Another beneficial side effect of the surfaced highway network was the birth of the roadside stand for selling surplus produce, dairy and poultry products. There were some distinct advantages to the stands, as farmers could sell directly to the customer without the costly use of a middleman, and did not have to transport his goods to city consumers. A count made in 1937 found 210 roadside stands in the county.[189] Earlier, the Herndon News-Observer had reported the success of the new markets which lent themselves "to the disposal of second-grade products or fruits and vegetables too ripe for distant shipping [and had] grown to an unusual business ... for the farmers fortunate enough to live along popular highways." Business indeed seems to have been brisk; by 1926 the farmers were pocketing over $2,000 per month from the roadside markets.[190]
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New discoveries in technology, educational opportunities and a refurbished transportation network were naturally considered advances in their time; they could be loosely headed under the term "progress." But progress does not run along a perfectly straight path, rather it dips and weaves ignoring some people and places in its circuitous route. Consequently, many of the changes so eagerly embraced by the farmer of modest means were the very factors which eventually crowded out the family farm. The farmers of Fairfax County were for the most part unaware of their impending doom, being instead optimistic and relatively prosperous during the 1920s and 1930s. But the small, varied and preindustrial farm could not compete for long against the lure of city wages, highly mechanized and specialized farms, and the inroads of the city into rural areas.
Mechanization most drastically altered life on the family farm. Work rhythms and patterns, previously geared to hand labor, were disrupted, and even the sounds on the farm changed. Older cows, for example, disliked the noise of the electric milking machines, and Wilson McNair wrote that
horses were generally scared of traction engines with their hissing steam, etc. When the engine met a team it would stop and one man would lead the horses by the bridle past the engine.... At the railroad crossing in Herndon there was a bell that rung when a train was coming. Our pony, if the bell was ringing when we crossed the track coming home would break into a dead run. You couldn't hold her.[191]
To the interim farmer, caught between completely automated equipment and the tradition of hand labor, the change in work habits, knowledge and goals could be more than vaguely disquieting.
As mechanization increased, many began to speak of agriculture in industrial terms, believing that "factorizing" the farm would solve its problems. This meant dispensing with any unnecessary tasks, such as raising sheep or making soap, and as much as possible replacing manpower with machinery. Technical terminology started to creep into farm talk. C. T. Rice referred to his dairy as "a milk producing plant,"[192] ancient terms such as "culling" became "selective breeding," and even the animals were referred to as machines, which if "poorly constructed must be ... discarded by the good breeder."[193] To independent-minded farmers, who, as Sinclair Lewis had observed, jealously guarded the ability to escape the mill and turmoil of the city, this industrialization seemed the ultimate compromise. The findings of the Commission to study the Condition of the Farmers of Virginia (1930) show the rural values of a most fundamental character to be those most prized by the agriculturalist:
Among these are: a) The advantages of the country for bringing up a family ... a greater sharing of responsibilities, a closer knit, more stable family life.... b) The satisfactions ... of contacts with forces of nature, of caring for plants and animals, and of seeing them grow.... c) Greater freedom from various types of restraints, including somewhat greater control over time and freedom of personal action; also less intense struggle to keep up with or ahead of others.... d) somewhat greater freedom from illness, together with a better prospect of attaining old age. e) Greater security against unemployment as well as less prospect of falling into absolute want.[194]
Yet in the post-World War I period the farmer had increasingly to commercialize and mechanize his business to remain solvent and to "citify" his life, destroying in numerous instances the standards he held dear.
"I used to 'farm' some and made money at it; now I'm 'engaged in the pursuit of agriculture' and can't make ends meet," commented one U. S. Secretary of Agriculture, echoing the sentiments of many small landowners.[195] The new farm mechanization was, in many cases, not particularly well adapted to the family farm in this period. Gasoline-powered tractors, harvesters and other equipment worked most economically on the large, level acres of midwestern farms, and the east coast farmer with modest landholdings could not hope to compete on the market with the streamlined efficiency of western farms. Mechanized farming was also capital intensive. Besides the initial cost of equipment there were expenses for maintenance and fuel. Whereas the farmer had been able to raise feed for horses or mules inexpensively, he could not grow gasoline.