Market garden

A market garden is the relatively small-scale production of fruits, vegetables and flowers as cash crops, frequently sold directly to consumers and restaurants. The diversity of crops grown on a small area of land, typically from under 0.40 hectares (4,000 m²; 1 acre) to some hectares (a few acres), or sometimes in greenhouses, distinguishes it from other types of farming. A market garden is sometimes called a truck farm in the US.

A market garden is a business that provides a wide range and steady supply of fresh produce through the local growing season. Unlike large, industrial farms, which practice monoculture and mechanization, many different crops and varieties are grown and more manual labour and gardening techniques are used. The small output requires selling through such local fresh produce outlets as on-farm stands, farmers' markets, community-supported agriculture subscriptions, restaurants and independent produce stores. Market gardening and orchard farming are closely related to horticulture, which concerns the growing of fruits and vegetables.

Traditionally, "market garden" was used to contrast farms devoted to raising vegetables and berries, a specialized type of farming, with the larger branches of grain, dairy, and orchard fruit farming; agricultural historians continue to thus use the term. Such operations were not necessarily small-scale. Indeed, many were very large, commercial farms that were called "gardens" not because of size, but because English-speaking farmers traditionally referred to their vegetable plots as "gardens": in English whether in common parlance or in anthropological or historical scholarship, husbandry done by the hoe is customarily called "gardening" and husbandry done by the plough as "farming" regardless of the scale of either. A "market garden" was simply a vegetable plot, the produce of which the farmer used to sell as opposed to use to feed his or her family. Market gardens are necessarily close to the markets, i.e. cities, that they serve.

Truck farms produce vegetables for market. The word 'truck' in Truck farms does not refer to the transportation truck, which is derived from Greek for "wheel", but rather from the old north French word troquer, which means "barter" or "exchange". The use for vegetables raised for market can be traced back to 1784 and truck farms to 1866.

Selling to the wholesale market usually earns 10–20% of the retail price, but direct-to-consumer selling earns 100%. Although highly variable, a conventional farm may return US$0.03 to US$0.30/m² (US$120 to US$1,210 per acre; US$300 to US$3,000 per hectare) but an efficient market garden can earn in the US$2 to US$5/m² (US$8,100 to US$20,200 per acre; US$20,000 to US$50,000 per hectare) range, or even higher. However, the size of a market garden has a practical upper bound, while with conventional farming, a farmer can farm vast areas because access to a direct market is not a requirement.

Larger market gardens often sell to such local food outlets as supermarkets, food cooperatives, community-supported agriculture programs, farmers' markets, fresh food wholesalers, and any other higher-volume channels that benefit from buying a range of vegetables from a single supplier, their freshness allowing for a premium over the revenue from the supermarkets and frequently other local suppliers. A larger market garden can by mixed crop production maintain a sales alternative to the wholesale commodity-style channels often used by farms that specialize in high volumes of a limited number of crops.

Relying on cities for markets, however, can have drawbacks. For example, in England, south Sussex was famous for growing tomatoes for the London market that were delivered by train. The arrival of railways in the 19th century at first stimulated growth of market gardens in certain areas by providing quick access to the city, but it eventually allowed commuting residents to move there and turn many market garden areas into suburbs. Urban sprawl still eats up farmland in urban regions. Buying the rights to develop farmland from the farmers solved this problem in Suffolk County, New York.

In some more affluent countries, including Australia and the United States, market gardening is rated as a high social utility occupation. It is typically taken up by recent immigrant groups for one or two generations, until they can accumulate capital, language and trade skills. The succession of dominant market garden groups in Australia, for example, was – from the early 19th century Anglo-Celtic, people from German-speaking countries, Chinese (after the peak of the gold rushes in mid-late 19th century), then southern European migrants from Italy, Malta and Yugoslavia (before it disintegrated), then southeast Asian migrant and refugee communities following the Vietnam War, such as the Vietnamese and Cambodians.