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Where the Seeds of Change for Farmers Took Root
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In the seed-cleaning business, the word "custom" meant the farmers got the seed back after it was processed. They could keep it or sell it on the open market.
"For the first three years, we cleaned mostly red clover and Korean lespedeza," Carpenter Jr. said.
They got their first load of orchard grass in 1939. Orchard grass and other clovers were replacing lespedeza, which had been a staple of the early 20th century. The problem was that frosts killed lespedeza's fibrous root system, which rotted and left soil likely to erode in a heavy rain.
The plant expanded through the 1930s, "even though my father couldn't get a bank loan. It was the Depression, and local banks knew nothing about the seed business," Carpenter said.
By the 1950s, the plant's buildings and equipment were spread across 5,000 square feet of property. Carpenter Jr. was persuading more farmers to send their seed to Mitchells rather than to Earl Wetsel's plant in Harrisonburg, Harry Seabright's plant in Winchester or Purcellville's Contee Adams Seed.
Although Contee Adams and his son Lynn were competitors, Carpenter said, they were "the best friends I ever had."
When asked why, he replied: "We experimented with different seed-cleaning machines, and when one had success, he'd tell the other about it."
The Adamses and Carpenters also shared a love of local lore and people. You name a farmer, they knew him and could tell a story about his land.
All the stories weren't positive. Carpenter recalled one Loudoun farmer who "would cover the sorry seed with good seed, so when you sampled it you didn't get to his sorry seed."
"Large spreads often had farm managers who didn't care whether you'd clean their owner's seed for $3 or $4 a bushel. They wanted to know what's in it for them," he said. "So I carried around a pocketful of real nice folding pocket knives, a blade big enough to castrate a calf. They'd have their pick."
Carpenter thinks it was around 1955 when his father, Contee Adams, Wetsel, Seabright and Walter Nourse, a Virginia Tech agricultural agent, got together to actively seek out-of-state markets to sell processed orchard grass seed.
Within a few years, Virginia was producing 90 percent of the orchard grass seed in the world, Carpenter said. Loudoun, Fauquier and Page counties produced 90 percent of all the orchard grass seed in Virginia.
