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 space 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 spaces 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 assets 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 asset 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 retarded 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 Associations, 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 Associations, since membership was required in order to borrow a government animal. By these methods and repeated admonitions to "get out of the scrub class 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 Association. 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 accumulated and refunded when a farmer left the organization) and the Association 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 assured 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 Association member Holden Harrison attests:
There were four or five principal 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 Association the management of the Association 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 Association 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 Association 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 Association 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 butter 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.