Milk in Virginia

Source: VPM, Virginia Farming: Dairy Industry Overview (2019)

European colonists brought the dairy industry to North America. Native Americans in Virginia had only domesticated dogs. There were no cows, sheep or goats to milk until the English arrived at Jamestown.

Milk was kept initially in glazed earthenware or lead pans, allowing cream to separate over 24-48 hours. The buildings used as dairies often had a floor excavated several feet into the ground, in order to create a cooler environment. Cheese production in colonial Virginia was limited in the summer by high temperatures. Hard cheese could be imported from England, where cooler temperatures allowed cheese to be created from milk throughout the year.

The milking process had to be in an antiseptic setting to keep the product for spoiling. In the social hierarchy on a farm, the workers in the milk house had relatively high status.

Churning cream into butter and other dairy work was typically done by women. George Washington bought milk for use at Mount Vernon until he married in 1759. Once Martha Washington was there to oversee the work, he set up dairy operations.¹

The word dairy is derived from Middle English deye, a female servant. So the deierie was a place where females worked. It was, not without reason, a bastion of female industrial and domestic busyness.

Dairy operations were local businesses, with milk and butter sold to nearby customers or consumed on the farm. Grass growing on the hilly portions of a farm, acres too steep for growing crops, could be put to productive use by a herd of cows. Their manure was also valued as a natural fertilizer.

Dairy farming was profitable near towns and cities, where there were customers for the products:²

If dairying held special advantages for Virginia's tired fields and farmers, Virginia held special advantages for dairying. Her mild climate and short winters permitted a far longer grazing season than the traditional Northern dairy region. Less costly housing was needed for the stock than in areas of harsher winter weather. Feed and forage crops enjoyed more frost-free days; often, two crops in one year were possible...

However, although Virginia offered superb natural advantages for a dairy industry, and although dairying would enrich her impoverished soils and be a tonic for her depressed land prices, it was the peculiar profitability of the dairy farm that tempted many tobacco growers to lay down the hoe and take up the pail. Perhaps most attractive was the steady, bi-weekly or monthly milk check weighed against the uncertain, once-a-year reward of cotton and tobacco, cash crops at the mercy of storm, season, and a market too often glutted at sale time.

The development of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad and the Alexandria, Loudoun and Hampshire Railroad reshaped the pattern of dairy production in Northern Virginia before the Civil War. Farmers could ship milk daily in metal cans to Alexandria and Washington, DC.

dairy farmers sent milk to market every day via cans
Source: Library of Congress, Untitled photo, possibly related to: Farm near Warrenton, Virginia (by Marion Post Wolcott, February 1940)

Afte the Civil War, dairy operations expanded in Henrico County and it claimed to be the "Dairy County of Virginia." At the peak of production in 1929, there were 5,000 dairy cows in the county. That dropped to 3,000 cows by 1950.

For customers in eastern Virginia, Curles Neck Dairy was a major source of milk between 1933-1980. The county's Dorey Recreation Center is a renovated dairy barn.³

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic occurred as milk demand was declining and dairy farms were closing. Closure of restaurants and other food-service establishments almost eliminated 40% of the market, and panic buying in grocery stores did not offset the loss.

In the previous two years, 100 dairy farms in Virginia had closed and only 450 remained. The shift in demand was too quick for fresh milk producers to shift to production of yogurt, cheese, and other more-lasting products. One farmer noted how the supply chain would be slow to adapt to the abrupt disruption of the market, and how that would impact prices for fresh milk:⁴

Until processors change their packaging or what they’ve been processing to meet the grocery demand versus the restaurants and school demand, there’s still going to be low prices.

Goats also support dairy operations today. Goat milk was used exclusively for producing cheese for commercial sale until 2014, when Virginia's first goat milk bottling operation was authorized in Washington County.⁵

Cattle in Virginia

Links

• 4-H Virtual Farm - Dairy
• Virginia Dairy Farms
• Dairy Cow Breeds
• Daily Alliance
• the origins of the Holstein breed
• Holstein Association
• Holstein World magazine
• WWW Virtual Library for Dairy Production
• American Guernsey Association (there are two Virginia members in the directory - down from three in 1999. Think this is the most popular Virginia breed for milk production?)
• Dairy Policy Issues, January 18, 2000, from the Congressional Research Service

References