14 BULLETIN 1285, U. S. DEPARTMENT OE AGRICULTURE 
portant reasons for inferiority were laziness, ignorance, physical 
handicaps, shiftlessness, and bad habits. 
Farmers stated that an important cause of inefficiency among farm 
laborers is the illegal liquor traffic. Regardless of their personal 
attitudes toward legal prohibition of the liquor traffic, the existing 
situation was frequently complained of among farmers and persons 
acquainted with the labor situation. Occasional petty thieving by 
farm hands was mentioned, but employers considered them honest 
as a class. 
Employees were reported as usually not leaving their jobs before 
the farmer was ready to discharge them. Most complaint to the 
contrary came from truck farmers, and especially from those lo- 
cated near large cities in northern New Jersey where labor turnover 
seemed the most rapid. 
NATIONALITY 
In the canvass made by the investigators, 683 farm employees were 
interviewed ; 497 of them were American born, 186 were foreign born. 
There were 135 negroes, all American born except 1. Seventeen 
nationalities were represented among the foreign born, of which 73 
Italians formed the largest group. There were also 40 Polanders 
and Russians, 31 Germans and Austrians, 14 British and Canadians. 
Practically no foreign-born workers were found on dairy farms vis- 
ited ; three-fifths of those interviewed were working on truck farms. 
Italians made up the foreign born found on fruit farms, but were 
not found on any potato farms visited. The canvassers met no 
foreign-born farm hands in Salem County; but the proportion of 
those to American-born employees grew larger as the party worked 
north, until in Bergen County it was over 45 per cent. One-fourth 
of the foreign born interviewed were found in Gloucester County, 
and one-fifth each in Bergen and Passaic Counties. Practically all 
the negroes were found in southern New Jersey, where they were 
working in about equal numbers on truck and general farms. In 
Gloucester and Salem Counties negroes made up two-fifths of the 
farm employees interviewed. 
American-born whites alone were hired on one-fifth of the farms 
visited and American-born negroes alone on one-fifteenth. Foreign- 
born workers alone were hired by a quarter of the farmers and among 
others by three-fifths of the farmers reporting. The largest pro- 
portion of the farmers hiring only native-born whites or negroes 
were found among the general and truck farmers of southern Xew 
Jersey. The largest proportion hiring foreign-born workers alone 
were in the Hammonton district of Atlantic County and in the 
tracking section of Bergen and Passaic Counties. Among the 
foreign-born workers Italians were hired among others on one-third 
of all farms, exclusively on one-eighth of the farms studied. They 
were largely employed on the truck farms of Gloucester County and 
on fruit farms near Hammonton. Next in numerical importance 
were the Poles, and, after them, Germans. These classes were found 
largely in the trucking districts of Bergen and Passaic Counties. 
Of 167 foreign-born farm workers, 94 had taken no step toward 
becoming naturalized citizens of this country; some had no intention 
of remaining in this country and becoming naturalized. Thirty-two 
