Crops, tomatoes, implements, harvester

Maryland Historical Society

In the most recent U. S. Census of Agriculture (2002), Maryland tallied 12,200 farms, occupying 2,100,000 acres, and producing $1.7 billion in sales. Broilers (young chickens) led all commodities and accounted for almost a third of cash receipts, followed by horticultural crops, milk, vegetables, corn, cattle, and soybeans. Maryland farmers still grow tobacco and wheat, tend to apple and peach orchards, and raise hogs, as they have for nearly 370 years. But, it is in broilers that Maryland growers stand highest nationally—the seventh leading producers, by value. If, however, avian influenza becomes endemic, or NAFTA brings crushing competition, or environmental legislation loads a peculiar disadvantage (to mention only a few conceivable risks), the broiler industry could decline or disappear as suddenly as it arose about two generations ago. Indeed, that is virtually certain, because agribusiness is highly perishable, as it always has been.

Early Nineteenth Century: A Wheat Bonanza
Descriptions of agriculture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries appear elsewhere in the Maryland Online Encyclopedia; so, this overview begins in the early nineteenth century, when the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon brought a wheat bonanza to Maryland. Wheat had figured in the old colonial system—sugar planters in the British West Indies got their breadstuffs from the mid-Atlantic colonies. But American independence opened possibilities for supplying the French and Spanish islands, which the European wars made essential, while also bringing luxury prices. To be sure, it was risky to trade between combatants, but when a barrel of flour sold for $7.50 in Baltimore and $20-$40 in Havana, farmers, millers and merchants turned millstones into wheels of fortune. In 1813, Baltimore’s inspection reached nearly a million barrels, and ships carried them to the West Indies as well as to all buyers, friend and foe, on the Iberian Peninsula.

Besides its boom or bust trade, the wheat bonanza before 1815 commercialized Maryland’s agriculture in ways the earlier tobacco bonanza had not. Small communities—sometimes no more than a mill, a blacksmith’s or wagon-wright’s shop, and a store with a post office—drew grain growers into a commercial network that developed as Baltimore developed. Road building and canal construction had a profound impact on this web because when wheat prices declined after 1815, freight costs fell even more so, which opened new opportunities for raising different commodities. Thus, the wheat bonanza created Maryland’s first metropolitan economy, which became increasingly diverse and dynamic over time. Wheat gradually diminished in importance, though it made up much of the outbound trade to Brazil and Peru in the 1820s and 1830s that returned with coffee and guano, and exports to Europe resumed when Britain repealed its Corn Laws in 1846. In 2002, when Marylanders still produced some 11.8 million bushels of wheat—more than double the amount of 1813—that branch of farming was but a trickle in the state’s $165 billion economy.

Post-Civil War: The Canning Industry
The Civil War restructured agriculture everywhere: slavery ended, western homesteads and railroads created a new cornucopia, land grant colleges advanced scientific farming, urbanization and industrialization became driving forces of the nation’s growth. From the war’s end to the century’s end, however, Maryland’s agriculture experienced a long-wave depression. The wholesale price index (1926=$100)—as a general indicator of what farmers received for the crops and livestock—stood at $132 in 1865, $56.6 in 1885, and $46.5, at its lowest point in American history, in 1896. These circumstances largely explain how Baltimore became the leading canning center in the United States, accounting for a third of that industry’s production in 1880.

Packing oysters in winter and fruits and vegetables in summer, Baltimore’s canning industry actually first blossomed during the California gold rush—when a can of Maryland peaches could profitably transit around Cape Horn to San Francisco. As one observer after the Civil War described, an unbroken peach “forest” existed for a mile or two back from the Chesapeake’s shoreline, between Queen Anne and Cecil counties. The density of that planting also accounted for a sudden collapse of peaches during the mid-1880s, when a viral disease known as “yellows” spread quickly, and completely devastated the orchards. Not coincidentally, the Chesapeake’s all-time record oyster harvest, in 1885, came with the orchard destruction, as Baltimore’s canners tried to compensate for their summer losses. Pear and apple growing experienced similar epidemics about this same time from the bacterial disease “fire blight” and the fungal “cedar-apple rust.”

Besides the canning trade, Baltimore’s population growth created a green grocers market for strawberries, early potatoes and peas, cucumbers and lettuce, spinach, kale, and many other garden crops, which could be grown on small acreages, in soil light enough for hoe-husbandry, and, if managed properly, could generate sales from the vernal equinox to the winter solstice. For many African Marylanders, market gardening, perhaps along with some supplemental fishing for oysters and terrapin, provided both a living during hard times and a way out of rural poverty when opportunities arose.

The Tomato War
Truck farming and market gardening had certain similarities, but “truckers” tended to grow fewer commodities more extensively—and one crop in particular, tomatoes. In fact, Maryland was a battleground in the great tomato war between ketchup-king H. J. Heinz in Pittsburgh, and soup-maker Campbell’s in Camden, New Jersey. With a rail line from its loading dock all the way to Cape Charles, Campbell’s had an aorta as long as the Eastern Shore, and through it tomatoes moved like red blood cells. In sandy soil, growers could produce 400 bushels an acre, even with moderate droughts. Eventually, the canning industry dispersed so that packing could be done closer to the fields. By the start of World War I, Maryland had 406 vegetable canneries, with the largest business, Phillips Packing Company in Crisfield, annually processing over a million cases of vegetables (largely tomatoes), such as soups, pastes, and sauces. At that time, roughly a third of all tomatoes canned in the United States came from Maryland.

Scientific Methods
Scientific ideas in agriculture—about nutrition, breeding, and diseases—that originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—culminated in the 1940s and started the era of Maryland agriculture that has matured today. Two driving forces were the University of Maryland, with its College of Agriculture and Agricultural Experiment Station, and various federal laboratories that coalesced with the Beltsville Agricultural Research Station in Prince George’s County. Dairying—the most complicated farming enterprise—became science’s exemplar. Farmers had known the advantages of ensilage, for example, since the 1870’s; they learned about the need for protein supplements in the 1880’s; they heard about vitamins in the 1910s; and both state and federal offices distributed pamphlets about efficient diet regimes. Milking cows, then, became a year-round business. In 1900, agriculturalists rediscovered Mendel’s “laws” of inheritance and soon applied them to livestock, first producing “breeds” in the modern sense, then driving economic characteristics to very high expression levels, and ultimately, using artificial insemination to produce high performance herds on a very narrow genetic base. The germ theory of disease—arguably the most important idea in modern agriculture—brought diagnostics for several cattle diseases; vaccines; milk pasteurization and meat inspection; and, as early as 1892, the first eradication of a disease, bovine pleuropneumonia.

The U. S. Department of Agriculture started a research farm for dairying in Beltsville in 1910, expanded it to deal with all animal husbandry, and transferred disease research there in 1936. Much of the dairy science work it carried out, with nutrition, breeding, and disease research, found applications with poultry as well. Between 1935 and 1941, Stanley Marsden and colleagues carried out breeding work that resulted in the “Beltsville White,” a relatively small turkey that could fit in consumers’ refrigerators and ovens. The researchers distributed this variety through the state agricultural experiment stations, the closest of which was in the neighboring town of College Park. Equally important as their breeding work, Beltsville scientists developed diets that produced a pound of meat from about two and a half pounds of feed (down from 20 pounds). Still, a ten-pound turkey took nearly a half year to raise. With a three-pound broiler, the same feed efficiency (which now approaches 1:1) produced a marketable bird in 55 days or less. Additionally, chickens were easier to manage in large-scale operations. From livestock research that started with dairying, and adapted to turkeys, Maryland began its broiler industry that is today’s leading agricultural earner.

Farming’s decline, both relatively and absolutely, stemmed from its historical success. People who grew things fed people who made things. Moreover, home-grown industry found buyers on farms, and rural people became urbanites (i.e., stevedores, steel workers, secretaries, and stock brokers) as fewer were needed on the farm to produce more and more. It seems unlikely, though, that farming will shrink to the vanishing point. Maryland is a world center for biotechnology, and the sciences of genomics and proteomics allow investigators to ponder the molecular origins and individuality of economic characteristics in plants and animals. Whether Maryland’s greatest age of agriculture is in the past or the future, the outcome is now in the hands of the thirteenth generation of those who gamble in the business of growing things on purpose.

Marylanders appreciate that the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville is the best resource for agricultural history anywhere in the world.