Madison, Me.
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Barbara LaRouche adjusts the position of the plants to get the best exposure to sunlight. More Photos »
AN icy mixture of rain and sleet fell on the glass roof of Greenhouse Two at Backyard Farms here, but as its big blue door slid open and the warm, green, celery smell of tomato plants wafted out, it was summer.
When it was built three years ago, the company’s first 24-acre greenhouse in Madison was already the largest building in Maine. This second connected greenhouse, completed last year, brought the total area under glass to some 42 acres, or roughly the size of 32 football fields. Even in the depths of winter, a million tomatoes ripen indoors to harvest each week, snipped from their vines by workers in T-shirts and shorts.
“It’s medium sized,” said Tim de Kok, one of the company’s head growers. At his last job, Mr. de Kok managed a 40-acre chunk of a 318-acre monster in Arizona. The center of Canada’s greenhouse industry, the area around Leamington, Ontario, has some 1,600 covered acres, roughly equivalent to putting Manhattan, south of Houston Street, under glass.
Once, if you wanted tomatoes out of season, you mainly had to settle for hard pink ones picked green in the fields of Florida or Mexico and shipped by truck. Commercial greenhouses could do better, but they were a niche market.
Backed by consumer demand for fresh tomatoes year round, the indoor acreage devoted to growing tomatoes has become nearly six times as large since the early 1990s, said Roberta Cook, a marketing economist who helped write what many in the industry consider to be the definitive report on greenhouse tomatoes in 2005.
Those tough pink ones are still good and cheap enough for most fast food restaurants and the food service industry, which buy about half the fresh tomatoes sold in the United States. But with shoppers willing to pay a premium — even $4 to $5 a pound — for red vine-ripened ones with more flavor, greenhouse tomatoes now represent more than half of every dollar spent on fresh tomatoes in American supermarkets, according to figures from the Perishables Group, a market research firm in Chicago.
“In the U.S., it’s hard to be competitive without a 20-acre minimum block,” Ms. Cook said.
The plants here at Backyard Farms number about 550,000. Each consists of two plants — the vines of new varieties, constantly tweaked for flavor, color, freshness and myriad other traits; and the roots of another, grafted together at a thickly scarred “V” near the base.
One half grows down into a sterile dirt-substitute made from fibers spun out of volcanic basalt, absorbing a custom hydroponic cocktail mixed by Mr. de Kok. The other half stretches toward the glass ceiling, growing a foot every week along a nine-foot length of twine. When the plants reach the top, workers reel more twine from the spool, shift the entire row horizontally and band each vine to its neighbor so that by the end of a plant’s life it might grow parallel to the concrete floor for as many as 20 or 30 feet, a dozen vines tangled together like garden hoses, before each makes its own graceful turn upward.
“It’s like a bonsai tree — you have to treat every plant exactly the same,” Mr. de Kok said. “As soon as it gets uneven, that’s when it starts to get away from you.”
He sat at his desk with three monitors recording temperature data, carbon dioxide levels, light readings measured in joules per square meter, and countless other figures from sensors scattered throughout the glass building.
To compete in a more crowded market, where increased supply eroded price, many exploit technology to scramble for tomorrow’s hot tomato.
“There is a tremendous variety of tomatoes available, thousands of cultivars,” said Tom Papadopoulos, a senior research scientist at Canada’s Greenhouse and Processing Crops Research Centre in Harrow, Ontario.
In the mid ’90s, beefsteaks were the dominant contributor to greenhouse revenue. Then it was tomatoes sold on the vine, the principal crop at Backyard Farms. They are medium-size fruit, round and firm, and are sold in clusters of four to six.
Today, as tomatoes on the vine grow commonplace, many companies are going small — cherry tomatoes, or grape, or campari, larger than cherry and smaller than tomatoes on the vine. Backyard Farms recently introduced a new line of cocktail tomatoes on the vine, similar in size to Camparis and sold in clusters of eight and packaged in cartons like Tomato McNuggets.
“They’ve got strawberry tomatoes in greenhouses now — that’s a special variety that also has great flavor,” Ms. Cook said. “What I find is the smaller ones tend to be the good ones.”
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