Growing Tomatos in Florida

My uncle Eddie was a full-time farmer. A bachelor for most of his life, he didn't own a home. Most years, he boarded with my uncle Max or with my uncle Harry during the vegetable growing season in upstate New York. Eddie didn't like winter, and at the end of the farming season, he usually drove his gray Hudson pickup truck to Florida.

Vegetable farming, or "truck farming" as it was generally known, did not require a great deal of equipment. The typical crops were corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, and various types of summer and winter squash. The primary piece of equipment was a tractor equipped with a plow to till the soil, a harrow or disc to break up the plowed soil, cultivators to destroy weeds growing in the rows, and a trailer to haul bags of fertilizer and hand tools throughout the fields and to bring the ripe produce to a central point. A lot of the work was manual labor: cutting the weeds away from each growing plant with a long-handled hoe.  

During late 1951 Eddie decided to try growing tomatoes in south Florida. The timing was perfect for him. The growing season for tomatoes didn't start until the growing season in upstate New York ended, and it was over in time for Eddie to return to New York. He shipped his equipment to Florida and rented a modest field near Homestead, south of Miami, where he successfully grew a tomato crop.

The following summer, he spoke enthusiastically about Florida farming to my father and convinced him that he should join him in a larger tomato growing venture during the coming winter growing season. 

Note Marking Periods 3 & 4

My parents would usually close their tavern for a winter vacation in Florida. The vacations had been limited when my sisters were in high school because they objected to missing classes, but once they both went to college and I was the only public school student, the vacation periods lengthened. I didn't particularly mind missing some school. Although the school administration objected to my leaving school for a time, my father told them that he and my mother were going to Florida, and did they expect them to leave me home alone?  While I was away, they marked my report card "on vacation" for the time I was gone. Only one teacher, Miss Bennett, the mathematics teacher, penalized me by not letting me return to geometry because she thought that I had missed too much while on vacation.

My parents and I drove to Florida at the start of Christmas vacation in 1952 to join Eddie in the tomato farming venture. My father rented rooms (possibly an efficiency apartment) at the Beacon Hotel on Ocean Drive near 8th Street in Miami Beach. The Beacon Hotel was in an area that primarily hosted Jewish families but is now in the heart of the tony "South Beach."

Shortly after we arrived, Eddie drove my father and me down to Homestead. It was strictly a farming country, a few years before the Air Force constructed the large Homestead AFB. The farmland was perfectly flat, with gravel or crushed white rock farm roads dividing the fields. There were ditches along the roads that always had a few inches of water in them. The fields were bare, as Eddie had arranged for them to be plowed and harrowed prior to planting. Unlike tomato growing in New York, where the farmers usually purchased small plants from greenhouses to get a higher-priced early crop, the procedure in Homestead was to harrow a stretch of soil along a road and sow the tomato seeds. When the fields were ready for planting, young plants were simply dug up from the roadside and replanted in the fields.

My father and I were probably the only active farmers living in Miami Beach. We dressed in our farm clothes most mornings and headed south in my father's 1947 Buick Roadmaster. We usually stopped at a diner in Coral Gables for breakfast and then met Eddie in the fields.  

One of the interesting aspects of farming in Homestead was natural irrigation. The water table was just below the deep topsoil. Some nocturnal soft-shelled land crabs moved into the fields during the summer when it was too hot and too wet to farm. Tomato farmers couldn't co-exist with the crabs because they would damage the plants. Accordingly, the first job that my father and I had was to poison the crabs. Eddie produced jars of an orange paste that contained poison and glowed in the dark. For a couple of days, my father and I walked the fields. Whenever we saw a crab's hole, we would put a dab of the poison paste on a wooden match-sized piece of dried reed and place it next to the hole. The crabs would find it at night, dine on it, and die. After the crab poisoning was completed, we had to stay away for a few days because the stench of the rotting crabs was too onerous.

When the time was suitable for planting, Eddie marked the rows by driving his tractor back and forth with a cultivator's tooth on either side down at the proper distance to separate the rows of tomatoes. It was at this point that the migrant laborers appeared. Our farm was not large enough to employ its own laborers, who required housing, transportation, and other amenities of life. Instead, Eddie subcontracted laborers as needed from a large grower with whom he had become friendly. Eddie was actually a social person. When not working, he was a dapper dresser with a pencil-thin mustache. He was very active in the Masons and became a Shriner. I believe that it was his Masonic contacts that provided the entre to the Homestead farming community.

Migrant labor in south Florida was quite different in the pre-Castro days. The migrant laborers were from Cuba, not Mexico, as is the case today. On the field, they were managed by a Black foreman who spoke enough Spanish to give directions. There was a chain of command: Eddie and my father would give directions to the Black foreman, who in turn would give directions to the Cuban workers. I was only about fourteen at the time and was too young and inexperienced in tomato farming to give directions. Although from time to time, I would drive the tractor to cultivate the tomato plants, I was given the chore of killing snakes. The ditches were home to snakes, and their actual or perceived presence was unnerving to the workers. Eddie equipped me with a double-barrel 20 gauge shotgun and a supply of cartridges containing lead birdshot. I would patrol the fields along the ditches and shoot snakes when I saw them, although most were black snakes not known to be poisonous. Perhaps, some were moccasins, but I didn't differentiate. If I was a snake, I shot it. One day I approached a foreman who was sitting under a tree having lunch. I noticed a snake in the tree above him, and without warning, I raised the shotgun and fired both barrels into the tree. I don't know if he was more frightened by seeing a white teenager suddenly point and fire a shotgun in his direction, or by the pieces of snake that rained down from the tree next to him.  

We didn't have to go to the fields on a day-to-day basis. As the crops grew, Eddie pretty much ran the show himself, and sometimes my father would go there by himself while my mother and I remained at the hotel or at the beach. My father's roots were in farming, and I think he enjoyed just being in the fields and talking with his brother.  

We had a Zenith Trans-Oceanic radio. It was a great radio in its time because it was both AC and battery-powered. It had several short wave frequency bands as well as the usual AM frequency. My father used to tune in some weather stations, and one day he learned of some severe weather system in the Caribbean but was thought to be heading towards Florida. Winter is not hurricane season in Florida, and the forecast was unusual. The possibility of a big storm was not even in the news media, which devoted most of the weather news to winter storms in the north, probably as an incentive to keep tourists in town. 

After some discussions, my father and Eddie sold the crop "on the field" at a discounted price to a local packing house. They received a check that they quickly cashed. Eddie loaded up his equipment and headed north. A couple of days later a massive rainstorm flooded the Homestead area farmlands and caused widespread destruction to the ripening crops. Eddie decided to quit Florida farming while he was ahead and restricted farming to upstate New York.