After the middle of the nineteenth century the open-field farmers of Bobigny abandoned their exclusive concentration on the production of cereals and began to grow vegetables as well. The farmers had been the most important group in Bobigny; at the turn of the century they still cultivated three-fourths of the land. Yet this dominance was called into question after the s, when many market gardeners began to settle in Bobigny.
Henceforth Bobigny's farmers had to compete with gardeners for both land and access to the Paris vegetable market. Vegetables were more profitable than wheat, yet the competition from market gardeners led many Bobigny farmers to return a larger part of their efforts to the wheat crop in the late nineteenth century.
Many market gardeners who moved into Bobigny after came from Paris, where the urban renovation unleashed by Baron Haussmann forced many Parisian market gardeners from neighborhoods like the Bastille and Vaugirard, where they had traditionally lived and worked. A larger number, however, came from the provinces, especially from the regions of Bourgogne and Morvan.
These provincials were usually peasants who left their villages as a greater percentage of the agricultural land there was shifted to pasturage; the dynamism of the Paris vegetable market in the late nineteenth century attracted many to the metropolitan area.
The major impetus to invade Bobigny, however, was provided by the count of Blancmesnil, the town's largest and absentee landowner; after he began dividing up much of his land into small market-gardening plots marais and renting them out.
