ABSTRACT
Agricultural patterns in New Jersey should be viewed both in their relationships to the physical capabilities of landforms, soils, drainage, and climate and in their even more complex, and continually evolving, relationships to market factors. New Jersey's farmers operate in a farmland region that is one of the highest priced of the United States. The great majority of New Jersey's farmers were not working within an isolated frontier milieu for more than a few decades. The century or so from approximately 1810 to the First World War was one in which change and innovation were found not so much in new crops or animals but in care and fertilization of the soil and emphasis on more efficient, more productive varieties of plants and animals, and one in which new machinery was introduced. Fertilizer was a nearly universal need as farmers, under mounting pressure from expanding cities, needed to use their land more intensively.
