Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Vine-ripe tomatoes come from plants that are called "indeterminate," which means they
will keep growing and producing tomatoes as long as there is sunlight and warmth. As a
result, farmers need to stake them in place and keep them trained. The extra labor means
that the tomatoes must be sold for a higher price, so they are picked a few days later than
they would be if they were mature-green.
This improvement isn't as dramatic as the name "vine-ripe" might imply. Usually they
are harvested at what is called the "breaker" stage, when the fruit just begins to show some
red (technically, not more than 10 percent of its surface). Still, a tomato matures quickly
at this point in its life, and there can be a discernible difference in flavor. Also, because
the plants are staked and trained, the fruit is easier to pick, so the harvest proceeds gradu-
ally rather than in one giant sweep. It's not unusual for a vine-ripe field to be picked every
other day; therefore, a higher percentage of the harvest will be ripe than with determinate
tomatoes.
Because the plants are producing for such a long period of time, they need a fairly mild
temperature. Most of the vine-ripe tomatoes grown in the United States come from the
coastal regions of California, although vine-ripe tomatoes are among the most geograph-
ically dispersed crops, grown in thirty-five states.
As sweet as tomato growers might have thought they had it, nothing lasts forever. In the
mid-1990s, the tomato world was turned upside down when imported fruit hit the Amer-
ican market with a bang. The shocking thing was where these revolutionary new imports
came from. Imported tomatoes had long been a significant part of the American scene,
particularly in the winter, but historically most imports came from Mexico, where a thriv-
ing tomato industry is located in the state of Sinaloa. (Imports from Mexico usually come
close to equaling the individual harvest of either Florida or California.) The Mexicans had
particularly good luck in the early 1990s with special breeds of tomatoes that could be
picked a little later than mature-greens, so they had somewhat more flavor but still a long
shelf life.
What took American farmers by surprise were the tomatoes coming from a most un-
expected place: Holland. In the mid-1990s Dutch tomato exports to the United States
skyrocketed, increasing more than 800 percent in only a couple of years. What was truly
revolutionary was that these tomatoes didn't fit the old mold. Rather than sending over an-
other variation on the old mature-green/vineripe model as the Mexicans had done, Dutch
farmers practically reinvented the tomato. As a result, Holland went from nowheresville
in the tomato world to becoming the second-largest exporter to the United States.
