Vegetable Run

Every day, five Air Force C-545 make the "vegetable run" from Japan to Korea, carrying radishes, lettuce, onions and other fresh vegetables for U.S. troops. The vegetables come from hydroponic (water culture) farms run by the U.S. Army in Japan. The Air Force started its vegetable runs before the Korean war was a month old, by last week had shipped 500,000 lbs. of produce to Korea. A favorite G.I. item: onions, which give a zip to meat rations.

Before World War II, the U.S. Army began experimenting with water culture at isolated outposts such as Wake Island, later carried the experiments on at Ascension Island and Iwo Jima. In 1946, it started hydroponic installations for U.S. occupation forces in Japan, where tillable soil is scarce. The farms are run by a peppery, 58-year-old horticulturist named Kendrick Blodgett, who has been growing vegetables out of water and chemicals for 15 years.

Blodgett's vegetables grow in narrow, shallow concrete beds which look like giant window boxes and are filled with gravel; three times a day, they are fed with water containing the necessary nutrients (nitrogen, potassium, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium). The water, drained back by gravity into an underground reservoir, is used over & over again. There are two farms, one at Chofu, 14 miles from Tokyo, the other near Kyoto. The larger installation at Chofu has 50 acres of hydroponic plots in the open and five acres under a million-dollar greenhouse, has its own ice plant and railroad siding.

Blodgett's produce goes to 400,000 U.S. personnel in the Far East, including those on Okinawa and Guam as well as in Japan and Korea. In 1950 he grew 7,429,382 Ibs. His target for this year: 9,537,000 Ibs., or 56,236,000 servings.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.