American Encouragement

When the Americans occupied the Philippines, the demand for temperate vegetables grew. Chinese and Japanese laborers, brought to southern Benguet to build Baguio City and its connecting roads, soon began cultivating a variety of market-garden crops. Trinidad Valley, near Baguio and endowed with fertile and easily irrigated soils, formed the center of the emergent vegetable industry. Japanese capital dominated until independence, and local Ibaloi villagers eventually supplied most of the labor. A second cradle of vegetable culture emerged on the high plateau of Paoay (in Atok Municipality, north of Bagio), where an American soldier, Guy Haight, established a residence and rest house while recovering from tuberculosis (Davis 1973:58). Despite his distance from Baguio, Haight managed to deliver vegetables to the city, and he also supplied the travelers who lodged at his place. Through their association with Haight, many of Atok's residents learned the techniques of market gardening.

American officials encouraged vegetable culture among the Benguet people. As early as 1901, they distributed seeds from an agricultural office (Fry 1983:216), and not long afterward they established an experimental station largely devoted to temperate vegetables in La Trinidad. The Catholic Church also fostered vegetable growing in the districts it missionized (Russell 1983: 192).

With such encouragement, the market-garden frontier began to advance. In Baguio and environs, vegetable growing spread among the local Ibaloi; by 1907 they were reported to be abandoning their mining works in favor of the more profitable truck gardens (Philippine Commission 1907, v. 1: 282). By 1908, nearly 4,000 baskets of potatoes were sold annually in the Baguio market—but demand was still not satisfied (Philippine Commission 1908, v. 1:245).