Frying Pan Farm Part 5

[Ill.u.s.tration: Soybeans on a demonstration field showing the improvements made by the addition of lime to the soil. Photo in H. B.

Derr Report, 1925, Virginiana Collection, Fairfax County Public Library.]

Veterinarians abounded in the area, but were called in generally for required tests (such as tuberculin) or when the situation was really grave; most farmers relied on their own experience for delivering calves or treating common ailments.[113] Among the prominent vets in the county were Dr. Harry Drake, Dr. Bernard Poole and C. L. Kronfeld. All of these men made house calls, bringing medical kits and medicine with them. Their fee was $2.50 per visit which included the price of follow-up medicine. Perhaps because this fee was prohibitive to some, or through a desire for self-reliance, farmers often neglected to call the veterinarian until an animal was critically ill. "The farmer in what I suspect was fifty percent of the cases lost the animal anyway after the vet got there," acknowledged Joseph Beard,

because so many times instead of having preventative medicine ...

they never called him until things were in very bad shape. I suspect that the vet would have been able to save so many of the animals that he didn't by virtue of the fact that he didn't get there on time.... They weren't interested in prevention; they were interested in the cure.[114]

The farmers were not entirely to blame since preventative medicine was a new concept, the benefits of which were not always immediately obvious.

County agents Derr and Beard both waged exhaustive battles to convince local agriculturalists of the advantage of vaccination and show them the proper methods of inoculating their own animals. Derr found the farmers unwilling to do their own vaccinating, preferring to rely on specialists; yet with cla.s.sic inconsistency they were also reluctant to call in a veterinarian for such a purpose.[115] In the end, the agents found that, like many other progressive techniques which seemed new and unsubstantiated to the farmer, demonstration worked better than rhetoric. An example of this occurred in 1926 when a farmer let some cattle onto a pasture, believed to be infested with a calf disease known as blackleg. When one of his best calves died, he panicked and turned to the county agent. The farmer's animals were all inoculated, as were those on several neighboring farms, and there were no further losses.

"This incident has done more to place confidence in vaccinations than several years' talking could do," wrote a pleased H. B. Derr. "There are no more doubting Thomases in that community at least."[116]

Similar work was undertaken to convince orchardists and crop producers of the advantages of preventative spraying to eliminate bacterial diseases and aid in insect control. The county's production of fruits, vegetables and grains had suffered less from direct neglect than from ignorance of proper care.[117] The value of chemical pesticides was just beginning to be understood (their use would not reach major proportions until the years after World War II) and Joseph Beard noted that the agents were frequently "bombarded with all these new advertis.e.m.e.nts coming from the supplier or chemical company...."[118] The agents refrained from recommending products that had not been tested for at least three years at the State Agricultural Experiment Station, insuring some safety in the pesticides, though Beard admitted that the principles of chemical buildup were not yet recognized.[119] Slowly word travelled through the county of the advantages of protecting crops from disease. By 1930 the program was progressing nicely, as Derr reported to the state agency. Driving through the county one day, he met a successful orchardist whom he had previously urged to use fungicides.

"Derr," the farmer remarked to him, "you sure keep me busy; every time my wife sees your spray notices she makes me get the machine out and go to work, but it surely does pay to spray."[120] Here too the farmer relied on his own verification and judged personal experience stronger than the words of experts.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A wild cherry tree destroyed by web worms. Insect pests such as these were a chief reason for the decline of orchards in the area. Photo in H. B. Derr Report, 1925, Virginiana Collection, Fairfax County Public Library.]

In this period of exciting and crucial advances in agricultural knowledge, the individual landowner was sometimes at a loss to, in his parlance, separate the wheat from the chaff. Radio programs, bulletins from the USDA and VPI, local newspaper columns and talks by visiting experts all vied for the farmer's time, as did the news in _The Southern Planter_, _Country Gentleman_ and _Farm Journal_, favorite periodicals in the area. "These programs came so rapidly the farmers just about got familiar with one until another appeared," Derr reported in 1936. "As one farmer put it, 'just one durned thing after another."[121]

Furthermore, the information was often confusing, at odds with the handed-down teachings of generations, or juxtaposed with other advice with which it was dramatically opposed. The _Herndon News-Observer_, for example, carried several articles on "scientific feeding" in its early 1925 issues and advocated crop rotation and strict attention to cleanliness. Only a year later, however, it printed a column advising farmers to feed kerosene and lard to hens to rid them of vermin.[122] In an even more blatant example, this paper contained an article written by Virginia state dairy specialist John A. Avery, which counseled area farmers to increase their dairy herds; the same edition ran a piece by H. B. Derr which bemoaned the surplus of milk then glutting the Washington market.[123] It is not surprising that the farmer, caught in the midst of a bewildering amount of concrete advice and misinformation, sometimes preferred to stick to his ancestors' ways. Thus, the old adages--that corn should be planted when the leaves were as large as squirrel's ears, or that when a hen's comb isn't bright red, it isn't laying--were relinquished with reluctance.[124] The only consistently accepted source on scientific farming seems to have been Virginia Polytechnical Inst.i.tute's _Handbook of Agronomy_, which more than one farmer stated he held in one hand while directing the plow with the other.[125]

A particularly difficult question for the farmer to consider was the problem of specialization. General farming had been the rule for so long, and one-crop systems had such a reputation for running farms into debt, that many were doubtful of the advantages of specialization. Here, too, they received mixed signals. On one hand farmers were advised to sink their all into poultry or dairying, only to hear that to concentrate too completely on one area would limit their self-sufficiency and mitigate the integrated quality of the farm. In an increasingly technical world, however, specialization had many attractions. Expensive machinery needed to be purchased for only one kind of production, the farmer could cut down the vast influx of information to only those subjects which directly interested him, and the methods of ma.s.s production, first pioneered in factories, could be applied to his concentrated effort. Moreover, specialization in market commodities produced the cash which had become ever more important to buy equipment, pay taxes and purchase manufactured goods which were no longer made on the farm. In the end, Fairfax County farmers generally effected a compromise: while focusing on one aspect of farming, they retained many of the advantages of the general farmer. Vegetable gardens, poultry houses, orchards, and sometimes sheep all kept their place on the family farm. Even C. T. Rice, who liked to refer to his farm as a milk producing plant, with "little time or s.p.a.ce for anything else" kept a few chickens and hogs.[126]

An early specialization in the county was truck gardening. The long growing season and potential markets in Alexandria and Washington in theory seemed to point to success in this field. The list of vegetables and fruits grown for the commercial market was impressive and included potatoes, corn, tomatoes, spinach, black-eyed peas, parsnips and rhubarb, apples and several varieties of berries.[127] One man even grew artichokes, making quite a substantial profit, but decided to move his operation to more productive soils in New Jersey.[128] Yet those who attempted raising large quant.i.ties of these crops found it difficult to show clear profits. Fruit growers had to compete with the world-famous produce of the Shenandoah Valley, whose strong cooperative organization gave an added advantage to the area's natural abundance. Hay and forage grains were of decreasing importance in a country rapidly becoming enamored of the automobile. In addition, a slump in farm prices had begun in 1920-21, the after-effect of the inflated agricultural revenues of the World War I years.

A study of small truck farms in the Washington, D.C. area showed that despite intensive labor and a double cropping system, a farmer was often clearing only $500 annually by raising produce for the city markets. The study concluded that it took "the best management and a considerable knowledge of farm practice and markets" to till such a farm to advantage. On the smallest farms it was only the exceptional farmer who could make more than a living without any outside source of income.[129]

Marketing the produce was a special problem of truck farming. The vegetables had to be delivered and sold at the peak of their ripeness and their highly perishable nature made this somewhat difficult in the days before refrigeration. It was generally undesirable to sell through a middleman, and therefore the farmer was responsible for personally marketing as well as raising his produce. Moreover, the trip to Washington was tedious and time consuming, especially in the early 1920s when the condition of the area's roads was at a notoriously low point.

One market farmer's trip was described in this way:

He planted all sorts of garden produce and he had what you'd call a market wagon; it was a covered wagon.... During the day he would fill that wagon with his produce and in the evening he would hook his ... two horses to the wagon to get to Washington. He'd aim to get there by six o'clock in the morning when the markets opened. He would sell his produce as much as he could [directly from the wagon] ... to individuals at the old Center Market.... They paid a higher price. If he had any left over he had to sell it at whatever he could get to the people who owned the stalls.... It took him three or four hours ... to sell his load of produce. Then it was the next night before he came home.[130]

Conditions at the city markets were also less than perfect as large companies tried to dump cheap produce from outside areas on the Washington consumer. Not only did they compete with the local farmer for the lowest prices, but they misused the stall s.p.a.ce itself. Even when a new market was built in 1933, this remained a problem. One irate farmer angrily stated to the editor of the _Herndon News-Observer_ that the large retail trucks held all the available s.p.a.ces while the area farmers "stand out doors (sic) all day and part of the night, trying to eke out money for taxes, interest and other arbitrary costs." The streets were filthy, he continued, and the market protection itself inadequate. "The only pretense of shelter barely covers the sidewalk, leaving the farmer's truck or car outdoors where produce is in danger from heat, cold, or rain."[131]

Partially because of these problems, the specialty which gained in distinction and profitability at this time was dairy farming. There were several additional reasons for this. The land itself was well adapted to the raising of milk cows; its gently undulating terrain--which formed numerous natural water depressions--coupled with the abundance of small streams or "runs," made water easily available. To the dairy farmer who must water his stock regardless of seasonal conditions, this was essential. As previously mentioned, Fairfax County also possessed soil types which worked up well and produced high yields of the pasturage and ensilage crops required to support large dairy herds. And, one observer noted, the weather was favorable for the dairy industry: "The winters are relatively short in Fairfax, thus allowing cattle to stay out often until the latter part of November, returning to pasture by April or May."[132]

These natural a.s.sets tell only part of the story for, as stated above, Fairfax County continually produced well above the state per acre average in both corn and orchard fruits and its market crops were considerably varied as late as 1920. Although dairying required more capital initially and more land than did market gardening, it held an advantage in that the plummeting farm prices did not affect milk products as disasterously as crops. The really great a.s.set that the Fairfax County dairy industry possessed, however, was its proximity to the large milk-consuming markets in Alexandria and Washington, D.C., and the speedy access afforded by rail lines connecting the two areas. Where truck farmers needed to sell their produce personally in order to make the best profit, milk producers sold to distributors, who collected at the depot, making rail transportation a feasible marketing device.

In the earliest days of the century milk was shipped by boat to the city markets, but the lack of river access for many farms and the ease of spoilage on this slow mode of transportation r.e.t.a.r.ded the growth of the commercial milk market. It was not until the old and unreliable steam railway lines, such as the Washington and Old Dominion Railway, were converted to electricity around 1912 and refrigerated cars were widely used, that the shipment of milk became really profitable.[133]

Communities such as Floris, situated only a few miles from the Herndon depot, began to flourish as dairy centers when only a few years earlier poor transportation would have made marketing of such a highly perishable product unthinkable. So successful and rapid was the dairy boom that by 1924 over 1,800 gallons of milk were shipped daily from the county to Washington, and its production was the highest in Virginia.[134]

Other factors served to enhance the burgeoning dairy industry. Around 1910 milk pasteurization and bottling plants were established in Washington. This created a large market for whole milk, which had formerly been held in suspicion by many people who believed milk to be a carrier of disease. Another important aspect was the well-directed efforts of the two county agricultural extension agents who, in addition to introducing the previously mentioned Dairy Herd Improvement a.s.sociations, encouraged the use of pure-bred bulls for breeding, often acquiring the free loan of USDA animals for the purpose. The use of these bulls was an added incentive for farmers to pay the nominal fee and join the Dairy Herd Improvement a.s.sociations, since membership was required in order to borrow a government animal. By these methods and repeated admonitions to "get out of the scrub cla.s.s and join the pure-bred bunch," the county agents helped Fairfax farmers develop so fine a reputation for quality dairy cows that buyers came from many states to procure these high-testing animals for their farms.[135]

Another factor affecting the rise of dairying in Fairfax County was the early formation of the Maryland and Virginia Milk Producers a.s.sociation.

The organization had been informally started in 1907 as a clearinghouse for grievances among some producers in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., but for many years it "amounted to little more than an occasional general meeting for the purpose of some united effort toward raising the price of milk."[136] In 1920 it was incorporated and a full-time manager employed. Each member paid a fee of one cent per gallon of milk sold (a fund which was acc.u.mulated and refunded when a farmer left the organization) and the a.s.sociation handled the business of selling to the distributors in Washington. By such collective action the dairymen were able to control milk prices more effectively, and their unity a.s.sured a measure of security against unscrupulous action by distributors. In the early years of Fairfax County dairying this was a very real threat as former a.s.sociation member Holden Harrison attests:

There were four or five princ.i.p.al distributors in Washington. I don't know whether they got together on this or not, but to start out with they had a two price program. They paid you more in the winter than they did in the summer.... The dairy farmer was at the mercy of the milk distributor then. They set prices just as low as they thought the best dairyman could continue to produce.... The distributors were about to starve the farmers out, that's what brought it around. We weren't getting a fair deal. So when we formed this a.s.sociation the management of the a.s.sociation could say, 'We've got these farmers lined up. They pretty well depend on us and we can pretty well tell them what to do.' Through that leverage they could pretty well tell the distributors what to do, too.[137]

The a.s.sociation furthered its prestige--and its bargaining power--by waging a battle against "bootleg," or uninspected, milk being brought into the area from Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It had the additional advantage of stabilizing prices so that the farmer with only a small amount of milk for the market could compete with the larger producer whose more economical methods had previously allowed him to undersell his smaller neighbor. Better methods of testing and pasteurizing the milk were also concerns and the cooperative used its muscle to negotiate loans for its members.[138]

Furthermore, in the late 1920s, the a.s.sociation became concerned about the drop in prices due to an overabundance of milk in the area and developed a system of handling the surplus. "It eventually built itself into a position where the a.s.sociation itself either rented or purchased a plant that could take care of surplus milk...," stated Holden Harrison. "This surplus milk was processed into cheese or b.u.t.ter or ice cream or maybe even powdered milk.... They had a plant in Frederick, Maryland, and they would divert whatever amount of producers' milk to Frederick to the processing plant and keep it out of the hands of the distributors."[139] This action had the double advantage of avoiding waste and preventing a profit-lowering glut of milk.

By 1927 the Maryland and Virginia Milk Producers a.s.sociation was the largest farmer's cooperative in Virginia. It included 85% of the Washington area producers in its membership, despite the effort of distributors to dissuade some of the better producers from joining. They exercised bargaining control of over $2,500,000 annually. Though they never actually went on strike, their large membership fund gave them a strong bargaining position. "The distributors knew when that fund acc.u.mulated to a good-sized sum that we weren't just a fly-by-night outfit that could be pushed around, that we had resources we could rely on."[140] Furthermore, the organization wisely kept its clout by avoiding political issues and exercising minimum control over individual methods of production. Its purpose was to streamline the commercialization of a farm product, and in this effort it was highly successful.

Northern Virginia's reputation for dairy excellence grew both in local circles and throughout the state as a result of published census reports and statewide comparisons of milk volume and b.u.t.terfat content. The 1925 agricultural census shows Fairfax County to be the largest producer in the state, with average yield per cow 70% above the statewide figure; in 1940 this margin was even greater.[141] Dairy Herd Improvement a.s.sociation #1, based in the Herndon area, had especially impressive results. In 1935, for example, it had the second highest overall average in Virginia and included four of the state's five most productive herds.

In 1937 the county's high-testing cow, a Holstein owned by Dr. F. W.

Huddleston, gave 2,031 pounds of milk (8.6 pounds to a gallon) per month to a statewide average of 620.[142]

As a result of these impressive showings, many local farmers shied away from general farming and began to put their energies into milk production; new farmers were drawn to the area specifically for the possibilities in dairy farming. Of ten families interviewed in the Floris area, all save one connected their family's removal to Fairfax County to the combination of transportation ease and excellent prices afforded by the Washington milk market. "In this period there was an immigration of farmers from other parts of the country, particularly in the Valley of Virginia, who did not have an opportunity to market their farm products and their livestock very readily up there in the Valley,"

related Joseph Beard, "... the Southern Railway, the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac [Railways were] quite an a.s.set to people who wanted to market their farm products so a lot of them moved up here."[143] Many of the newcomers became outstanding in the field of dairy husbandry, for example, C. T. Rice, a celebrated dairy owner of the Oakton area, whose animals consistently scored highly on milk production. He came to the county in 1915 but "threw away his plow"

during the 1920s to concentrate solely on dairying, citing erosion problems and the more constant income of dairying as his reasons.[144]

So widespread was this tendency to embrace dairy farming that a traveller riding through the county in 1930 sensed that "it is not farming country at all, because there is very little planting done. We saw few fields in which a crop had been recently harvested ... it is apparently a grazing country."[145]

Despite its spectacular achievements, the Fairfax County dairy industry did not rise with an unchecked ascent but suffered a certain share of problems and setbacks. In one sense its very success was its worst enemy. Although many farmers continued to focus on dairying, by 1926 there was a surplus of milk on the Washington market and the county agent noted that "it appears as if we had sufficient dairies."[146]

Still, while prices dropped steadily between 1926 and 1935,[147] farmers continued to increase their yields in hopes of increasing profits by shear quant.i.ties of milk sold. One county farmer commenting on the futility of this, remarked:

We were getting about 25 a gallon for our base milk. Seventy-five gallons a day at 25 a gallon wasn't paying the interest and the mortgage on [his farm loan]. So we decided in 1928 that we would put in some more cows and get a little extra money to help pay off this mortgage and this loan. So we started shipping, instead of 75 gallons of milk a day, 90 to 95 gallons of milk a day. Then milk went down from 25 a gallon to 22 a gallon. Well, we couldn't do that, so we put some more stalls on the barn and built a new silo and put in enough cows to ship 125 gallons of milk a day ... it was only netting us 18 to 19 a gallon ... the more we worked, the more we produced, and the harder we worked, it seemed like the less net income we had.[148]

Against this turn of events the state agricultural service advocated poultry and truck farming for those entering the county and urged a more uniform distribution of the county's cattle. Some farmers had too few cows for even their own use. Others had too many and no feed. "A few good cows well kept, rather than a large number poorly fed, will bring in a steady income, that will do much for our farmers in their present conditions," advised County Agent Derr.[149] He also hoped to see farmers concentrate on the b.u.t.terfat content of their milk and to increase their production of cream for which there was a continual market; the skim milk left after the removal of cream could be fed to calves, pigs or children. Most often Derr cautioned against the dangers of complete specialization at the expense of an integrated farm in which each facet of the farm was both aided and benefitted by every other part. "The old slogan, 'the cow, the sow and the hen,' is a very true one," he wrote, "especially in the South."[150]

Derr did well to emphasize the quality of milk products. A 1932 ruling in the District of Columbia requiring a 4% b.u.t.terfat content in milk sold there occurred just as Derr was complaining that "with many the quality of the milk is not such a vital question as the quant.i.ty."

Holstein cattle, which gave higher yields but less rich milk than did Jerseys or Guernseys, predominated in the county, making the new demand a difficult one to meet. In desperation some farmers tried cross-breeding the two strains with mixed results; the inevitable outcome was to compromise the county's movement towards establishing herds of pure-bred animals.[151]

The mixing of breeds to increase b.u.t.terfat content was not the only element which undercut the breeding program. One problem, the selling of highly profitable animals, was yet another hazard of success. "Owing to the excellent reports being made by our cow testing a.s.sociations, numerous buyers from other states have come into the county and by paying almost fabulous prices have taken away quite a number of our best animals," Derr wrote in 1926. "In some cases this has proved a costly undertaking for our dairymen, as by bringing new animals into their herds ... either T B or abortion has been introduced."[152] Another factor working against pure-bred stock was the depression, which for farmers encompa.s.sed not only the 1930s, but the entire period following the deflation of World War I prices. With less cash available, many farmers bought poor quality bulls rather than invest the money for a pure-bred animal.[153]

Notwithstanding these setbacks, dairy farming continued to be Fairfax County's predominant (and most prestigious) industry during the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, it flourished well into the 1950s and was eclipsed only by the overwhelming spread of urban workers into the area in the second half of the century. Until this development occurred, it was the dairy farmer's life which set the style and pace of life in the county.

Mechanization and specialization of the family farm did not necessarily lighten the farmer's workload. An electric machine could cut several hours per week off milking time, but this time gain was offset by the hours spent on sterilization and maintenance. Threshers eliminated the time-consuming ch.o.r.e of hand-flailing the grain, but the farmer still had to cut and stack his harvest, and it took several men a number of days to run the machine. The grower was at the mercy of the machine's owner as to the day and time he was able to thresh; here again, he lost a measure of independence.[154] The excellent efforts of the Dairy Herd Improvement a.s.sociations also produced work for the farmers, especially those unaccustomed to bookkeeping. The landowner who had kept his records in an old shoe box was now expected to record the precise weight and b.u.t.terfat content of the milk given by each cow, as well as the market value, number of days tested and amount and cost of grain fed the animal. The data shown in the Herd Record Books belonging to C. T. Rice reveal them to be complex doc.u.ments which required in addition to the above information, hereditary records, descriptions of physical features, and yearly and monthly production averages.[155] The efforts were rewarding, of course, but, added to the farmer's already overloaded day, the recordkeeping could be burdensome. Both Agents Derr and Beard complained constantly of the farmer's reluctance to keep records and in their attempts to increase the area's professional methods and pride, they stressed the need to keep accurate accounts of the farm's transactions.[156]

The advent of technological application in the farming sector was a cause of both optimism and disquiet. It eliminated some drudgery, it streamlined and modernized, but it also uprooted traditions and added financial and emotional burdens to the already pressured farmer. To cope with the new agricultural methods and outlook, farmers increasingly chose to relinquish some of their independence and band together to solve their problems.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Hard Work Made Easy and Quick" wrote a local farmer on the back of this photograph. The mechanical hay loader eliminated the taxing work of pitching hay into a barn loft, c. 1935. Photo courtesy of Holden Harrison.]

PART II--NOTES

_Change_

[92] Barger and Lansberg, _American Agriculture, 1899-1939_, 212.