The Mountain Trail Vegetable Hearth

The cabbage boom that transformed the economy of Buguias had little impact at first on neighboring Agno Valley communities. Along the Mountain Trail, however, the effect was massive. This cool ridge-top zone, well suited to cabbage, also boasted a road that, although narrow, unpaved, and dangerous, was passable to vehicles. The resulting advantages of climate and transport attracted thousands of settlers to the ridge. Where only a handful of families had lived before the war, a string of fast-growing market towns soon sprouted.

Among the new settlements was Natubleng, a new village sitting on a plateau only a few miles from Buguias. A handful of Buguias families had relocated here in the 1930s, but in the war's immediate aftermath many more moved up to clear small gardens in the scrubby oak. But no highlanders had the capital necessary to establish sizable farms. This would fall to another immigrant group: the Chinese of Baguio City.

Chinese and Japanese farmers had long grown vegetables in the Baguio-Trinidad area, and when the Japanese were forceably repatriated after the war, the Chinese gained financial control of the industry (Davis 1973:51). As large-scale Chinese growers prospered, they looked to expand their operations along the Mountain Trail, seeking relatively flat plateaus plentifully supplied with water. Among the best were Sayangan/Paoay in Atok municipality (formerly known as Haight's Place) and Natubleng. Backed by a shadowy financial network extending from Baguio to Manila, and relying on the wage labor of local villagers, these Chinese planters cleared gardens of 10, 20, and even 30 hectares.

Of the four or five Chinese farmers clearing land in Natubleng, one named Singa is particularly remembered in Buguias. Singa tilled his large farm with local labor bound by a variety of arrangements. During the peak season, as many as 115 persons worked for wages, on a daily or monthly basis. Those workers whom Singa came to trust were eventually set up as sharecroppers on subsidiary plots.

Laborers came to Singa's farm from throughout the entire upper Agno Valley, but especially from the smaller villages south and east of Buguias. People from these areas seldom had the wherewithal to purchase seeds, and they yet lacked knowledge of vegetable culture. But working for Singa they quickly learned the new techniques, and most were able to save the small sum needed to begin gardening on their own. Many returned home, seeds in hand, after a single cropping season. In their home villages they planted cabbage in small plots, sufficient to furnish the pittance of cash they needed. Thus the late 1940s saw the vegetable-growing frontier rapidly extend to many peripheral villages of the former Buguias economic sphere.

The Chinese may have dominated the early vegetable industry, but they by no means wholly displaced the independent cultivators along the Mountain Trail. Throughout the 1950s, highlanders

with a minimum of financial backing continued to migrate to the ridge-top zone to clear and claim new lands. Most cultivated gardens of under 1 hectare, but a few grew wealthy enough to finance larger operations requiring day laborers.

While a few growers still burned brush for soil nutrients, most had turned by the early 1950s to chemical sources. The large-scale Chinese farmers, closely connected with Baguio wholesalers, doubled as fertilizer distributors. In northern Buguias municipality, however, local baknang entrepreneurs entered the chemical business. For many of the Chinese and Igorot elite, the retail selling of agricultural supplies eventually supplanted gardening as an economic mainstay.

These early postwar years saw a major reworking of the economic map of greater Buguias. A line could now be drawn down the length of the region, separating the Mountain Trail zone, with its nucleus at Natubleng, from the Agno Valley (excluding the Lo-o Basin) and points east. The former area, essentially under Chinese financial domination, supported numerous medium and large farms. The latter area, for the time being, was characterized by small market gardens still supplementing subsistence-producing dry fields. But this was only the most general of a series of fine geographical divisions that were to emerge over the next several decades.