p until April, and one
woman recalled that the cherry trees failed to blossom until the late
fall.[212] Thousands of tons of hay and grain feeds had to be brought in
from other parts of the country to feed the livestock, at enormous cost
to the farmers. The combination of these unfortunate elements meant more
mortgaged farms and tighter belts for the county's farmers.[213]

Relief came in the form of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) which
went into effect in the spring of 1933. One of the earliest of Franklin
Roosevelt's New Deal policies, it offered a radically new approach to
farm recovery. Whereas earlier governmental policies had relied on
tariffs or half-hearted attempts to buy up surpluses to protect farm
profits, the AAA promoted a scheme of "artificial scarcity." This was
accomplished by price supports and through elimination of
price-depressing surpluses by paying the growers to cut down their crop
acreage. Payments were financed by taxing food processors, such as
millers, who in turn shifted the burden to the consumer.[214]

Many of the AAA provisions were aimed at the large producers of the
lower south and midwest, but they also had their effect in areas of
smaller farms such as Fairfax County. Few county citizens were in
absolute want during the Depression, in part because the effective work
of the Maryland and Virginia Milk Producers Association insured steady
milk prices. Yet these and later policies were embraced as being the
only available hope for turning around the farm situation. "They were
distressed enough so that they were willing to cooperate in a
considerable degree with anything that would help them out."[215]

Implementing the programs created some initial problems. A system of
acreage allotment had to be devised for each farmer, and this involved
setting up an intricate bureaucracy which included a county committee
(made up of three local farmers), new responsibilities for the county
agent, and close association with representatives of the new federal
programs. Confusion existed about the allowances made in the act for
home consumption and the process by which allotments were decided. To
arrive at the allowances for wheat, for example, the farmer had to
complete two forms, on which it was necessary to compute his average
yield for a three-year period (1930-1932) then adjust it to relate to a
five-year nationwide average; this figure, reduced by 15 to 20 percent
was his allowed productio