Vegetables: From 1850 to World War II

In the nineteenth century, with the rise of market gardens and truck farms, commercial vegetable growing advanced to the level of a skilled profession. (In 1850 farmers made up 64 percent of the labor force nationwide.) Market gardeners, occupying high-rent acreage on the outskirts of major cities, used interplanting, cold frames, and other production practices to grow a broad variety of vegetables—including valuable perishable specimens—in relatively small spaces. Horse manure, collected from city liveries, was the preferred fertilizer, and newly arrived immigrants provided the labor. Truck farmers, on the other hand, grew less perishable vegetables, often only one or two kinds, on land several miles from market and transported them to market or to nearby canneries or pickle packers by truck. Refrigerated railcars, developed in the late nineteenth century, made even longer shipping distances possible. Around this time southern farmers began taking advantage of their early spring to ship vegetables up north, and southern Florida became a major center for vegetable production. (The wholesale flight of Americans to the suburbs after World War II shortened the distance, and ultimately blurred the boundaries, between market and truck farms.)