Loudoun's Defiant Dairy Outpost

The couple, with help from the fourth generation -- their three children -- continues to raise and milk their 80-cow herd. It's a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week on-call job, without vacation.

A truck takes their milk to a Newport News processing plant every other day. Soon they'll be preparing for pregnant heifers and new calves. The younger son, in middle school, and daughter, in elementary school, plan on showing their prize cows at the Loudoun County Fair and the state fair this year. Every morning at 4:30, Mike begins milking the herd.

At the same time, around those wee morning hours, some commuters are hitting the road to beat rush hour traffic to the District, and the local Starbucks are busy brewing their morning coffee.

The Potts are out of step with the new rhythm of life in Loudoun, but this is the life they know.

Nancy and Mike Potts met at Virginia Tech, where they both majored in dairy science. They were married after graduation, and Nancy, who grew up on a dairy farm in southern West Virginia, moved to Loudoun, where Mike's family owned and rented about 400 acres.

Their three children have grown up in the same white, two-story house that was built by Mike's grandfather. On the living room wall, a small sheet of paper shows the original farm's hand-drawn boundaries. Mike's parents and brother live across the street, closer to the barns.

It's difficult for them to explain to people why dairying is the life for them.

"I like working with the animals," Nancy said, "and I didn't want to be a vet."

Or as Eddie Potts remarked, it's not necessarily a matter of choice. "I was born into it," he joked.

Dairying has been a family affair since the first cows came to Loudoun more than 200 years ago. But it wasn't until World War II that the industry surged, with an influx of jobseekers in Washington buying milk. Soon the Washington & Old Dominion Railroad, now a bike trail, was shuttling 10-gallon cans of raw milk to the District daily. Cows, not cars, lined county roads.

In 1951, Loudoun families reaped more than $5 million from their dairy products, according to the Loudoun Cooperative Extension Office. Feed and seed dealers, deliverers, hardware stores, veterinarians, repairmen and insurance agencies sprung up around the industry.

Business bowed to the whims of nature. Droughts destroyed the crops needed to feed the herd. Cows experienced heat stress during muggy Washington area summers. It was not uncommon to lose a third of your herd each year, said Jim Brownell, 90, who with his wife, Mac, once owned a 700-acre dairy farm.