardiman's presidency that the modern Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation, as Wisconsin's largest general farmers' organization, vied with the Wisconsin Farmers' Union as a powerful influence in maintaining and modifying agricultural policy in the state.
