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I had one acre in tomatoes, a vegetable for whose
production the soil of New Jersey is perhaps without a rival. The plants
are started in hot-beds, where they flourish until all danger from frost
disappears, when they are set out in the open air, with a generous
shovel-full of well-rotted stable manure deposited under each plant. A
moist day is preferred for this operation; but even without it this plant
generally goes on growing. It has been observed that the oftener it is
transplanted, the more quickly it matures; and as the great effort among
growers is to be first in market, so some of them take pains to give it
two transplantings. Having no hot-bed on my premises, and my time being
fully occupied with other things, I was compelled to purchase plants from
those who had them to spare, the cost of which is elsewhere stated. But
the operation paid well.
The quantity produced by an acre of well-manured
tomatoes is almost incredible. When in full bearing, the field seems to
be perfectly red with them. Those which come first into market, even
without being perfectly ripe, sell for sixpence apiece. So
popular has this vegetable become, and so great is the profit
realized by cultivating it, that for nearly twenty years it has been grown
in large quantities by Jerseymen who emigrated to Virginia for the
purpose of taking advantage of the earlier climate of that genial region.
There they bought farms, improved them by using freely the unappropriated
and unvalued stores of manure to be found in the vicinity, and produced
whole cargoes of the choicest early vegetables required by the great
consuming public of the northern cities. They shipped them hither two
weeks ahead of all the Jersey truckers, and were rewarded by fabulous
prices, from the receipts of which large fortunes resulted. This mutually
advantageous traffic had become a very important one, when rebellion
broke it up. Intercourse was stopped, cultivation was abandoned, and the
Virginia truckers were ruined.
Although this competition seriously interfered with
the profits of New Jersey farmers, yet it did not destroy them. The
cultivation of early truck and fruit continued to pay, though not so well
as formerly. When prices fell, the Southern growers could not afford the
cost of delivery here, and thus left us in undisputed possession of the
market. But as a general rule, the Virginia competitors invariably
obtained the highest prices. A great portion of their several crops,
however, perished on their hands; because, as they had no market here when
prices fell, so the scanty population around them afforded none at home.
For the first few baskets of early tomatoes I sent
to market, I obtained two dollars per basket of three pecks each. Other
growers coming in competition with me, the price rapidly diminished as the
supply increased, until it fell to twenty-five cents a bushel. At less
than this the growers refused to pick them; and seasons have been
repeatedly known when tens of thousands of bushels were left to perish on
the vines. When this low price could be no longer obtained, they were
gathered and thrown to the pigs, who consumed them freely. But as the
season advanced the supply diminished, and the price again rose to a
dollar a basket, the demand continuing as long as any could be procured.
The tomatoes are at this season picked green from the vines, and placed
under glass, where they are imperfectly ripened; but such is the public
appreciation of this wholesome vegetable, that when thus only half
reddened, they are eagerly sought after by hotels and boarding-houses.
But of latter years measures have been taken to
prevent, to some extent, the enormous waste of tomatoes during the height
of the season, by preserving them in cans. Establishments have been
started, at which any quantity that may be offered is purchased at
twenty-five cents a bushel; and now they can be kept through the whole
year, and be preserved for winter consumption, the same as potatoes or
turnips. By hermetically sealing them in cans from which the air has been
expelled by heat, they are not only preserved, but made to
retain their full flavor; and may be enjoyed, at a very moderate
cost, in the winter as well as the summer. The demand for them is
constant, large, and increasing, and putting up canned tomatoes has become
an extensive business. One person, who commenced the business two years
ago, is literally up to the eyes in tomatoes once a year. He provides for
a single year's trade over fifty thousand cans, all of which are
manufactured by himself; and he employs over thirty persons, most of them
women. He engages tomatoes at twenty-five cents a bushel, a price at which
the cultivator clears about a hundred dollars an acre, and they come in at
the rate of a hundred and fifty bushels a day, requiring the constant
labor of all hands into the night to dispose of them.
The building in which the business is carried on was
constructed expressly for it. At one end of the room in which the canning
is done is a range of brick-work supporting three large boilers; and
adjoining is another large boiler, in which the scalding is done. The
tomatoes are first thrown into this scalder, and after remaining there a
sufficient time, are thrown upon a long table, on each side of which are
ten or twelve young women, who rapidly divest them of their leathery
hides. The peeled tomatoes are then thrown into the boilers, where they
remain until they are raised to a boiling heat, when they are rapidly
poured into the cans, and these are carried to the tinmen, who, with a
dexterity truly marvellous, place the caps upon them, and solder them
down, when they are piled up to cool, after which they are labelled,
and are ready for market. The rapidity and the system with which all this
is done is most remarkable, one of the tinmen soldering nearly a hundred
cans in an hour.
The tomatoes thus preserved are readily salable in
all the great cities, both for home consumption and for use at sea. Thus,
few vegetables have gained so rapid and wide-spread a popularity as this.
Until lately, but few persons would even taste them; and they were raised,
when cultivated at all, more from curiosity than anything else. Now,
scarcely a person can be found who is not fond of them, and they occupy a
prominent place on almost every table.
My single acre of tomatoes produced me a clear
profit of $120. I am aware that others have realized more than double
this amount, but they were experienced hands at the business. My gains
were quite as much as I had anticipated.
From all the remainder of the three acres but little
money was produced. It gave me parsnips, turnips, and pumpkins. Between
the rows of sweet corn a fine crop of cabbages was raised, of which my
sales amounted to $82. Thus, an abundant supply of succulent food was
provided for horse, cow, and pigs during the winter, all which saved the
outlay of so much cash. I admit that a few of my vegetables did not yield
equal to the grounds of some of my neighbors, thus disappointing some of
my calculations. But I was inexperienced, had much to
learn, and was not discouraged. On the other hand, I had gone far
ahead of them in the growth of my standard fruits; and the evident hit I
had made with the new blackberry had the effect of impressing them with
considerable respect for my courage and sagacity.
This business of raising vegetables for the great
city markets, "trucking," as it is popularly called, is now the great
staple of New Jersey agriculture.
All the region of country stretching from Camden
some forty miles towards New York, once enjoyed the reputation of being
either all sand or all pine. It is traversed by the old highway between
Philadelphia and New York, laid out by direction of royalty in colonial
days, and protected at various points by barracks, in which troops were
garrisoned. Some of the barracks remain to this day; though in chambers
where high military revel once was held, devout congregations now worship.
Along this royal highway passed all the early travel between the
colonies; and after they had been severed from their parent stem, up to
the advent of steamboats and railroads, it was the only thoroughfare
between the two cities of New York and Philadelphia. Stages occupied five
weary days between them, the horses exhausted by wading through a deep,
laborious sand in summer, or the still deeper mud through which they
floundered in winter. On miles of this road the sand was frightful. No
local authorities worked it, no merciful builder of turnpikes ever thought
of reclaiming it. It lay from generation to generation, as waste
and wild as when the native pines were first cleared away. Access
was so laborious, that few strangers visited the region through which it
passed; and the land was held in large tracts, whereon but few settlers
had made clearings. All judged the soil as worthless as the deep sand in
the highway. Where some settler did clear up a farm, his labors presented
no inviting spectacle to the passing traveller. If manure was known in
those days, the farmer did not appear to value it, for he neither
manufactured nor used it. Phosphates and fertilizers had not been dreamed
of. If he spread any fertilizer over his fields, it was but a starveling
ration; hence his com crop was a harvest of nubbins. "Wheat he never
thought of raising; rye was the sole winter grain, and rye bread, rye
mush, and rye pie-crust, held uncontested dominion, squalid condiments as
they all are, in each equally squalid farm-house. Ragweed and pigweed took
alternate possession of the fields; cultivation was at its last point of
attenuation; none grew rich, while all became poor; and as autumn came on,
even the ordinarily thoughtless grasshopper climbed feebly up to the
abounding mullein top, and with tears in his eyes surveyed the melancholy
desolation around him. Such is a true picture of the king's highway up to
the building of the Camden and Amboy Railroad.
No wonder that the great public who
traversed it through this part of New
Jersey should think it, and speak of it
everywhere, as being all sand, seeing that in their passage through it
they beheld but little
else. Hence, the reputation
thus early established continues to the present day, and the tradition has
been incorporated into the public vernacular. The sandy road alone was
seen, while the green and fertile tracts that lay beyond and around it
were unknown, because unseen. Like the traveller from Dan to Beersheba,
the cry was that all was barren. But time, improvement, education,
railroads, and the marvellous growth of Philadelphia, New York, and fifty
intermediate towns, have changed all this as by enchantment. Every mile of
the old highway is now a splendid gravel turnpike, intersected by a dozen
similar roads, which stretch away up into the country.
As good roads invite settlement, so population, the
great promoter of the value of land, has come in rapidly, and changed the
aspect of every farm-house. Good fences line the roadside, rank hedgerows
have disappeared, new farm-houses have been everywhere built, low lands
have been drained, manures have been imported from the cities, wheat is
now the staple winter-grain, rye has ceased to be cultivated, and rye
bread is now a mere reminiscence of the old dispensation. But chief,
perhaps, of all, the whole agricultural world of New Jersey has been
educated by the agricultural press to a high standard of intelligence and
enterprise. Its labors have led to the establishment of numerous extensive
nurseries, by the pressure of a general demand for trees and smaller
fruits, whose wilderness of blossoms now annually blush and brighten upon
every farm. It has taught them to cultivate new
vegetables and fruits for city consumption alone, salable for cash in each
successive month; in doing which, they have changed from a
poverty-stricken to a money-making generation. It has taught them, what
none previously believed, that no good farming can be done without high
manuring, and banished the ignorance and meanness that prevented them from
spending money to secure it. It has introduced to their notice new and
portable manures, improved tools, better breeds of stock of all kinds, and
sharpened their perceptions, until they have now become men of business as
well as farmers, and so proved its value to them, that he upon whose table
no agricultural journal can be found, may be written down as the laggard
of a progressive age.
But in addition to all these stimulants to progress
the Camden and Amboy Railroad came in, giving it a vast momentum.
Terminating at Philadelphia and New York, it opened up a cash market among
thousands asking for daily bread. When this road was first opened, its
annual way-freight yielded less than one hundred dollars a year. But its
managers wisely built station-houses at every cross-road, as the farmers
called for them. To these nuclei the produce of entire townships quickly
gathered in astonishing quantities. Agents from the great cities traversed
the country, and bought everything that was for sale. A cash market being
brought to their very doors, where none had previously existed, an immense
stimulus to production followed, and a new spirit was
infused into the whole region. Hundreds of farms were renovated,
cleared of foul weeds, drained, and liberally manured. New vegetables were
cultivated. Tomatoes, peas, rhubarb, and early potatoes rose into prime
staples. Green corn has been taken from a single county to the extent of
two thousand tons daily. Other products go to market by thousands of
baskets at a time. "Way-trains are run for the sole accommodation of this
truck business, stopping every few miles to take in the waiting
contributions collected at the stations. To both railroad and farmer it
has proved a highly remunerating traffic. These way-freights, thus wisely
cultivated by the railroad, now amount to many thousands annually, and are
steadily growing larger. Meantime, steamboats on the Delaware stop several
times daily at new wharves on the river, sometimes taking at one trip two
thousand baskets of truck, from a point where, twelve years ago, the same
number could not be gathered during an entire season. The grower thus has
the choice of the two richest markets in the country. He reaches
Philadelphia in one hour, and New York in three.
It must be manifest that crops of such magnitude
cannot be produced on mere sand. Hence the traditional notion that New
Jersey is a sand heap, desolate and barren at that, has long been proved
to be a fallacy. Men do not grow rich upon a burning desert, such as this
region has been described. Yet the farmers who occupy it are notoriously
becoming so. They lend money annually on mortgage, after
spending thousands in manure, while farms have advanced from $30 to
$100 and $200 per acre. The last ten years have added thirty per cent, to
the population. Schools, churches, and towns have proportionately
increased in number.
The soil of this truck region contains a large
proportion of sand with loam, on which manure acts with an energetic
quickness that brings all early truck into the great markets in advance of
the neighboring country. This secures high prices. Southern competition
has only stimulated the growers to increased exertion. Though from this
cause losing some of the high rewards of former years, yet the aggregate
of profit does not seem to diminish. Better cultivation, higher manuring,
changing one product for another, with more land brought into tillage,
enable them to foot up as large an amount of sales at the end of the
season as aforetime. They see that the world cannot be overfed, and that
anything they can produce will command a ready market. Consumers increase
annually, and the public appetite loses none of its rampant fierceness.
Hence, competition stimulates instead of discouraging.
A vast area is planted with tomatoes. Though
thousands of bushels perish every season, yet two hundred, and even four
hundred dollars an acre is frequently the clear profit. Thirty years ago,
three bunches of rhubarb were brought to the
London market for sale, but as no one could be found to buy them, they
were given away; yet London now consumes seven thousand tons annually.
So, in New Jersey—the planter of the first half
acre was pitied for his temerity. Now, there are hundreds of acres of
rhubarb. The production of peas, pickles, cucumbers, melons, and cabbages
is immense. Early corn is raised in vast quantities. All these various
products command cash on delivery.
The soil of this region has long been famous for its
growth of melons. Formerly they were raised by ship-loads, but Southern
competition has checked their production. Yet New Jersey citrons possess a
flavor so exquisite, that they cannot be driven from the market. Peaches
have long since become almost obsolete, the yellows and the worm having
been great discouragements. But within three years, hundreds of acres of
them have been planted in New Jersey, and the nurseries find ready sale,
in seasons of average prosperity, for all they can produce. Numerous
orchards will annually come into bearing; and the chances are that this
once famous staple will again be domesticated in its ancient stronghold.
Among the smaller fruits, strawberries occupy an important place in New
Jersey, whose soil seems peculiarly adapted to them. The yield per acre is
enormous. One grower has gathered 400 bushels from three acres of the
Albany seedling. He began his plantation with a single dozen plants, at
$2.50 per dozen. New York and Philadelphia took them all at an average of
eighteen cents a quart. This patch was a marvel to look at. The ground
appeared fairly red with berries of great size, and were so abundant that
pickers abandoned other fields at two cents a quart,
and volunteered to pick this at one and a half. Other neighboring
growers realized large returns. The two counties of Burlington and
Monmouth are believed to yield more berries of all kinds than any district
of equal area in the Union, and the cultivation is rapidly extending.
A year or two ago, somebody
invented and patented a new box for taking them to market, lighter,
neater, cheaper than the old one, and securing thorough ventilation to
the fruit. A club of Connecticut men forthwith organized
a company with a capital of $10,000 for manufacturing them; built a
factory, started an engine, and now have forty hands at work. An agent of
the company went through the State last fall, from Middletown to Camden,
showing samples, and taking orders. He sold three hundred thousand boxes,
many to those who had the old ones, but more to others just wanting them.
As he travelled on foot, with samples in his hand, he inquired his way
over the country, from farm to farm, and probably discovered every grower
of an acre of berries. Of course he could not fail to visit and supply me.
He gave me many curious items of information touching the extent of the
berry business. There are parties in this country who have fifty acres of
strawberries on a single farm, with a thousand dollars invested merely in
the small boxes in which they are taken to market. He reports that the two
counties of Burlington and Monmouth produce more berries than all the
remainder of the State. Strawberries and raspberries are now the
staples, to which the
blackberry has recently been added. The great consuming stomach of the
large cities, having long been fed on these delicious fruits, must
continue to buy. Growers seem to know that after thirty years' propagation
of the strawberry, this devouring stomach has never been surfeited,— that
the more it is fed the more it consumes.
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