Army & Navy – Pacific Victory Gardening

One soldier traded a quart of Scotch for one of the first cucumbers from a new U.S. truck farm in the Pacific. But by last week U.S. soldiers and bluejackets were harvesting more fresh vegetables than they could eat, sending the ample surplus to their fighting comrades. First of its kind in the Central Pacific, the Guam garden is part of an expanding system of island farms (already 5,000 acres) which are producing every month more than 2,000 tons of tomatoes, cabbages, peppers, corn and other truck for the armed forces.

The project is classed as a Navy job, because it is in a Navy theater. But although most of the work is being done by servicemen, the credit for its success belongs mainly to a group of 25 civilian experts from the Foreign Economic Administration, who are headed by tall, weatherbeaten Knowles Ryerson. Starting from scratch little more than a year ago, Ryerson and his men have furnished enough seed, fertilizer, machinery, tools and sound advice to bring the farms up to a high level of efficiency, despite obstacles that would make many farmers down tools.

The FEA men got their first sore sample of Pacific plowing on Efate, in the New Hebrides, where they planted their first seed. Thick virgin underbrush had to be uprooted, coral sand scraped away. But with the help of French prison labor, they were soon producing. Last Christmas the boys had 15,000 ears of sweet corn.

Bugs, Crabs, Volcanoes. On Guadalcanal they found the thick, heavy soil covered with high, knife-edged kangaroo grass, had to use bulldozers borrowed from the Seabees before they could even begin to plow. On Kolombangara, in the Solomons, they planted a former Jap airstrip of coral, already well stirred up by bombs. As they moved on again, they met new gardener’s curses: land crabs, wild pigs, volcanic ground that was hardly arable, odd varieties of scavenging bugs. But by the time they reached the Marianas, they had met and licked almost all the problems of tropical farming.

Contrary to appearances, the soil of the hot, jungle-lush islands is often far from rich, lacking especially nitrogen. G.I. farmers must use more than three times the normal amount of fertilizer, spooning it on a little at a time so that it will not all be washed away by the heavy rains.

To check the swarms of bugs, farms must be sprayed seven to ten times a year. Heavy tractors, which are hard to get, are invariably needed to work the fields. But to make up for all this trouble, everything else grows in three-fourths the time required in the U.S. At the seasonless equator, farms produce three to five crops a year.

Until recently, the farm project was confined to the South Pacific, where Ryerson and his 25 fieldmen also opened fisheries and started lumbering, by last spring were producing 250,000 board feet a day. But the program proved so satisfying that the Navy asked for the cultivation of 10,000 more acres in the Central Pacific as soon as the fighting moved on far enough. Eventually its chain of oversized victory gardens may reach all the way to Japan.