Heart & Soil: Family Truck Farms

Heart & Soil: Family Truck Farms

By Sarah Baird

When someone mentions heading to the “truck farm” to buy produce, what picture springs to mind? Perhaps it’s the booming voice of the late, great Mr. Okra in New Orleans, driving his veggiepainted technicolor truck through the 9th Ward announcing, “I’ve got mirliton! I’ve got tomatoes! I’ve got cucumbers! It ain’t no use in cooking, if you don’t use fresh veg-e-tables!” Perhaps it’s swinging by a roadside, makeshift farm stand housed on a truck’s tailgate outside of Breaux Bridge, grabbing bundles of collards or turnip greens and slipping cash to the guy sleepily manning his sales post under an umbrella.

Between the end of the Civil War and the suburban sprawl of the mid 20th century, though, a very different type of “truck” farm was crucial to the agricultural ecosystem of South Louisiana. Truck farms were an enterprising, fresh-food-forward way of life for growers and families, feeding residents in urban centers like New Orleans using the yet-tobe-developed fertile lands in places like Gretna and Metairie (which even means “farm share” in French) to grow small and mid-sized farm plots of produce intended to be sold hyper-locally to the surrounding community. If heading to Rouses Markets is your idea of buying local in 2023, then checking in with your truck farmer was the 1923 equivalent.

Etymologically, the use of the term “truck” farm doesn’t refer to any four-wheeled, rattling Ford or Chevy, but instead comes from the French word for bartering, troque

“The ‘truck’ in this sense comes from Middle English, trucken, from Old French troque, both meaning to trade, to barter, and springs from the fact that such commodities were often used as items of exchange — paying the local pastor with an occasional bushel of corn, for instance,” explained Merrell Knighten, an English professor at Louisiana State University , in a 1984 syndicated column. It wasn’t long after the rise of truck farms in Louisiana that the term “truck” even became synonymous with fruits and vegetables, the barteredand-sold items themselves.

The truck farms were also sometimes known as market gardens; the produce raised on truck farms (leafy greens, peas, artichokes, radishes, tomatoes, orchards of figs — the list is endless) was delicate, meaning that even if it could be shipped long distances to the likes of Memphis or Chicago, the risk of spoiling was too great a financial and product-wasting risk. This ensured that, for most of their popularity, truck farms sold almost exclusively at local public markets, becoming indispensable

community resources and a productive use of the rich farming land that hadn’t yet been targeted for any other type of development (like, ahem, suburban neighborhoods).

“The vacant lands in and about New Orleans are the most prolific in the United States, and equal in productiveness the richest soil in the world. The soil is especially well-adapted to the culture of vegetables, and the products are not only large and plentiful, but the flavor of certain kinds is superior to those raised in other and less favorited sections of the country,” The Times-Picayune proclaimed in an 1887 story. “There are thousands of acres of land, relegated to the alligators, snakes and other reptiles, swampy and subject to overflow, which with but little expense, compared to their ultimate value, could be drained and converted into truck farms which would more than doubly repay the cost of reclamation every year.”

The same 1887 Times-Picayune article also made note of how different truck farms around New Orleans had found a range of crops that grow splendidly in their specific locations — even if those garden

If heading to Rouses Markets is your idea of buying local in 2023, then checking in with your truck farmer was the 1923 equivalent.

plots were mere miles apart. “Various localities around the city are devoted to particular kinds of vegetables; thus large, fine onions, garlic, sweet and Irish potatoes come from St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parish...Grand Island and vicinity [is] noted for furnishing the finest and earliest cauliflowers...Metairie and the rear of the city for the earliest potatoes, peas, beans, cucumbers, eggplants. The best cantaloupes come from the farms along Metairie Ridge.”

Truck farms soon became viewed as economic engines for cities, serving as catalysts for growth and sustainability by keeping precious grocery consumer dollars local. “Fully self-sustaining, close enough to the city to be called ‘suburban’ and far enough out to enjoy country life... truck farms are city builders. Why should not Shreveport export green produce instead of import it?” The Shreveport Times lamented in 1924 as part of an impassioned plea for truck farms entitled — yes, all caps — TRUCK FARMS NEEDED HERE. “As much as those who started truck farms would benefit, the city would be as much

bettered. Prices of vegetables would lessen; the town would thrive because the merchants would have more customers to purchase their wares; the half million dollars that now goes to other cities would remain at home.”

Truck farms were also a way for lowerincome Louisianans to not only corner the market on a potentially well-paid agriculture career, but find a place to call home: Truck farms were quite often residential spaces for their growers, meaning that buying into the pastoral life of a market gardener was a 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year lifestyle commitment. Many truck farms across the region were operated by African Americans, while Italian American truck farms operated all over Harahan, Kenner and St. Bernard Parish, growing herbs, beans, peas, zucchini and beyond. (A teenage J.P. Rouse got a job at a truck farm in Marrero raising potatoes and cabbages!)

Immigrant families — including Chinese laborers who farmed in a collective model near Gretna, both for their local community and, eventually, nationwide shipping

— were particularly drawn to the truck farm ideal, and local newspapers were consistently rich with advertisements promising a better existence, and plenty of opportunity, through classifieds about the draw of the market garden lifestyle:

ARROW-CIRCLE-RIGHT BE INDEPENDENT 1926 RAISE WHAT YOU NEED ON A TRUCK FARM

(The Shreveport Times , 1926)

ARROW-CIRCLE-RIGHT WAVELAND, Miss.— 35 acres, with improvements, $750; good for truck farm; adjoining Brown’s vineyard.

(The Times-Picayune, 1899)

ARROW-CIRCLE-RIGHT IN THE “MAGIC CITY” OF BOGALUSA. For sale, 26 truck farms. If you are interested call to-day or to-morrow.

(The Times-Democrat, 1907)

ARROW-CIRCLE-RIGHT PARADIS TRUCK FARM. $500 buys an improved truck farm; any vegetable you grow will make every payment except the first; all farms front the railroad and a good wagon road. (The Times-Democrat, 1906)

With the rise of refrigerated railroad cars and technological advancements that

helped move prone-to-rotting fruits and vegetables longer distances, truck farm produce was also eventually carted out of Louisiana to wholesalers nationwide — though the emphasis on local-first sales never waivered when compared to the gambit of out-of-state shipping.

“At present, satsuma oranges are moving to markets in large express shipping from Oakdale. Saturday one dozen crates left for northern markets carrying fine samples of the Oakdale fruit. This fruit was shipped from the John J. Seily truck farm of Oakdale and according to report are of the best on the market,” detailed a 1929 Clarion-News article about the bounty being hauled out of the small Allen Parish community. “The truck farm...contains around 105 bearing trees...[with] an average of 500 orange or more. They are now good and ripe and will be harvested within the next two weeks. Already many crates have been sold to local markets.”

By the 1950s and 1960s, though, the small-is-good, market-selling ethos of truck farms found itself beginning to look like a relic of the recent past as highway

systems with refrigerated trucks spread tentacles across America, making moving produce long-distance simpler, and airlines took flight, eager to take shipments of produce in their bellies. In the span of a decade, large-scale, big business farming — complete with mechanization and lab-engineered chemical sprays, like herbicides — squashed the homespun truck farms in a David vs. Goliath battle that was over before it even began.

“The thoroughbred truck farmer is, like the whooping crane, a vanishing breed...[and] truck farming as the sole source of income is becoming a scarce situation,” Kathy Tilley wrote for The Town Talk in 1971. “The shrinking truck farm industry is directly related to labor problems. The small farmer can’t afford mechanical harvesters and at the same time manual labor is not available in abundance. Competition is another problem, not rivalry between local farmers but crops imported from other areas.”

Even still, the crop-based culture built by truck farmers — where local residents celebrate produce that’s special to their area — hasn’t faded with time. Take

Tangipahoa Parish, for example: Amite City was described as a strawberry-centered growing spot for truck farmers as far back as 1892.

“Amite City is surrounded by a country which is an ideal one for perfect truck farming. It is considered to be the best in this whole section of the country. Strawberries…are produced in abundance and form the main shipments from this place to the markets North, West and South,” The Weekly Times-Democrat of New Orleans proclaimed in 1892. “The industry, truck farming, peculiar to this part of the country, is in its highest element of success in and around this town.”

The strawberries grown in and around Amite City today might not be on truck farms, but the spirit of the market gardeners’ ingenuity lives on through sheer quantity — Tangipahoa Parish presently grows 79% of Louisiana’s strawberry crop. The ways in which seeds planted by truck farmers have sprouted into deeply rooted cultural phenomena will continue to grow, even as market gardens themselves are tilled over into the fertile soil of memory.