Where the Seeds of Change for Farmers Took Root

By Eugene Scheel
Sunday, June 15, 2008

Harvey "Buddy" Carpenter Jr. has spent his 84 years living in Mitchells in Culpeper County, except for three years in the Air Force during World War II.

He wanted to enroll at Virginia Tech under the GI Bill after the war, but the school's admissions office said he lacked communications skills and turned him down.

That was a mistake, and a serendipitous one. Within a few years, Carpenter became one of the greatest communicators among farmers in Northern Virginia. He visited hundreds of spreads in the agricultural heartland north of the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers, persuading farmers to send their seed to his seed-cleaning plant to rid it of impurities.

From the mid-1950s to early 1980s, the Carpenter Seed Cleaning Plant at Mitchells -- founded by his father, Harvey Carpenter Sr., in 1934 -- was, in Carpenter's words, "the largest custom seed cleaner in Virginia."

"I knew the farmers in western Loudoun and upper Fauquier County as well or better than I knew the farmers in Culpeper," Carpenter said during the course of several recent conversations at his home in Mitchells, a village of 150 people.

Each year during that quarter-century, his company processed some 4 million pounds of seed. That included 2 1/2 million pounds of barley, oats and wheat cleaned during summer and 1 1/2 million pounds of orchard grass, soybeans and rye during winter.

Twelve storage bins at the plant held up to 3 million pounds of grains, grasses and soybeans. Some bins dated from Great Depression, when farmers didn't have ready cash. They paid for the cleaning by giving a percentage of the seed, known as a toll.

Carpenter Sr. had loved to tinker with cars and had started the first garage in Mitchells in the early 1920s. But an allergy forced him to quit welding and find another job. His father-in-law had a threshing machine, and Carpenter had a tractor to run it. So they began cutting and harvesting grains for local farmers.

Carpenter's truck hauled the cut crops across the Blue Ridge to the Wetsel seed-cleaning plant in Harrisonburg, the nearest custom cleaning company. His son, who sat in the cab beside his father, recalled the steady grade up to Swift Run Gap.

"The mountain was quite a pull for an old truck," Carpenter Jr. said. "It would get hot, steam up, and we had to find spring water to cool the engine down. I'd say the trip took 2 1/2 hours. We got tired of going back and forth."

After carefully observing how the Wetsel plant sifted seed through screens to rid it of foreign matter, Carpenter Sr. picked out a $935 cleaning machine from Brockton, N.Y. It cost as much money as he could hope to make in a year.

In summer 1934, at the height of the Depression, he opened his custom seed-cleaning concern in an 18-by-24-foot metal-clad frame building he had just built.

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.

Oregon knocked Virginia off that perch, Carpenter recalled. In the mid-1970s, the U.S. Agriculture Department's experimental complex in Beltsville developed an orchard grass seed called Potomac.

They should have called it Columbia. "They sent it out to Oregon, and farmers found they could grow it at a heavy profit compared to other grasses. By 1980, it crowded Virginia orchard grass off the market," Carpenter said. "I don't know of a single person saving [Virginia] orchard grass seed today. We have four or five varieties out of Oregon now."

More competition in the seed-cleaning business came from drug companies such as Bayer, DuPont and Monsanto. They produced genetically engineered seed that could withstand weed killers and insects, then patented it to be used only once. They had their own growers. The benefits of using genetically altered seed outweighed the costs, which were often double that charged by local seed-cleaning operations.

In the early 1990s, Carpenter's accountant told him it was time to sell the business. He did so in 1998, after more than 60 years of work. He continued to manage it until 2007.

For more reading, see Eugene Scheel's column "How Purcellville Grew Into Orchard Grass Capital," in the May 16, 2004, Loudoun Extra.

Eugene Scheel is a historian and mapmaker who lives in Waterford.