Tomato Farmers in the Red After a Rotten ’91 Season : * Crops: Growers say they’re losing thousands of dollars every day. Increased competition and a late harvest are blamed.

Paul Murai leaned against a railing and watched a farm worker push a wheelbarrow of tomatoes into a warehouse.

“We’re losing $5,000 to $10,000 a day on tomatoes,” said Murai, who runs Murai Farms in Irvine with his two brothers. “We’ve lost about $400,000” this season.

He said it almost casually, resigned to the unpredictable business of farming, where tomato growers generally expect to turn a profit about every three to five years.

“It’s not like we’re making tennis shoes, then realize we’re losing money and stop production and lay off everyone,” said Murai, whose parents began farming in Orange County in the early 1950s. “With produce, we’re dealing with perishables.”

The market is bad all over because there are more tomatoes than buyers.

To illustrate that point, Ed Beckman of the California Tomato Board took Monday’s production and price figures and estimated that, as a group, Southern California growers and shippers lost $100,000 on a single day alone. Farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, he said, are letting acres of tomatoes rot on the vine.

“It’s a blood bath out there,” Beckman said.

Perhaps the biggest reason for the oversupply is that a lot of farmers in other parts of this country and in Mexico decided to grow tomatoes this year. Growers in the Carolinas and Virginia speculated that the California crop this season would be small because of the drought, Beckman said. The California crop is down 20%, less than farmers elsewhere had predicted.

Carl Lindgren, general manager of Treasure Farms--the other large tomato grower in Orange County--surmises that more people planted home-grown tomatoes this year to save money in the recession.

“The nation essentially could not absorb all these tomatoes,” Beckman said.

Southern California growers also missed a good part of their optimal season for tomato sales in June. Usually, they beat growers elsewhere in the country to market by about six weeks. But the harvest was delayed by the cold weather and the March rains, and tomatoes from Orange County were three weeks late.

The harvest finally came in July, just as back yards everywhere were so full of tomatoes that people were giving them away to neighbors.

Murai and Lindgren are still hopeful that the market will turn around this month. By September, most other parts of the country are too cold for tomatoes. This region’s mild climate lets growers harvest through the first week of January.

For now, though, there is no sign that the national tomato supply is slackening.

Murai Farms and Treasure Farms each are growing 400 acres of tomatoes this year. Murai grows a variety of table tomato and Roma and cherry tomatoes. Treasure Farms, the Irvine division of agriculture giant Sun World International, grows its own, patented brand of table tomato called Devine Ripe.

Murai said a strong strawberry harvest for him this spring will more than make up for losses from tomatoes.

Lindgren would not say how much money he is losing on the tomatoes. Treasure Farms grows a half-dozen other crops.

“I wouldn’t care to put a number on it,” he said, “but it’s been in the red.”

Low Prices Squeeze Tomato Growers

Orange County tomato growers are being hurt this year by competition from other areas, which has pushed prices down.

Source: California Tomato Board