Mechanization most drastically altered life on the family farm. Work rhythms and patterns, previously geared to hand labor, were disrupted, and even the sounds on the farm changed. Older cows, for example, disliked the noise of the electric milking machines, and Wilson McNair wrote that
horses were generally scared of traction engines with their hissing steam, etc. When the engine met a team it would stop and one man would lead the horses by the bridle past the engine.... At the railroad crossing in Herndon there was a bell that rung when a train was coming. Our pony, if the bell was ringing when we crossed the track coming home would break into a dead run. You couldn't hold her.[191]
To the interim farmer, caught between completely automated equipment and the tradition of hand labor, the change in work habits, knowledge and goals could be more than vaguely disquieting.
As mechanization increased, many began to speak of agriculture in industrial terms, believing that "factorizing" the farm would solve its problems. This meant dispensing with any unnecessary tasks, such as raising sheep or making soap, and as much as possible replacing manpower with machinery. Technical terminology started to creep into farm talk. C. T. Rice referred to his dairy as "a milk producing plant,"[192] ancient terms such as "culling" became "selective breeding," and even the animals were referred to as machines, which if "poorly constructed must be ... discarded by the good breeder."[193] To independent-minded farmers, who, as Sinclair Lewis had observed, jealously guarded the ability to escape the mill and turmoil of the city, this industrialization seemed the ultimate compromise. The findings of the Commission to study the Condition of the Farmers of Virginia (1930) show the rural values of a most fundamental character to be those most prized by the agriculturalist:
Among these are: a) The advantages of the country for bringing up a family ... a greater sharing of responsibilities, a closer knit, more stable family life.... b) The satisfactions ... of contacts with forces of nature, of caring for plants and animals, and of seeing them grow.... c) Greater freedom from various types of restraints, including somewhat greater control over time and freedom of personal action; also less intense struggle to keep up with or ahead of others.... d) somewhat greater freedom from illness, together with a better prospect of attaining old age. e) Greater security against unemployment as well as less prospect of falling into absolute want.[194]