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 Institute'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 signa