Cliff Emlong

Founded by his father, Emlong Nurseries was operated from 1914-1989 in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

I get a kick out of people growing organic vegetables and stuff. They would have to stand on the Bible to tell me that they don’t use something else. The good growers didn’t let the pesticides get out of control. If people didn’t understand what the pesticide would do, they ruined their soil with it.

My father was a taskmaster. He’d look over a field and I’d clean the weeds out of it. We did a lot by hand at that time. He could spot a weed a half mile. I tell you, he was pretty tough, but I learned.

My father was interested in irrigation. He and Ferdinand Zar, a farmer in Dutton Township , were trying to get some portable pipe so they could do a lot of irrigating. We had about seven hundred acres of land on Hickory Creek. We could get water out of Hickory Creek. We could pump water but this pipe was portable. It was made of steel, lightweight steel. Two men could lay the pipe. Champion Pipe Company from Gary , Indiana , developed the patent on this thing and we used interlocking pipes. It served a purpose for a long time, and it saved a lot of fruit, ground fruit, with irrigation.

I developed equipment. We developed our own sprayer. We covered two rows at a time. We used our tractors more than anybody else did around here. We did our heavy work with a big, crawling tractor. Four-bottom plow, eighteen-inch plows. Then, the farm alls came in and you could cultivate two rows at a time. Farm alls were International tractors and they worked fine. Finally, they started to manufacture more tractors, John Deere, and all of ‘em. International was probably the best row crop tractors that was ever built. It could do two rows at a time. They developed a small tractor that would straddle one row, and it had a little unit on the tractor that did the work in and out of the plants, so we didn’t have to hoe everything.

My grandfather started to grow plants before 1900. My father started the retail [nursery] business in 1914. In the beginning, this area was mostly small fruit, strawberries, raspberries, grapes, and so on. Small fruits [are] what built it. At one time we had fourteen thousand acres in strawberries.

We were in the mail-order business for a long time. At one time, we were mailing half a million catalogs. We had a fall catalog for several years that got larger and larger. Then we opened a garden center over in Niles , in about [19]46-[19]47, somewhere in that area after the war. Then we had one in South Bend - in the southern part of South Bend in the [19]50s. Well, when mailing catalogs we mailed to just about every state in the Union , except California .

There’s always going to be somebody growing plants. We’re losing in this country. We’re just losing it. Real large growers left and what they’ll do, they’ll subdivide their land and they’ll go out of business. That’s what they’re going do. They’ll probably start importing a lot of plants. It’s been gobbled up.

The Depression hit us and it turned everything cock-eyed. It really stopped everybody. You didn’t know whether you were going to stay in business or not. The Depression was real bad around here, but people took care of each other. During the Depression it was so touch and go, in the nursery business. So many of them went by the wayside. This area had more nurseries in the [19]30s and [19]40s than any place in the state.

Conglomerates got into the nursery business. That’s when everybody quit. Otherwise, they’d stay in the landscaping or something or cash and carry. That held up for a long time, cash and carry did. It was good for a long time, but when the conglomerates, the bigger stores got into it, I can see the handwriting on the wall. You couldn’t compete.