truck farm
1
5.3
- noun
- /trʌk fɑrm/
- US
:
huerto
- He passes truck farms on some flat stretches, but it's mostly desert still before we steal the Owens Valley water.
- truck farm of twelve acres
Examples
-
I just found a "truck" farm in my area that doesn't use a bunch of chemicals.
Blog text (8) -
Beyond this was yet another truck farm, maybe twelve acres punctuated by a tin-roof shack.
Fiction book (1991) -
No chance that I have a little truck farm there?
-
I was new to that part of the country, having lived until then in the center of a flat, green little stretch of truck farms on the East Coast.
Fiction book (1990) -
After World War I, cucumbers became part of commonly tended truck-farm plantings.
Academic text (2007) -
When he tried to borrow money to start up a truck farm, his own mother told everybody in town that Wilbur couldn't grow germs on the bottom of his shoe.
Fiction book (2000) -
He married and went into business for himself in the spring of 1946, raising laying hens, vegetables, and berries on a seven-and-a-half-acre truck farm.
Fiction book (1990) -
I saw now that here, in the heart of rural north-central Florida, truck farms and scraggly pines had replaced the orange groves and majestic palms.
Fiction book (1997) -
Hispanics are fewer in number but still very much in evidence in South Alabama, where they provide migrant agricultural labor, replant timberland, process seafood, and work dairy farms, truck farms, and sawmills.
Academic text (2003) -
The local truck farm supplies fresh vegetables to the farmers' market every weekend.
Synonyms
A small farm that grows vegetables to sell at local markets
How Commercial
Surface Forms
Morphology
truck + farm
The MWE uses an archaic sense of 'truck' meaning marketable produce or trade rather than the common B1 meaning 'large vehicle', so the definition 'farm producing vegetables for market' cannot be derived from the literal constituents. A learner who knows 'truck' only as a vehicle and 'farm' as land would likely misunderstand the phrase, making the expression unpredictable without prior exposure.
Etymology
Truck farm may come from an older use of truck meaning trade, but a clear image is a small farm that grows vegetables and loads them onto a truck to take to market. That's why a truck farm means a place where crops are grown mainly 'to sell at market'.