Interesting, but not that dissimilar to the United States. I grow a couple thousand acres of tomatoes in California, all of which are for processing into juices and pastes. These tomatoes are all transported in open-topped trailers by semi, and the losses have always bothered me. There is a tight turn just after leaving our property and the pile of tomatoes there grows steadily with the season as they roll off the top of the trailers. There isn’t much option for us though, and those losses are taken by the processing company.
Interesting fact about tomatoes: if you grow tomatoes for multiple years on the same field your yields will drop to zero due to fusarium fungus destroying the crop. We rotate one year tomatoes with one strand of alfalfa, which lasts 3-5 years and regenerates nitrogen into the soil.
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.
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 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.
> 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)
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.
I'm a big fan of tomatoes - we used to grow them at home in Europe, and I swear to you I have found 0 tasty tomatoes in the US, aside from this one tomato that my friend's boss grew in his garden, which tasted almost like a tomato should. Sometimes I feel like entire generations of people in the US don't know what a good tomato tastes like because they've never had a proper tomato.
I find the tomatoes in US stores bland and watery. They must be collected when green and ripe on the truck or in the store. I even grew my own tomatoes here from organic seeds and they ended up being just mildly better tasting than store-bought tomatoes. What happened to the tomatoes in the US?
Can someone demystify this for me: where are all the good US tomatoes at?
> I find the tomatoes in US stores bland and watery. They must be collected when green and ripe on the truck or in the store.
I once read somewhere that many commercial tomato varieties have lost their flavor because they have only been selected for appearance (red/flawless). But I don't know if that is true.
Luckily I found that here in Europe, recently, there have been very flavorful cherry tomatoes in the grocery stores again, but they cost between 6 to 7 euro/kilo (the watery ones around half the price.)
In selecting delicious cherry tomatoes, I observed two criteria:
1) they'll have a somewhat rough surface, rather than smooth - like little particles
2) they'll often have little yellow dots at the top around the stem
Like most veggies sold in grocery stories in the US, the varieties are engineered to line up with the supply chain needs. Tastier heirloom tomatoes tend to not do as well in transport, or don't last as long on the shelf, or whatever other reason.
As is already suggested, the good US tomatoes and fruit in general can be found at farmer's markets, local farms, and/or local grocery stores that have relationships with local farmers. Also, a lot of smaller local farms that grow tastier veggies tend to supply to locally sourced farm-to-table type restaurants directly instead of selling them in stores,
My parents get their tomatoes from a local hydroponics farm that only sells straight from the farm (in the middle of nowhere), and in bulk to local restaurants.
At the farmer's market. Look for heirloom tomatoes. I get them during the summer from either the farmer's market or a food cooperative in the Seattle area (PCC). Heirloom tomatoes are the only tomatoes I tasted on this continent that are on par with the tomatoes my parents grow in their garden in Europe.
Farmers markets and home gardens are where you find the tomatoes you are thinking of, rather than chain retailers. The produce you see in the stores are developed to be shipped in. Heirloom varieties are too fragile, even in the farmers market the tomatoes at the bottoms of the piles will be damaged from the weight of those above.
If you can find a good Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, they'll give you good tomatoes. Granted you'll also get a bunch of other vegetables but it's good quality and saves you from having to buy groceries from July to November. I've had tomatoes from a CSA that tasted like candy.
A lot of people in the US don't like tomatoes as well. One of my friends told me he hated them until he moved to another country and then found out what they were supposed to taste like.
The only good tomatoes I've had in the US come from friends' gardens.
For one thing, your own source shows that tomatoes are a rich source of many different vitamins, minerals, and fiber. But furthermore, this treatment of nutrition is a little reductive. You could eat highly processed food that is formulated to deliver the desired daily value of major nutrients, yet it would fail to deliver the same benefits as a simple diet of fruit, vegetables, small fatty fish, and nuts - even if the latter isn't optimized for nutrients. Why is this? We don't seem to know enough to answer at this time, but it appears food is more complex than a tabulation of various nutrients.
So does this mean we should be trucking tomatoes long distance? Not at all. People should eat whatever fresh produce grows locally, and supplement with canned or fermented foods that capture the benefits of faraway and out-of-season crops without the downside of wastage and shelf-life optimization.
Did you miss the part before your quote about them being a moderate source of vitamin C? The whole sentence needs a re-write anyway IMO, "no significant nutrient content" seems like too strong a statement given the table. A large tomato would cover ~10%DV of a whole bunch of vitamins and minerals.
Kind of a tangent but this really makes me think about this problem I see with thinking in Silicon Valley. It seems to be a common belief that if someone is solving a problem they have with some product or service, they are helping everyone in the world. But the rest of the world is very unlike Silicon Valley. Someone making an app to help them book a masseuse is not going to be solving problems for people who cannot afford to transport their tomatoes in refrigerated trucks.
I strongly believe that the best way to help people in other places very different from our own is to open source the best of what we know. Everything we rely on. For example instead of buying refrigerated trucks from an expensive European suppler (let's suppose) they could clone the designs and manufacture refrigeration more cheaply. Such an effort would take time but if we shared the plans for everything we rely on, someone could make it cheaper and offer it to those with less income. A free market of manufacturers would compete based on who can manufacture goods the cheapest, rather than who can both design them and manufacture them.
Maybe refrigeration is already generic enough that this particular item would not get cheaper, but in general if everything was open source then people in places like this would be more able to manufacture what they really need even if they lack certain technical skills required to design the things. And with trade normalization required by the WTO, many of these companies cannot clone certain useful goods due to patent restrictions.
We are so wealthy in the USA and yet we do not often consider sharing our wealth in this way with every other person sharing this time with us.
But you are discounting the rarity of productive labor and the value of R&D. Yes, we have serious vices in the US with our spending on frivolous pursuits, but at the same time we're doing incredibly ambitious things. If we undercut the profitability of those ambitious pursuits, we lower the number of ways to get funding to those enterprises. In the face of low payoffs for big ideas, you just get all that effort put toward more apps to book a masseuse for your dog.
Wealthy people pay to have their problems solved, so undercutting intellectual property just directs more high achievers to cater to 'first world problems' rather than chasing big ideas.
Growing and transporting tomatoes in Africa is a whole diff ball game than in other parts of the world. Farming is just a tiny slice of Ag. Supply chain is the biggest team player.
Also: processing tomatoes and tomatoes eaten out of the hand are two diff markets. Everything from genetics to harvest to inputs is different.
> One of my former classmates in undergrad is a Visiting Researcher at Purdue in the Agricultural Engineering department; he tells me that many tomato transporters actually own or rent fuel tankers that they fill in the South to sell at a markup in the North. In order to make some extra cash on the trip South with the empty tanker, they carry tomatoes.
> I know what you might be thinking: is it even sanitary to transport tomatoes that close to gasoline? But that is the least of the issues plaguing these transporters, the biggest one is that they lose about 12% of the tomatoes in a two-day trip.
The article shows raffia baskets containing tomatoes strapped to the top of fuel tankers. So they're not transported within the same space as the fuel.
Tomatoes don’t contain any alkaloids..nicotine is a very different kind of alkaloid. Tomatoes contain a diff kind of alkaloid from other nightshades. Tomatine levels drop as fruit ripens. Hardly addictive.
I wonder if they can charge more for the non-cold-chain tomatoes due to better flavor:
>Cold storage is widely used to extend shelf-life of agriculture products. For tomato, this handling results in reduced flavor quality. Our work provides major insights into the effects of chilling on consumer liking, the flavor metabolome and transcriptome, as well as DNA methylation status.
Yeah, I grew some tomatoes on my balcony this summer, and the way they taste compared to what I would buy at the store you would think they are completely different fruits. I would pay maybe 30% more for a sandwich with fresh tomatoes as opposed to the.... red slime that usually come on them.
We (Optimal Agriculture) have built an autonomous growing system for high-tech greenhouses and have achieved 'superhuman' performance in a recent tomato trial. We collect a bunch of sensory data about the crop and growing environment, run cloud-based optimisation, and then control the actuators of the greenhouse autonomously (lighting, screening, heating, cooling, irrigation, etc). We are turning $100M greenhouse facilities into IoT-connected-devices and then building an intelligence layer on top.
We are now building a commercial-scale facility in the US which will produce 50,000kg of fresh produce daily. And then we will scale from there.
Our goal is to accelerate the deployment of new greenhouses around the world to increase the availability of healthy locally-grown food and to secure our food system for the future.
Just for the density of jargon, this is quite an amusing post. I just hope your project is actually working out, though I can't tell from what you wrote.
How many square meters will that facility be, and what is the cost to construct? At $100M I don’t see how it would be financially viable.
50k kg a day is approximately 600 acres of tomatoes with our yields. That much land in CA might sell for $6-30M depending on water rights and latitude.
I have been somewhat obsessed with the idea of floating greenhouses. The economics are different than operating a farm on land but with automation it could be possible to deliver superior produce directly to coastal population centers at lower costs.
Are you optimizing for any experiential aspects of your tomatoes, like taste or texture? Personally, in my area tomatoes are cheap enough to not think about the price, but the products widely available from supermarkets taste like water
I don't like the taste of tomatoes, however, this is only true for non-processed fruit. Dried tomatoes, tomato paste, ketchup, even tomato juice are completely fine, just not the fresh fruit. I have a hazy recollection of some blog post confirming I'm not unique in this with a possible explanation and will be grateful if anyone helps me find it or explains the fact.
is the unstated moral of the story that the higher yield in plastic crates may not be due to the crate, but due to not being strapped on a petrol tanker?
The cultivar of tomato determines how "stiff" it is, and somewhat how long until ripe. A different cultivar might result in a slight change in percentage damaged.
Heat ruining the crop? But tomatoes love heat. I know rot can set in much quicker as the tomato matures, if rot or nutrient deficiency was already an issue; for pristine 'maters, they can sit around for weeks at room temperature with no issue. Perhaps part of the issue is tomato health, and another part is ventilation / passive temperature regulation. So maybe someone could construct a cheap filler material that promotes airflow and put between the baskets.
The basket design could be altered to allow tighter packing of baskets. Currently they are circular, and so don't fit very tightly against the truck or each other. If they can be packed tighter, the baskets will help reinforce each other and prevent deflection. Square baskets may be best. There are many different designs for square woven baskets. In addition they can be made smaller which will provide more reinforcement material per pound tomato (this may increase the basket price somewhat but also reduce loss, making it a net gain).
[+] [-] opinion-is-bad|4 years ago|reply
Interesting fact about tomatoes: if you grow tomatoes for multiple years on the same field your yields will drop to zero due to fusarium fungus destroying the crop. We rotate one year tomatoes with one strand of alfalfa, which lasts 3-5 years and regenerates nitrogen into the soil.
[+] [-] jelliclesfarm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tdrdt|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nitwit005|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wistar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaylinux|4 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] hinkley|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lenova|4 years ago|reply
I would love to hear more about your lifestyle, please! Is this for work, or for pleasure?
[+] [-] mikesabbagh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aweiland|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] optymizer|4 years ago|reply
I find the tomatoes in US stores bland and watery. They must be collected when green and ripe on the truck or in the store. I even grew my own tomatoes here from organic seeds and they ended up being just mildly better tasting than store-bought tomatoes. What happened to the tomatoes in the US?
Can someone demystify this for me: where are all the good US tomatoes at?
[+] [-] sva_|4 years ago|reply
I once read somewhere that many commercial tomato varieties have lost their flavor because they have only been selected for appearance (red/flawless). But I don't know if that is true.
Luckily I found that here in Europe, recently, there have been very flavorful cherry tomatoes in the grocery stores again, but they cost between 6 to 7 euro/kilo (the watery ones around half the price.)
In selecting delicious cherry tomatoes, I observed two criteria:
1) they'll have a somewhat rough surface, rather than smooth - like little particles
2) they'll often have little yellow dots at the top around the stem
[+] [-] noodle|4 years ago|reply
As is already suggested, the good US tomatoes and fruit in general can be found at farmer's markets, local farms, and/or local grocery stores that have relationships with local farmers. Also, a lot of smaller local farms that grow tastier veggies tend to supply to locally sourced farm-to-table type restaurants directly instead of selling them in stores,
My parents get their tomatoes from a local hydroponics farm that only sells straight from the farm (in the middle of nowhere), and in bulk to local restaurants.
[+] [-] decebalus1|4 years ago|reply
At the farmer's market. Look for heirloom tomatoes. I get them during the summer from either the farmer's market or a food cooperative in the Seattle area (PCC). Heirloom tomatoes are the only tomatoes I tasted on this continent that are on par with the tomatoes my parents grow in their garden in Europe.
[+] [-] asdff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hardwaregeek|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boondaburrah|4 years ago|reply
The only good tomatoes I've had in the US come from friends' gardens.
[+] [-] waspight|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Factorium|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato#Nutrition
And are 95% water.
They just taste great due to the umami flavour.
Is there any way to grow nutritious food that isn't just transporting water everywhere?
https://tools.myfooddata.com/nutrient-ranking-tool/Water/Veg...
I guess this is the end result of selecting for 'yield' which is basically just weight...
[+] [-] xenocyon|4 years ago|reply
So does this mean we should be trucking tomatoes long distance? Not at all. People should eat whatever fresh produce grows locally, and supplement with canned or fermented foods that capture the benefits of faraway and out-of-season crops without the downside of wastage and shelf-life optimization.
[+] [-] phonypc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antisthenes|4 years ago|reply
You can find common produce that has even less nutrients, yet is a widely used staple.
If your goal is protein/aminoacid delivery in an efficient manner, you need milk & meat. Or maybe soybean/pea concentrates if you want to go vegan.
No way around that.
> Is there any way to grow nutritious food that isn't just transporting water everywhere?
Yes. Growing literally any one of hundreds legume or cereal varieties.
[+] [-] debacle|4 years ago|reply
Put goats in a field. Meat has 20x-100x the energy density of most veggies.
[+] [-] TaylorAlexander|4 years ago|reply
I strongly believe that the best way to help people in other places very different from our own is to open source the best of what we know. Everything we rely on. For example instead of buying refrigerated trucks from an expensive European suppler (let's suppose) they could clone the designs and manufacture refrigeration more cheaply. Such an effort would take time but if we shared the plans for everything we rely on, someone could make it cheaper and offer it to those with less income. A free market of manufacturers would compete based on who can manufacture goods the cheapest, rather than who can both design them and manufacture them.
Maybe refrigeration is already generic enough that this particular item would not get cheaper, but in general if everything was open source then people in places like this would be more able to manufacture what they really need even if they lack certain technical skills required to design the things. And with trade normalization required by the WTO, many of these companies cannot clone certain useful goods due to patent restrictions.
We are so wealthy in the USA and yet we do not often consider sharing our wealth in this way with every other person sharing this time with us.
[+] [-] tbihl|4 years ago|reply
But you are discounting the rarity of productive labor and the value of R&D. Yes, we have serious vices in the US with our spending on frivolous pursuits, but at the same time we're doing incredibly ambitious things. If we undercut the profitability of those ambitious pursuits, we lower the number of ways to get funding to those enterprises. In the face of low payoffs for big ideas, you just get all that effort put toward more apps to book a masseuse for your dog.
Wealthy people pay to have their problems solved, so undercutting intellectual property just directs more high achievers to cater to 'first world problems' rather than chasing big ideas.
[+] [-] jelliclesfarm|4 years ago|reply
Also: processing tomatoes and tomatoes eaten out of the hand are two diff markets. Everything from genetics to harvest to inputs is different.
[+] [-] nyanpasu64|4 years ago|reply
> I know what you might be thinking: is it even sanitary to transport tomatoes that close to gasoline? But that is the least of the issues plaguing these transporters, the biggest one is that they lose about 12% of the tomatoes in a two-day trip.
This doesn't sound safe :(
[+] [-] dustintrex|4 years ago|reply
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xscqgr
[+] [-] pcrh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0des|4 years ago|reply
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10552617/
[+] [-] rackjack|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx1ztJROpyU
[+] [-] jelliclesfarm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treeman79|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] colechristensen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JacobDotVI|4 years ago|reply
>Cold storage is widely used to extend shelf-life of agriculture products. For tomato, this handling results in reduced flavor quality. Our work provides major insights into the effects of chilling on consumer liking, the flavor metabolome and transcriptome, as well as DNA methylation status.
from: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/44/12580
[+] [-] ModernMech|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nhoughto|4 years ago|reply
https://www.seriouseats.com/why-you-should-refrigerate-tomat...
[+] [-] davidhunter|4 years ago|reply
We are now building a commercial-scale facility in the US which will produce 50,000kg of fresh produce daily. And then we will scale from there.
Our goal is to accelerate the deployment of new greenhouses around the world to increase the availability of healthy locally-grown food and to secure our food system for the future.
Find out more about our mission: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDJ_QdUaap4
If you want to find out more about us or generally want to geek out on tommies then give me (founder) a shout: [email protected]
[+] [-] pcrh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opinion-is-bad|4 years ago|reply
50k kg a day is approximately 600 acres of tomatoes with our yields. That much land in CA might sell for $6-30M depending on water rights and latitude.
[+] [-] amirhirsch|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eutectic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_sigh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knicholes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RobRivera|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZoomZoomZoom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway439893|4 years ago|reply
The cultivar of tomato determines how "stiff" it is, and somewhat how long until ripe. A different cultivar might result in a slight change in percentage damaged.
Heat ruining the crop? But tomatoes love heat. I know rot can set in much quicker as the tomato matures, if rot or nutrient deficiency was already an issue; for pristine 'maters, they can sit around for weeks at room temperature with no issue. Perhaps part of the issue is tomato health, and another part is ventilation / passive temperature regulation. So maybe someone could construct a cheap filler material that promotes airflow and put between the baskets.
The basket design could be altered to allow tighter packing of baskets. Currently they are circular, and so don't fit very tightly against the truck or each other. If they can be packed tighter, the baskets will help reinforce each other and prevent deflection. Square baskets may be best. There are many different designs for square woven baskets. In addition they can be made smaller which will provide more reinforcement material per pound tomato (this may increase the basket price somewhat but also reduce loss, making it a net gain).