My grandfather 'the destroyer': Inside the ruthless world of NJ's frozen veggie kings

When John Seabrook first discussed writing a book about his grandfather, C.F.Seabrook, and the family’s agricultural empire with his mother, her response shocked him, as he reveals in “The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty” (WW Norton).

“Don’t write about your family,” she said.“Just don’t.”Seabrook was perplexed.

“Maybe she knew what I was going to find out,” he writes.In “The Spinach King,” he unearths the story of how his grandfather created one of the world’s largest farming operations, as well as the ugly means that got him there.“Charles Franklin Seabrook, my grandfather, was the principal dreamer, main promoter, master builder, and autocratic ruler of this industrial farming empire – and ultimately its destroyer,” he writes.At its peak in the mid-1950s, Seabrook Farms owned or controlled 50,000 acres in southwestern New Jersey, employed 8,000 people, and grew and packed about a third of the nation’s frozen vegetables.Dubbed the “Henry Ford of Agriculture,” C.F.Seabrook had taken over his father’s farm in 1911, transforming its fortunes with his innovative approach to agriculture.

He introduced new irrigation and mechanization and diversified into building roads and railroads.But it was his pioneering use of quick-freezing vegetables in the 1930s, partnering with Birdseye, that sent Seabrook stratospheric. “In our family history, he was Thomas Edison and Henry Ford in the same Dagwood sandwich; a great American who had elevated us from dirt farmers to industrialists in a single generation,” writes John Seabrook.Seabrook Farms was so successful that a 1959 Life magazine story described it as “the biggest vegetable factory on earth.” In 1969, meanwhile, director Stanley Kubrick featured an astronaut in “2001: A Space Odyssey” sucking a Seabrook Farms Liquipack on their way to the moon.Thousands of workers worked for Seabrook: Russians, Syrians, Germans, Hungarians, Jamaicans, and Jap...