Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit

by Barry Estabrook

  Thanks to an arcane document called Federal Marketing Order 966, the Florida Tomato Committee has the ultimate say over the qualities a slicing tomato must have if it is to be exported from the southern part of the state. The Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937, which paved the way for the creation of Order 966, was passed to allow certain types of farmers to band together and control commodities without being subject to antitrust prosecution. At the time, the act made good sense. In an era when fruits and vegetables were grown by hundreds of small farmers who sold their crops to packinghouses, it assured that growers met consistent standards and that their crops were sold in an orderly manner. Today, when just a dozen large companies are responsible for the vast majority of Florida’s production and pack the tomatoes they have grown on their own farms, the financial logic behind such enforced standardization no longer applies. But the power of the marketing orders has in no way diminished. The Florida Tomato Committee decrees the exact size, color, texture, and shape of exported slicing tomatoes. It prevents the shipping of tomatoes that are lopsided, kidney shaped, elongated, angular, ridged, rough, or otherwise “deformed.” It delineates down to the millimeter the permissible depth and length of the “growth” cracks surrounding the scar where the fruit has been attached to the stem. It’s worth noting that nowhere do the regulations mention taste—it’s simply not a consideration. “Taste is subjective,” said Steve Jonas, a compliance officer at the committee. UglyRipes failed to meet many of these cosmetic standards. It did not matter that consumers were happy with them and obligingly paid nearly four times what they paid for “Florida rounds,” as the gassed mature green tomatoes are called.

  By taking on Procacci, the committee had picked a formidable and cagey foe. In his late seventies at the time, he looked like anybody’s happily retired Italian grandfather, and in fact a caricature of his smiling face appears on displays of a brand of his tomatoes called Papa Joe’s. For all his folksy demeanor, though, Procacci controlled one of the largest produce companies in the United States. Through various corporations, he had interests in Gargiulo, Inc., a major producer of Florida rounds, and also Ag-Mart, the large company responsible for premium niche-market products like Santa Sweets grape tomatoes and UglyRipes. Procacci had been in the business long enough to recognize a once-in-a-life-time marketing opportunity when he saw one, and he was eager to talk. When I met him in the parking lot of a Naples country club, which he and his brother had built on what was once a tomato field, he immediately plopped an inch-thick stack of photocopied press clippings on my lap. They all hewed closely to the same narrative line: A noble farmer grows a great-tasting crop and the Big Bad Tomato Committee won’t let him sell it. In reality, it was more like a family squabble among the Goliaths of Tomatoland.

  “It’s very simple,” Procacci explained, as we drove out to see a plot of UglyRipes he had planted to serve the in-state market, which the committee does not regulate. “The committee members are my competitors, and they are jealous. There’s a lot of jealousy in this business. They can’t have it, so they don’t want us to have it, either.”

  Whatever its motive, the Tomato Committee refused to budge. When negotiations reached a deadlock, Procacci took his case to the USDA, arguing that if the committee allowed producers to export cherry, grape, and plum tomatoes—none of which met its standards for shape—why prevent UglyRipes? The federal bureaucrats turned him down flatly. He brought in lawyers and hired the Washington, DC, lobbying firm that employed John R. Block, who had been President Reagan’s agriculture secretary, to take the UglyRipe message to the highest levels in the country.

  Procacci did not have to tell me when we arrived at his UglyRipe field. Against a windbreak of cypress trees, I saw several rows of staked vines being ministered to by a harvesting crew. Instead of grabbing the tomatoes off the vines with their bare hands as fast as they could, throwing them into buckets, and unceremoniously upending those into an open truck, these pickers wore gloves to prevent scratching the fruits with their fingernails. They eased the ugly tomatoes two deep into plastic flats. The bottoms of those fruits were blushing a light shade of pink. In a field of Florida rounds, any color other than green is considered seditious. Procacci told me that the first-class treatment of UglyRipes continued at the packing plant, where they were hand sorted (only four out of ten would be deemed worthy to wear an UglyRipe trademark sticker) and individually slipped into foam-mesh “socks” for their journey to grocery stores.

  “We can pack fifty or sixty truckloads of mature green tomatoes a day with the same amount of help as we need to pack two truckloads of UglyRipes,” said Procacci. “We have to charge a premium price for UglyRipes, but people are willing to pay it. My competitors have all this money invested to process the mature greens, and they want to protect that investment. But it is a diminishing market. More and more, people want flavor. Consumers are not going to eat fruits and vegetables if they don’t taste good, and they are going to eat more of them if they do taste good.”

  The fight between Procacci and the Tomato Committee played out in the U.S. Senate. Senators Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum, Republicans representing Pennsylvania, where Procacci Brothers Sales is based, introduced legislation that would specifically exempt UglyRipes from federal grading standards, provided that the agriculture department enrolled them in a special program that was designed to track genetically modified foods—which UglyRipes are not. Despite a twenty-four page appeal written by Reggie Brown on behalf of the Tomato Committee and a personal letter from then Florida Governor Jeb Bush, UglyRipes got their exemption in early 2007, days after Governor Bush left office.

  Procacci had scored two victories in one. I have eaten my share of $4-a-pound UglyRipes. None have packed anything close to the flavor power of a locally grown summer tomato. Some have been quite pleasant tasting, some so-so, and others not good at all. But no matter. The melee in the press did more to polish UglyRipe’s image than the most elaborate advertising campaign ever could have. With his exemption in hand, Procacci was able to cash in on years of pent-up consumer demand. The Tomato Committee had done him an enormous favor.

  Reggie Brown represents an industry that faces far greater problems than whether to allow one of its key players to sell homely tomatoes. Almost all American farmers have seen their share of the retail price of their product decline steadily as middlemen gobble up greater margins, but Florida tomato growers have been falling further behind than most. In the last three decades, the price we pay for fresh tomatoes in supermarkets has increased fourfold. During the same period, what farmers receive has only doubled. At the best of times, the business is a high stakes gamble. Growers spend millions of dollars to put in a crop and then have to hope that their plants are not hit by a hurricane or a freeze. Even after a bumper harvest, there is still no guarantee that a grower will be able to sell his crop profitably in a market that is often saturated with tomatoes. Unlike corn, soybeans, and wheat, which can be stored until prices improve, tomatoes are perishable and have to be sold soon after they are picked. “But sometimes you can make money,” Brown said.

  The summer of 2010, when I met with Brown, was not one of those times. That winter, growers in Florida had been hit by a freeze that destroyed 80 percent of the state’s crop. “For every hundred acres of tomatoes that you lost in the freeze, you could kiss $1 million goodbye—gone!” said Brown. Because they had no other choice, farmers replanted the fields, but the weather refused to cooperate. Florida had sixty days of below-normal temperatures in early 2010, and the new crop grew slowly. Tomatoes that typically ripen 90 days after being transplanted into the fields were struggling to produce a crop after 110 or 120 days.

  When the tomatoes did finally ripen, they landed in a market that was awash with overproduction from Mexican fields and Canadian greenhouses as well as the surge of replanted Florida tomatoes. Prices to handlers dropped as low as $3.50 for a twenty-five-pound box, less than it cost to pick and pack them. It wasn’t even worth
harvesting the fields. Tens of millions of dollars of tomatoes were left to rot.

  “It was a double-whammy,” said Brown. “We got hit when we lost the crop. Growers who had invested millions of dollars got nothing in return. And once there were no longer any Florida tomatoes on the market, prices soared to over twenty dollars a box. Mexicans weren’t affected by the freeze and they made a killing. Managers of quick-serve restaurants balked at the high prices and cut back on the amount of tomato-based items on their menus. They just walked away. So when our tomatoes finally ripened and the volume on the market returned to normal, we lost our shirts.”

  The freeze marked the second time in two years that the industry in Florida had to struggle through a disaster. In 2008 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration implicated Florida tomatoes in a massive salmonella outbreak. At the time, Florida had $40 million worth of tomatoes picked and ready for shipping. Consumers abruptly stopped buying, and fast food chains cancelled orders. It turned out to be a false alarm. Food safety inspectors determined that the outbreak originated in jalapeños from Mexico. After six weeks of investigation, the Food and Drug Administration completely exonerated Florida tomatoes, but it was too late for producers who had lost an estimated $100 million in sales.

  For some of their financial difficulties, Florida farmers have only themselves to blame. The infrastructure of the biggest sector of the industry is based on a technology that dates back to a simpler time when supermarket produce sections offered one type of slicing tomato, usually sold three-in-a-row in cellophane-wrapped cartons. During the winter, they were most likely grown in Florida. Today’s consumers demand variety. In the winter, my small town’s Shaw’s grocery store, which is a produce desert compared to larger, more urbane supermarkets, features a four-tiered display offering ten different varieties of fresh tomatoes. In addition to Florida rounds, I can buy cherry, grape, plum, on-the-vine-cluster, hydroponic, and organic tomatoes. Those tomatoes journey from greenhouses in Vermont and Canada and fields in Florida and Mexico—but mostly Mexico.

  Although it has not officially been declared, a tomato war has raged for the past two decades between Florida and Mexico. Florida is losing. When it started, Mexican imports accounted for about one-fifth of the U.S. tomato consumption. That figure has since risen to one-third. The North American Free Trade Agreement, which came into force in 1994, certainly helped Mexico. Almost immediately after the treaty was enacted, American growers claimed that Mexico was dumping tomatoes on the market at prices below what they cost to produce. Rather than risk tariffs or other sanctions, Mexico agreed to a settlement that established a minimum value at which it would offer tomatoes for sale to this country. But Mexico still had several key advantages over Florida, among them better weather, better soils, and lower wages. But the Mexicans’ far-sighted business strategies also played a role. In the early 1990s, Mexican growers pioneered new production techniques. Instead of producing “gassed green” tomatoes, they opted to plant newly developed “extended shelf life” varieties bred by Israeli horticulturists that could be allowed to ripen on the vine and still survive shipment to distant markets, depriving Florida growers of their geographical advantage. The Mexicans also adopted greenhouse culture, which has helped increase their share of the fresh tomato market. The profits reaped during the 2010 freeze left Mexican farmers flush with capital to invest in expansion at a time when Florida growers were just hoping to hang on long enough to plant another season’s crops. “They made enough during that freeze to keep their foot on our neck for a decade,” Brown said.

  While it is true that Florida’s tomato production is dominated by large agribusinesses, they are mostly family held, private companies that lack the financial leverage of most corporations. They are tiny compared with their fast food, supermarket, and institutional food-service customers. They are also dwarfed by their suppliers, who are multinational corporations such as Monsanto, DuPont, and Bayer CropScience. Almost everything a tomato farmer buys to raise a crop is petroleum based—chemical fertilizers, pesticides, plastic row covers, plastic bins, and fuel for tractors and trucks—and prices rise in lockstep with a barrel of oil. Little wonder that bankers are none too eager to lend money against a future harvest. Owners have to dig into their own bank accounts to get through lean years. And an increasing number are no longer willing or able to do that. Twenty years ago, there were about three hundred commercial tomato farms in the state. Currently there are fewer than seventy-five, and the number continues to shrink. “If Americans want imported food, they’ll be dependent on imported food before they know it, because we’ll be broke and gone,” said Brown.

  Florida tomatoes also face pressure from greenhouse and hydroponic producers located in Canada and the United States as well as Mexico. “The greenhouse market has just exploded in the last decade. There have been fascinating volume shifts,” said Brown, who holds their products in the same disdain that foodies reserve for Florida’s mature greens. “Our tomatoes are not a manufactured product, as opposed to what is grown in the greenhouse industry. They have a standard set of plant genetics, a standard set of environmental conditions, and they squirt them out like widgets. That’s why the entire retail shelf is totally dominated by greenhouse tomatoes. The consumer perceives them to be of great value because they are beautiful and on the vine and they smell like tomatoes, but that’s just a gimmick. If all a tomato has is water, what’s it going to taste like? Maybe we should get scratch-and-sniff stickers for our field-grown tomatoes.”

  Regardless of what they do to burnish their image, Florida tomato growers just can’t get no respect, in Brown’s view. “It’s frustrating,” he said. “The Coalition of Immokalee Workers needs a bogeyman. We’re it. And once an accusation is hurled in the media, it never goes away and rarely gets fact-checked. It just gets repeated, over and over again. When people are convinced that we’re the monsters that we’ve been painted to be, you don’t change their minds. Doing good things and being good citizens and business people does not make the papers. We’ve tried to tell our story, but reporters are not interested. Yelling Fire! sells.”

  Brown said that Florida farmers got almost no press coverage when they endowed the Farmworker Community Support Foundation, which in 2010 donated $160,000 for improved health care and early childhood education programs in South Florida. Growers have been longtime supporters of the Redlands Christian Migrant Association, which operates daycare centers, preschools, and charter schools throughout rural Florida. They funded an AIDs education program for male migrant workers. They backed a campaign to provide dental care for pregnant farmworker mothers. Tomato money provides scholarships for Immokalee high school graduates to continue their education. Exchange members have underwritten a scholarship at the University of South Florida’s College of Education. In the 2008–2009 crop year, the Tomato Committee donated nearly $300,000 to fund university research projects.

  The industry was also a pioneer in food safety, Brown said. “When we voluntarily started down that road, all my friends in the produce association business said that we were nuts. ‘Just stonewall the regulators,’ they said. We said that the right thing to do was figure out how we could do things better to try to lessen the chances of disease outbreaks caused by tomatoes. We worked with the Food and Drug Administration, and we came to the party long before the leafy-greens people came. We wanted to do whatever we could to prevent a major foodborne-illness crisis.”

  To uncover labor abuses in the fields, the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association established a group called Socially Accountable Farm Employers (SAFE) in 2005. Reggie Brown is on the board of directors and is listed as the organization’s contact person. The nonprofit organization was established to provide independent auditing to make sure that certified farms used fair and legal employment practices and to make sure the fields were “free from hazard and violence.” These were some of the steps the coalition’s Campaign for Fair Food was demanding farmers take, but from the outset there were complaints
that SAFE was a case of the industry fox guarding the henhouse if there ever was one. No one representing Florida migrant workers sat on the SAFE board, although three of the five members headed organizations that had received generous financial support from tomato growers and other farmers. The skeptics’ position was vindicated in 2007, when the SAFE auditor declared that the fields of Immokalee were slavery free only days before the high-profile Navarrete case came to light, and further vindicated a year later when court proceedings revealed that Navarrete slaves had worked on farms controlled by two SAFE-certified companies.

  Brown insisted that Florida tomato farmers abhorred slavery as much as anybody. “But there’s slavery in other places, too, in the United States. You go to any city where you have nail parlors or Chinese restaurants, and you’re going to be able to find human trafficking.” As for the housing conditions in Immokalee, he agreed they were an embarrassment to the industry but pointed out that the farmers did not own the decrepit Immokalee trailers. In other areas where they did provide housing for their workers, he noted, the accommodations were government regulated and inspected by the health department.

  Tomato growers, he claimed, complied with the same labor laws as other employers. “We pay the same wage that McDonald’s and Burger King pay in their shops to the people that work the counter. It’s minimum wage. That’s the law of the land. But because we have a seasonal business, our employees may not work for us twelve months a year, but in the period they are working for us, they’re making minimum wage.” People who accuse the tomato growers of not paying the workers enough to live off of, he said, are only looking at one slice of a migrant’s income stream. “That worker might be employed by eight or ten different companies during the course of twelve months. He could be in North Carolina in the summer picking tomatoes and New York State picking apples in the fall before he comes back here.”