Tomato Growers Happily See Red

For Southern California farmers still picking this season’s vine-ripened tomatoes, their crops are red gold.

East Coast hurricanes, West Coast rains and pestilence in Mexico have created a nationwide tomato shortage. And growers in Ventura and San Diego counties, relatively unscathed by Mother Nature, are benefiting from a temporary boost in prices.

The harvest will end in two to four weeks, depending on the weather, but what fruit the growers have left is going for about $45 per 25-pound box -- compared with a money-losing $5 to $6 back in midsummer.

“We are going to pick every last tomato that we can,” said Doug Lowthrop, sales manager with Deardorff-Jackson Co. in Oxnard.

Those will be relatively slim pickings. Workers at Deardorff-Jackson are harvesting about 10,000 boxes a week, Lowthrop said, compared with about 100,000 a week in July and August.

But even small volumes will help growers salvage what could have been a disastrous season for vine-ripened tomatoes, said Brian Bernauer, sales manager for Fresh Pac International in Oceanside.

“July was one of the worst months on record for prices,” Bernauer said, “and August was only a little better.”

California is the second- largest producer of fresh tomatoes in the United States, after Florida. About 75 farming companies grow fresh tomatoes on 35,000 acres in the Golden State. Last year, they produced 37 million boxes of the fruit.

Fresh tomatoes account for about a third of the state’s approximately $900-million annual tomato crop, with the remainder going into canned and processed tomato products.

The biggest producing region is the San Joaquin Valley, where the crop is grown on bushy plants with the fruit sagging onto the ground. Tomatoes grown that way are vulnerable to heavy rains because they rot when sitting in puddles of water. Indeed, several storms in October destroyed much of the Central Valley’s crop.

Valley farmers typically pick their fruit when it is still green. Then packinghouses induce ripening before shipment by exposing the green tomatoes to ethylene gas, the same chemical that occurs naturally in the fruit and promotes the development of its bright red color.

In contrast, Southern California farmers grow vine-ripened tomatoes, which require a more expensive system of 5-foot-tall stakes and strings. Although Ventura and San Diego counties also endured heavy rains, the crop was undamaged because it was suspended safely above the ground.

The last weeks of the Southern California harvest won’t produce enough fruit to replace what was lost in other regions. Central Valley growers won’t have another crop until spring. Florida normally would be supplying the bulk of the fresh tomatoes at this time of year, but the hurricanes this fall delayed planting there, creating the shortage.

Adding to the woes, a pest known as the tomato psyllid has damaged the Mexican crop in Baja California, which typically exports about 12 million boxes to the United States.

All told, about 120,000 boxes of tomatoes are available domestically each day, about a quarter of the normal supply, said Ed Beckman, president of the California Tomato Commission

The dearth of fruit has pushed up the retail price at grocery stores by a third to about $3 a pound since early summer.

It also has forced some restaurants to take the versatile item off their menus. Subway sandwich shops, for example, are telling customers that they are having supply problems related to the hurricanes and that tomatoes might not be available, depending on the day; the 17,866-store chain is operated by Doctor’s Associates Inc. of Milford, Conn.

The shortage is nearing the end, however. Florida’s fruit is starting to ripen and should become available in the next week or two. Beckman said prices should start to ease in subsequent weeks.

Until then, farmers in Southern California plan to take advantage of the favorable market, though they concede a bit of awkwardness over their good fortune.

“You never wish ill on another grower,” Lowthrop said, “but it sure saved us.”