g this was a very real threat as
former Association member Holden Harrison attests:

There were four or five principal distributors in Washington. I
don't know whether they got together on this or not, but to start
out with they had a two price program. They paid you more in the
winter than they did in the summer.... The dairy farmer was at the
mercy of the milk distributor then. They set prices just as low as
they thought the best dairyman could continue to produce.... The
distributors were about to starve the farmers out, that's what
brought it around. We weren't getting a fair deal. So when we
formed this Association the management of the Association could
say, 'We've got these farmers lined up. They pretty well depend on
us and we can pretty well tell them what to do.' Through that
leverage they could pretty well tell the distributors what to do,
too.[137]

The Association furthered its prestige--and its bargaining power--by
waging a battle against "bootleg," or uninspected, milk being brought
into the area from Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It had the additional
advantage of stabilizing prices so that the farmer with only a small
amount of milk for the market could compete with the larger producer
whose more economical methods had previously allowed him to undersell
his smaller neighbor. Better methods of testing and pasteurizing the
milk were also concerns and the cooperative used its muscle to negotiate
loans for its members.[138]

Furthermore, in the late 1920s, the Association became concerned about
the drop in prices due to an overabundance of milk in the area and
developed a system of handling the surplus. "It eventually built itself
into a position where the Association itself either rented or purchased
a plant that could take care of surplus milk...," stated Holden
Harrison. "This surplus milk was processed into cheese or butter or ice
cream or maybe even powdered milk.... They had a plant in Frederick,
Maryland, and they would divert whatever amount of producers' milk to
Frederick to the processing plant and keep it out of the hands of the
distributors."[139] This action had the double advantage of avoiding
waste and preventing a profit-lowering glut of milk.

By 1927 the Maryland and Virginia Milk Producers Association was the
largest farmer's cooperative in Virginia. It included 85% of the
Washington area producers in its membership, des