New Jersey: The Garden State, As You’ve Never Seen It

It’s not just Snooki and strip malls. New Jersey has gotten a bad rap as “America’s armpit,” but the reality is far more interesting. Photographer Cayce Clifford has been working for years to document the greener sides of her home state:

I grew up in a classic suburban development from the ’60s, made up of medium-sized houses with acre lots and streets named after the developers’ children (Samuel, Bennie and Estella). I could ride my bike in any direction and be surrounded by farmland in just a few minutes.

Upon returning home from my first few months away at college, I began to see things that I never noticed as a child. As the hit reality television show Jersey Shore reached 8.8 million viewers and my hometown replaced their historic fairgrounds with a 470,000 square foot Wal-Mart Supercenter, my vision of my home changed drastically.

All of a sudden my family found itself edged between suburbia and the rural town we moved to to escape the city. The farms became fewer and spread further apart. Sandwiched between New York City and Philadelphia, with seven of the ten most densely populated cities in the country, what had happened to the green place that I once imagined? Why had New Jersey once been called the Garden State?

In early 2012 I traveled back home to photograph these contrasting landscapes. I visited dairy farmers, preserved land, roof-top gardens, activists, high-density housing, the urban and the rural, the populous and the barren.

What most people don’t know is that 23 percent of New Jersey is preserved land. They don’t hear about the legacy of family-run farms that dot the New Jersey landscape and the intense efforts to preserve the valuable land that the region was built upon. Agriculture in New Jersey means both surviving famers that have remained despite years of encroaching development, and individuals who are creating new ways for us to look at small-scale agriculture in urban spaces.

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