So you're in your grocery store, hunting for the ripest tasting tomatoes you can
find...If you're in the produce aisle, you're in the wrong place.
The only truly vine-ripened tomatoes you'll find in the supermarket are in
tins and jars: tomato sauce, tomato paste. These use fully ripe, full flavored
tomatoes. See, it's all about logistics. Take this field right here. These
tomatoes are being grown for Prego Farmers Market Sauces. In just a few
hours they'll go from the field to the cannery, which is just about a mile from
here. Fresh market tomatoes have to get to stores all around the country. If
they're picked ripe, they'll simply rot before they get there. So they're picked
hard and green - before they reach maximum sweetness.
Now I had a choice: I could go to Florida, where most of the fresh green tomatoes
grow; or come here to California, where 95% of America's processing tomatoes
grow. Well you know from our red pepper episode that it's a whole lot harder to
bring a crop to peak ripeness. Each day that goes by, the farmer's within a hair's
breath away from losing everything. So I thought: hey, I want to tell that story!
Let's go find out what we're eating, shall we?
Welcome to Dickson, California - home to fifth generation farmer Dustin Timothy,
and his dad Ron, who started growing tomatoes here in the 1970s.
(Dustin): I don't think I was very helpful...until I was in my 20s...
(Ron): You know I know I didn't grow up till I was like 28, so I don't know why I expected him to grow up any sooner, but
he did, and I'm very proud of him now.
This part of Northern California is
known for a mediterranean-style climate - warm dry days make very happy tomatoes.
Not that Tomatoes come from the Mediterranean - nope - tomatoes are native
to the Andes. The Aztecs introduced the "tomatl"
to Spanish explorers. They adapted the name to their language, and took the
"tomate" home to the European continent. But they were not a "smashing" success - no
one knew what to do with them, and lots of people thought they were poisonous.
Ultimately it was the cooks of southern Italy - a former colony of Spain - who
really embraced the tomato. Imagine Italian food without tomatoes - no pizza,
no pasta sauce...what a sad world that would be...Worldwide, there are over 20,000
varieties of tomato, loosely classified by their shape and size, and they are
loaded with vitamins C and K, folate, and potassium. We Americans get more vitamins
from tomatoes than from any other fruit or veg we put in our mouths, and it's not
because we're pounding the salad - it's because we love our spaghetti sauce, and
our ketchup, and our pizza. You say blood courses through our veins?
I say it's tomato sauce...!
Nine out of ten tomatoes we grow in this country are processing tomatoes. That
means we eat a lot of them. These plum style tomatoes have fewer seeds, dense
flesh, and little water - just what you want for a full-bodied, full flavored sauce.
Unlike the tomatoes I grow in my garden, these Tomatoes have been bred to all
ripen at the same time on the vine, so Dustin can harvest an entire field of
ripe tomatoes all at once.
(Nicole): This thing's enormous! (Dustin): Ready? (Nicole): Yeah...
(Nicole): That's a lot easier than picking by hand...This is just one plant! (Dustin): And there are 8,712 of these per acre...
(Nicole): That's a lot of tomatoes... (Dustin): More or less...
The harvest begins in late July. By late September,
it's practically a round-the-clock operation...every day - and every night! Ripe
tomatoes wait for no man. Once they're red, Dustin has a two-week
window to get them cut. You'd think it's pretty straightforward - he has a thousand
acres, he planted over two months in the spring, forty acres a day - he just
harvests the first ones he planted and follows the sequence, right? No! This is
farming, it's never straightforward! It's more like a Rubik's Cube with a myriad
moving parts...you can't work on one side and forget the others. He's got weather -
if it rains, these Tomatoes could rot on the vine;
he's got equipment breakdowns - these machines run two 10-hour shifts every day,
things will break; he's got Prego's own production deadlines...I'll tell you:
Dustin is a Rubik's Cube champion.
It's 8 o'clock at night, but these guys won't quit for another couple hours.
(Ron): As a farmer, you only get maybe 40 to 45 chances, because you got 40 or 45 years
in your career. You can't make too many mistakes.
While a harvest is relentlessly
grueling, it's also a celebration - a culmination of a season's worth of blood,
sweat, and tears. That season began in March, with baby transplants grown in the
greenhouse planted one by one in the soil. Tomato plants are sensitive
creatures. If it's too cool in May, they won't grow as vigorously; too hot in June,
then the flowers won't survive. Each flower represents a tomato. If the heat
wilts your flowers, you get no tomatoes. As the fruit starts to grow,
Dustin is preoccupied with water. He gets his water from wells that are up to
sixty years old. If they fail him, his crop dies - game over.
Only this of course is not a game. It's his livelihood.
Dustin's entire salary for the year is tied up in a set of circumstances he
largely can't control. But he's not totally helpless.
Dustin's installed irrigation below the earth's surface. His costs are high, but
he gets to farm more ground, more efficiently.
(Dustin): I've experienced a 30% reduction in water use. (Nicole): That's amazing! (Dustin): Yeah...it's...it's pretty significant.
Two or three weeks before harvest, Dustin cuts the water. This drying out period concentrates the flesh,
making it denser, meatier. But how does Dustin know just when the tomatoes are ready to be harvested?
(Dustin): What you're looking for is development of the seed and the gel. (Nicole): Okay. (Dustin): So this is a very immature tomato. It isn't gonna be ready for at least
three weeks. You've got some fruit like this, looks similar to that... (Nicole): Okay. (Dustin): But, see that flesh...? (Nicole): Oh my god! It's red!
(Dustin): Right, it's probably only ten days away from being...this red. (Nicole): So it actually turns red from the inside out. (Dustin): Correct. (Nicole): I didn't realize that!
(Nicole): That's some serious tomato whispering right there.
Now, you might have noticed that these vines are not supported by trellises.
Trellis tomatoes need to be handpicked by an army of harvesters. Processing
tomatoes are grown on the ground, so they can be cut in one fell swoop - by this bad boy.
Dustin can harvest 50 tons of tomatoes per acre. Here's how: in a matter of
seconds, the harvester cuts the whole plant, passes it up to a shaker, the
tomatoes drop off, and the greens shoot out. The fruit runs quickly through a
color scanner that kicks out any unripe ones; and just to be on the safe side,
there's a human pair of eyes too. Today, that's me.
Dustin fills up to 24 tomato trailers a day - that's over 1.2 million pounds of
tomatoes - each day, for two months straight.
The colossal bounty that this land produces is mind-blowing. To give the
soil a chance to rest and recover, Dustin rotates crops across his farm.
Next to his Tomatoes are sunflower fields - a less demanding crop that allows
the soil time to build back its strength.
"Processing Tomatoes" - does that word "processing" sound scary? Like big brutal
factories with smoking chimneys? While "Fresh Market Tomatoes" sounds like
sunshine and sunflowers. The truth is, processing is just a process. It's dicing,
or crushing, or pureeing. And it's heating - to kill off bacteria. Basically, it's the
old-fashioned canning process on a much much larger scale. Now, what happens to
those processed tomatoes afterwards makes all the difference. Are they then
overloaded with salts and sugars and stabilizers? A good rule of thumb: read
that ingredients list. You should recognize all the ingredients - and
tomatoes should be top of the list.
(Mark Jolly, Producer, Camera): We're totally using these... (Dustin): Who's the wierd guy making the great catches in the background...?
(Dustin): The biggest perk of being a tomato grower? Tomato fights. We've had some
legendary tomato fights in my day. (Nicole): Have you? (Dustin): Yeah not since I'm getting older and more responsible though...I can't even tell you the details...