It’s not that much of a loss for them. If you are growing for someone like morning star, they have tightened the supply chain so well that every step is precisely executed. The reason they are open topped is because they go straight to processing and get washed and graded and processed even before they are weighed. It’s beautiful how the system has been designed. Closing the tops is probably saving less than a few pennies per pound but it’s not worth disrupting or delaying the operations systems. Processing company contract out every step of the growing process from nursery to transplanting services to harvesting. Chris Rufer is a model most of us should strive to be..he has perfected tomato processing to an art form.

Chris Rufer may run a tight operation but I have nothing nice to say about him as a person, especially how he communicates with his growers. I’ll leave it at that.

sorry to hear that. i don't contract grow. it's what i hear from others about how morning star is run re: systems.

Dutch fact about tomatoes: almost all tomatoes from the Netherlands are grown in greenhouses and most are grown on rockwhool. Computer systems fertilize water that flows through the rockwhool.

The seedlings are grown in labs and then sold to the greenhouses. And while it is not really organic food, most greenhouses don't use chemicals to keep pests and diseases out. A lot of times different kind if insects are used for this. So it is as bio as it gets.

But you can argue about the taste. While they are as healthy as soil grown tomatoes I think they taste watery.

I think the taste is not necessarily a hydroponics issue, but moreso a market issue. Dutchies choose unblemished pristine tomatoes, these strains are just watery by default. I can't even find heirloom tomatoes around here.

The taste of vine ripened tomatoes is incomparable to the 'industrial' tomatoes that are picked when they are still green. They are picked green so that they are firmer for transport and they ripe just enough to be red in the store. Let the same tomatoes ripen on the vine and they are truly amazing. I've grown my own tomatoes, same F1 Hybrid strains as the commercial growers use. There is a world of difference in taste.

Are there good Dutch tomatoes out there? I associated them with the worst tasting produce and avoid them like the plague.

Some of them best tomatoes I've ever had came (in winter!) from Thanet Earth, a massive indoor grow op in Kent, England. They grow all year under massive grow lights.

I think a lot of the really good flavours in tomatoes are a function of sunlight exposure.

I've yet to find any. I agree with tdrdt that they all taste watery, so much so that I'd aim to avoid Dutch tomatoes whilst living there.

I always found it baffling that it was too much work to put a tarp over the top. They forced the gravel trucks here to do so, as they kept cracking people's windows, but the total lost material must have been incredible.

The fusarium fungus fact is truly useful info. Thank you.

Indeed. I had great success with a tomato garden for two years, and then absolutely failed at it this year. I think I've finally found the cause.

> We rotate one year tomatoes with one strand of alfalfa, which lasts 3-5 years and regenerates nitrogen into the soil.

So for a given plot you do tomatoes for one year every 4-6 years, do I understand correctly?

Does it matter so much what other crop you plant, in terms of reducing the fungus? Alfalfa is just a good choice for its nitrogen fixing? Could you leave it fallow for example? (just trying to get ideas for my garden)

Alfalfa is especially good for adding nitrogen, but clover can do the same for a home garden.

You are correct on the number of years between plantings, but really only 2-3 years off are needed to clear the fungus. Alfalfa just lasts longer.

As another comment mentions, some other common crops have the same disease risk, so avoid potatoes and eggplants too many consecutive years.

Fallowing it an option, but a little nitrogen for a home garden shouldn’t be too prohibitive. When you have a lot of acres it can be a meaningful cost saving measure but it’s not huge.

I have this issue right now with my tomato plants. Am I right in my understanding that you don't necessarily need to crop rotate and just supplementing the soil with nitrogen would be sufficient?

If you don’t control the fusarium from time to time, the tomato plants will look great but give no yield. One of the other commenters mentions a new technique for winter cover crop to avoid rotation. I’m not really sure how much of a risk fusarium is for a home garden, it might be as much as our farm or perhaps minimal.

Nitrogen is necessary for proteins so you can get larger yields, but if some other nutrient is missing then nitrogen alone won’t help. K and P also need to be present in good quantities, as well as a mixture of iirc 17 elemental trace elements. I’d use a well-rounded fertilizer like 7-7-7, and if it wasn’t growing then assume there was a disease or pest at play.

This! We have the same problem.

Thank you very much.

If memory serves, that fungus family attacks all nightshades, not just tomatoes, right? So you can't rotate potatoes or eggplant or you get the same problems.

For anyone who didn't know this: tomato, tomatillo, potato, eggplant, pepper and tobacco are all from the same family Solanaceae aka nightshade.

There are many other plants in the same family (they have worldwide distribution), but a lot of them are poisonous.

Even more fun: It's possible to graft plants of different species within the family, so you can create a plant that grows both potatoes and tomatoes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomato

And in fact potato fruit are poisonous! Just remember that when you grow potatoes and you get those "nice small tomatoes" on the potatoes that do bloom and fruit :) Luckily not many bloom and fruit usually, so most people that just grow a few potatoes for fun don't even get tempted. Then again they don't ripen red anyway, so I guess there's that to "save the curious".

EDIT: Anyone else have an unusually many potatoes bloom and bear fruit this year? I've never had this many before.

The bigger warning to any potential potato farmers is to make sure you keep the potatoes underground; any tuber above ground will also have heightened levels of solanine. If they're light-skinned they'll also turn green from chlorophyll, which helps identify them a bit, but better to make sure they're well-buried.

(All my potatoes had a couple fruits this year, but I'm in Germany, so I have no clue if that data is relevant...)

That's a good one that people should know even for potatoes they buy. If green, discard.

But you are right, some people don't.

I think it is relevant because I'm in Canada and even though we now have a total of statistically irrelevant 2 anecdotal data points only it is something. Lots of fruit on potatoes in the same year on different continents more than 5000 km apart on a plant that usually has very few if any fruit at all. My very first years of planting potatoes I did not even have flowers.

There’s a tomato plant that produces little purple tomatoes that don’t look that different from potato fruits. I knew someone who planted both one year and I still haven’t forgiven them for being so reckless.

Wow, TIL. So The Simpsons' Tomacco wasn't that far-fetched after all!

I remember reading that when they were first brought to Europe via the Columbian exchange people were reluctant to eat them fearing they were also poisonous. Now it's hard to imagine, e.g. Italian cuisine without tomatoes.

They feared that because people were being poisoned. Pewter plates were common at the time and the tomatoes acid leached the lead out causing acute lead poisoning!

Even the “sweet” tomatoes have pretty close to the same pH, it’s just the sugars covering the tang, like soda or honey.

As a bitter taster it doesn’t matter how much sugar you put on the tomato it’s still too much. About the only thing IMO that you can put on a tomato to make it acceptable is a bacon cheeseburger.

> I grow a couple thousand acres of tomatoes in California

I would love to hear more about your lifestyle, please! Is this for work, or for pleasure?

Well I am an owner of the farm, along with my brother, which my great-grandfather purchased as a retirement project in 1950. Total area is about 7,000 acres, of which tomatoes will soon be replaced by almonds as the primary crop. We used to be the largest asparagus operation on the US, but NAFTA has ended that industry and it was a difficult 20-year transition to find almonds. There was a long-standing belief that our soil wouldn’t handle almonds due to excessive water, but that is proving to be very wrong.

Day-to-day operations are handled by a general manager that is brilliant. My brother is also out there daily working on his distillery and helping to run things. I work mostly on IT and then also handle special projects, especially financial ones.

Life is pretty good to have a large piece of land in CA. Tree nuts have been absurdly lucrative for the past two decades and it has pushed the land values up a lot. It’s put me in the interesting situation of being able to focus most of my energy into equity investing to try and balance my portfolio against the farm holdings. I do, however, attach a strong emotional connection to the land such that when asked what group I most strongly identify with, it is always “Central California Farmers.”

While it can be rewarding work, would 2000 acres just be something you grow "for pleasure"?

With the operational structure we have in place, I would describe it as fairly pleasurable for me. I get to work on interesting problems when I want to, and not much else. I’d say it’s actually the size that makes this possible, we could never afford our general manager on just a few hundred acres.

another interesting fact: if you see a plant growing on human sewage solids, it must be a tomato plant!! https://i.imgur.com/qByHRvo.jpg

I don't think it "must" be? Tomatoes are very common in that situation because their seeds can survive passage through the human digestive system, but if a different plant's seed happened to coincidentally land there there's no reason it couldn't grow too?

Would you be able to eat fruit from that? Does bacteria travel to the fruit from within the plant?

Well, animal feces is commonly used as a fertilizer. I think it would be bad news for a plant if bacteria were traveling around inside it.

People reusing human wastes generally try to compost it for a while, I think, probably partly to reduce the risk of diseases, but probably also in a large part to remove the foul smell. Shoveling shit isn't fun.

New research has shown that winter cover cropping with hairy vetch will suppress fusarium.

Very interesting, I’ll look into this.

I'm experimenting with it in my garden right now. Definitely had a fusarium issue this year (tomatoes in the same location for 3 years running). I have hairy vetch in now as a cover crop in that bed and will plant tomatoes again next year to see how it goes.

This info came from a gardener Youtuber, but it appears backed up from a google search. It appears the experiments were done with watermelons, but I would assume the results would be the same with other crops.