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But then came another shock: more imports from another totally unexpected quarter.
Canadian growers started adapting the Dutch tricks, and from a much more manageable
distance. The idea that a country widely regarded by Americans as the frozen north could
excel at growing tomatoes seemed even more far-fetched than that the Dutch could. But
the Canadian greenhouse tomato industry proved to be an even bigger threat. From almost
nothing in the early 1990s, Canadian tomato exports to the United States increased 600
percent by 2003, eventually accounting for 17 percent of all American tomato sales and a
whopping 37 percent of all American tomato sales at retail. (Those long-lasting, easy-sli-
cing mature-greens continue to dominate food service, which still accounts for half of all
tomatoes sold.) Wholesale prices for domestic tomatoes, which had started to improve (or
at least stabilize) after the Dutch invasion, tumbled again, falling two out of three years
from 1999 to 2001 and losing a net 10 percent.
These two invasions threw American farmers into a tizzy. Fresh tomato production overall
has grown only 8 percent since 1990, and in Florida it has actually declined since the in-
troduction of hothouse tomatoes. Even in California, where high-quality vineripes resisted
competition somewhat better, growers were forced to rethink how they did business. Be-
cause of the extremely high costs of starting up greenhouses in the United States (the price
of establishing a greenhouse full of tomatoes runs to more than $1 million per acre, as op-
posed to around $3,000 for field tomatoes), the hothouse option has been pretty much off
the table. There are only four large growers of hothouse tomatoes in the United States, and
the industry as a whole has been racked by financial uncertainty.
In Florida, some growers shifted to other varieties. Maturegreens dropped from more
than 85 percent of the total harvest in 1997 to less than 75 percent in 2003. Tomatoes other
than maturegreens and vine-ripes went from almost nothing in 1997 to more than 15 per-
cent of the total harvest in 2003. Other growers adapted by simply picking their mature-
greens later. More than 10 percent of Florida's mature-greens were picked at the vine-ripe
stage in 2003. In California, the share of mature-greens declined from more than three
quarters to just over two thirds.
Some adventurous growers began exploring other tomato options, including heirloom
varieties that not long ago were found only in the gardens of passionate collectors who
saved seeds at the end of each season to share among themselves.
Heirloom tomatoes such as Brandywine, Cherokee Purple and Radiator Charlie's Mort-
gage Lifter were the results of hundreds of chance mutations and eons of human mi-
grations. They came from Italy and France, Spain and Poland, even Russia. They were
everything mainstream tomatoes were not - the kind of fruit that made their fans think
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