Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit

by Barry Estabrook

  The quarters reminded me of the on-campus apartment where my college-age daughter lived with four friends, only the workers’ was more spacious and cleaner. At $175 per person a month including all utilities, the bachelor accommodations were a steal compared to the trailers I’d seen in Immokalee. And no one complained about the single guys. “We get more complaints about teenaged kids of married couples,” Kirk said.

  When designing the village, Kirk sat down with prospective residents and asked them what features they wanted to see in their dwellings. Women wanted to have hook-ups for washers and dryers, plenty of storage space, and large kitchen windows so they could keep an eye on their kids playing in the yard while they prepared meals. Men wanted parking places installed tight up in front of the houses to deter anyone who might want to vandalize or steal their vehicles—in many cases the only asset the family possessed. Everyone wanted to save money on electricity bills, so houses included fans in every room and specially designed windows to ventilate homes, limiting the need to run expensive air conditioners. A gated entrance and night-time security were also on the workers’ wish list.

  In return, Kirk and the board, which included residents, had a few demands of their own. “We practice tough love,” he said. Some might say it’s paternalistic or downright authoritarian. But it works, Kirk insists. Quiet must prevail after 11:00 in the evening. Single men can have no overnight guests. Vehicles must be parked in designated places. No pets are allowed. No do-it-yourself paint jobs or landscaping projects are permitted. There are no clotheslines, a rule Kirk explained by saying that aesthetics are as important as any other issue to maintaining a sense of pride in the community. The final rule is you have to pay your rent, which is capped at one-third of a family’s income. Government subsidies make up the rest, if necessary. “We don’t evict people who are unable to pay. We evict them for refusal to pay,” said Kirk. “If rent is affordable to people, it becomes a priority for them.”

  Early on, Kirk faced some competition for funding from farmers who wanted to build housing for their workers on their own land. Recalling incidents of being run off property by county sheriffs back in his student days when he was trying to interview the children of North Carolina farmworkers, Kirk adamantly opposed employer-built housing. “I don’t want them in control,” he said. “If you live down some dirt road where there’s an armed security guard to keep people out, problems can develop. Here, if Greg Schell’s paralegal wants to come down and meet with you, there’s an office set aside. The opportunity for involuntary servitude in this community is pretty slim. There is always someone to reach out to.”

  In the 1990s, Kirk, a self-professed workaholic, spent many nights at his desk until ten o’clock at night, a muted TV in one corner of his office tuned to CNN providing a link to the outside world. Equal parts zealous missionary for the oppressed and hard-driving real estate tycoon, Kirk had no family, few outside interests, and a very neglected girlfriend. His $50-million project was up and running. The creative, challenging part had been successfully completed, and suddenly Kirk found himself growing antsy. He went to his board of directors, which consisted entirely of local people whose interests were focused on county politics, and spelled the situation out. It was fine with him if they just wanted to run Everglades Farmworker Village. “I told them, if that’s the case, you need a property manager.” That job was not intellectually challenging enough for him. On the other hand, he said, the group could take what they had learned in building the village and try to spread affordable housing to farmworkers statewide. “The situation is very, very bad upstate,” he explained, saying that if they wanted to expand, he was their man. They told him that they were prepared to take the next steps.

  Over the ensuing decade, an umbrella organization called Rural Neighborhoods, with Kirk as its president, built developments in Immokalee, LaBelle, and Okeechobee in the southern part of the state, in Winter Haven in the center, in Ruskin in the west, and Fort Pierce in the east. With low-interest loans from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and through the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit that encourages private investors to make equity investments in affordable housing projects, Rural Neighborhoods spent more than $200 million to build thirteen hundred units that house more than forty-five hundred tenants, mostly farmworkers. It was an astonishing accomplishment. Kirk credits his knowledge of how governmental agencies work and his acumen about what politicians and officials need for his ability to get his projects funded. A conservative governor taking heat for working conditions in Florida fields might be eager to allot housing funding to migrant housing as a goodwill gesture. “We let them co-opt us; and we co-opt them,” said Kirk.

  Other affordable housing advocates have criticized Kirk for the high quality of his housing. “Why spend $100,000 per unit for architect-designed cement block and stucco structures when you can get a manufactured home for $60,000?” they complain. Kirk is utterly unrepentant. Rural Neighborhoods has built the best apartments available, period, in places like Immokalee, LaBelle, and Okeechobee, he said. “We’ve changed the perception of farmworker housing. I would be happy to live in any of our developments.”

  There is also an element of canniness in building attractive communities that look nothing like stereotypical farmworker housing. Given their propensity for being blasted into kindling with each passing hurricane, manufactured homes (glorified trailers, in the view of many) have an unsavory reputation in Florida. “Yeah, maybe we could house more people for less money in the short run,” said Kirk. “But the political reality is that quality housing sells better to local lawmakers.” It is also a financial as well as a political reality. If a lender ever had to foreclose on a Rural Neighborhoods’ property, he could sell it to a landlord who could fill it with eager renters, not marginalized farmworkers, which makes it more likely that a bank will extend credit to Kirk.

  Unlike most heads of charitable organizations, Kirk lives with the possibility of bankruptcy. Rural Neighborhoods may borrow at low interest rates through government programs, but the money it invests has to be paid back like any mortgage. Rents in its developments are set at a level that allows Rural Neighborhoods to break even, but higher than expected vacancy rates can quickly turn break-even budgeting into a losing proposition. “We are a risk-taking organization,” Kirk said. “We are doing multimillion-dollar deals. We guarantee loans. We could fail. But my view is that Bob Dylan thing, ‘He not busy being born is busy dying.’”

  Just prior to my visiting him in 2010, Kirk did something completely out of character: He took off three days in a row. On the previous weekend, the fifty-five-year-old lifelong bachelor had gotten married for the first time. But having entered into that state hadn’t done much to lessen his pace. He had 281 new units—$35 million worth—under various stages of construction and scheduled for occupancy within a year, all of which had to be paid for. The recession was making it tough even for providers of homes for the lowest of the low. Plus, Kirk was concerned that the immigration crackdown and resulting fear among migrants might suddenly leave him with unexpected vacancy rates. But none of those worries were slowing him down. “There’s need out there,” he said. “And if no one else is going to fill it, I have to step into the void.” He shrugged philosophically and added, “And even if we fail, those new units will still be there.”

  If Kirk is wistful about anything after three decades as a farmworkers’ advocate, it’s that there’s still a need for people like him. “We set out trying to change agriculture,” he said. “People like Barbara Mainster and I have changed conditions for some workers, but we haven’t changed agriculture.”

  TOMATOMAN

  It was a little after four o’clock in the morning when a tractor trailer careened into our lane. Tim Stark and I were in his pickup truck on I-78, about an hour and a half west of our destination, Greenmarket Union Square in New York City. In the back, we had five hundred pounds of vine-ripened tomatoes. Somewhere ahead of us in the darkness, Stark’s
other, larger truck, a box truck, lumbered along carrying an additional thirty-five hundred pounds. With any luck, most of those tomatoes would be sold that day to customers at Greenmarket as well as to a couple of dozen of the top restaurants in Manhattan and some specialty produce distributors. But first, we had to survive the journey into the city from Stark’s farm in rural eastern Pennsylvania.

  “You always have to watch out for the swerving trucks at this time of the morning,” Stark observed casually, as the one that had nearly cut us off veered back into its own lane and then swayed onto the shoulder. Seizing the moment, he gunned his engine, saying, “You want to pass them as fast as you can. And pray.”

  I was riding shotgun beside Stark that morning in an attempt to understand how he has succeeded where hundreds of like-minded idealists have failed. In the mid-1990s, the Princeton University graduate abandoned his city-bound lifestyle and the consultant’s job that provided an income while he tried to break into the business of being a professional writer. He dreamed of earning a livelihood by growing and selling tomatoes from a rocky few acres of marginal land on a hillside behind his mother’s house. Although he had gardened there in the past, he had zero experience as a farmer. “I just wanted to make a living where I grew up,” he said.

  Stark, who has been called “the Titan of Tomatoes” by New York magazine, though most people know him as simply “the Tomatoman,” sells his famously delicious tomatoes in the New York City area, avoids agricultural chemicals, and provides his staff with free housing, livable wages, and benefits. Eckerton Hill Farm, as his company is called, shows that with clever marketing and a hell of a lot of work, there is still a place for small farms that grow great-tasting tomatoes for regional markets in a manner that is sustainable both for the environment and for the people who work the land. Given the vulnerability of Florida’s industrial tomato agribusinesses to competition from Mexico and the wild price swings in the commodity market, it could be argued that Eckerton provides a more viable business model for commercial tomato growers, a model that is sustainable in more ways than one.

  Success, however, did not come easily. “I took a long strange route to get here,” he said. “For the first ten years, I had my head down in the mud trying to make this thing work. It was hard on my marriage and hard on my family.” Instead of a bucolic return to his rural roots, Stark found himself embroiled in a decade of nonstop crisis management, a story he relates in his 2008 memoir, Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer.

  Eckerton was an accidental farm. It came into being when Stark’s landlord summarily evicted three thousand tomato seedlings—sixty different varieties—that Stark, seduced by the inexpensive nonhybrid heirloom offerings from other gardeners in the annual catalog of the Seed Savers Exchange, had too ambitiously grown on the roof of a Brooklyn brownstone in anticipation of moving them gradually to his mother’s property. He was forced to load his decrepit Toyota pickup truck and convince four of his professional urban friends that transplanting tomatoes with trowels into two acres of rocky terrain for no pay would be a great way to spend a pleasant spring weekend.

  That first summer was one of the few times the elements conspired to help Stark’s nascent farm. Rains came in gentle, weekly intervals, delivering just the right amount of moisture. “I was really, really lucky,” Stark told an NPR interviewer. “If we’d had a dry year that first year, because I had no irrigation, I wouldn’t be here. I would be back in Brooklyn thinking up my next scheme.” Stark, then thirty-three years old, spent the early part of the season frenetically pulling the weeds—quack grass, purslane, wild mustard, Canadian thistle, wild carrot, and crabgrass—that also benefited from the perfect growing conditions, while he was falling further and further behind.

  Despite competition from the weeds, Stark’s crop thrived, ripening before other area farmers’ did. The timing couldn’t have been better. It was that period of the year when locals were salivating for the first real summer tomato. Stark was certain they would be willing to pay premium prices. With visions of the many uses to which he would put his profits (the first being basic survival), Stark began to harvest his misshapen, multicolored cornucopia—heirlooms whose names say it all: Black Krim, Black Seaman, Casady’s Folly, Vintage Wine, Speckled Roman, Pink Lady, Purple Calabash, Extra Eros Zlatolaska, Aunt Ruby’s German Green, Cherokee Purple, Green Zebras, Yellow Brandywine, White Wonder, Sungold, Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter. Unfortunately, buyers at the local produce auction had a clear preference for smooth, round, red beefsteak tomatoes, a position similar to the stance of the Florida Tomato Committee. They wouldn’t so much as bid on Stark’s motley harvest until the auctioneer dropped the price to less than what it cost Stark to grow and pack them.

  The only hope for Eckerton lay in New York’s Union Square farmers’ market, one of more than fifty markets operated throughout the city as part of the Greenmarket program. Years of living in the city had convinced Stark that the food-savvy citizens of Gotham would be eager to embrace his off-beat harvest. He tossed a meager fifteen pounds of tomatoes into his pickup and made his first two-and-a-half-hour predawn run into town on I-78. He set up his table, covered it in tomato-themed fabric that his then girlfriend and now wife, Jill, had bought, and crossed his fingers. A woman wearing the tight-eyed scowl of a skeptical New Yorker approached and began poking and squeezing his blemished offerings. She brusquely informed him that a young man tending another stall in the market had tried to convince her that his tomatoes were field grown. “I took one look at them and said, ‘Yeah, I just fell off the turnip truck myself,’” Stark wrote in his memoir. The woman bought some of Stark’s tomatoes and asked if he would have any the following week. He assured her he would, but seven rain-soaked days later, he could harvest only twenty pounds to bring into the city, barely enough to fill a single peck basket. Customers descended on the basket like “a single many-tentacled organism,” Stark wrote.

  When the rain finally stopped, Stark’s tomatoes began to ripen faster than he could pick them. The night before market, he’d load his truck until one o’clock in the morning, filling the bed and then the cab with flats, leaving just enough space to slide in behind the wheel. When he arrived at market, customers bought at such a pace that he often didn’t have time to set up his tables with Jill’s pretty tablecloths. Shoppers couldn’t get enough of his heirlooms, the uglier, more cracked, and more beaten up, the better. He sold out every time he went to town, and Eckerton limped along—barely. The venerable pickup truck expired under a load of tomatoes, and Stark had to rent a U-Haul, stowing excess tomatoes in his mother’s Subaru station wagon, which Jill drove into town.

  Stark still had years of twenty-hour workdays ahead of him, picking and weeding when the sun shone, packing by night, and heading into New York before dawn after a few stolen hours of sleep. It was a good thing that he possessed inexhaustible stores of stamina, developed in part by having undertaken epic bicycle trips to the West Coast, to a friend’s wedding in Detroit, and across the Alps. On the farm in those early years, he dealt with drought, frosts, flooding rains, legal actions by angry neighbors, voracious tomato worms, grasshoppers, deer, groundhogs, supercharged weeds, malfunctioning machines, and a revolving cast of workers who would stay just long enough to realize that farm labor was hard, hot work and then disappear at the very moment when Stark needed all the help he could get. Often at the end of a season, he promised himself that it would be the last. But a few months later, with the first lengthening days of spring, Stark inevitably found himself in his greenhouse putting tomato seeds into potting mix. “I became neurotic,” he said. “You would, too, if you had to make a living this way. Dry spells, bugs, freezes, even a single rainy Saturday when no one comes to market cost me money I didn’t have.” Stark mentally punished himself for months after trapping and killing a woodchuck that was chomping down his seedlings. He took to setting his alarm clock for midnight and four o’clock in the morning so he could check that mice and voles hadn�
�t gnawed tiny holes in his irrigation hoses. When sleep came, it was interrupted by vivid dreams of snow falling in thick flakes on his unprotected crops. He’d wake with a start, only to realize that it was a warm summer night. But when he tried to go back to sleep, he would start fretting about losing his crops to late blight—a very real threat that he could do little about.

  A big breakthrough came when he hired a crew of experienced Mexican immigrant workers, veterans of agribusiness operations in California and Florida who had moved to Pennsylvania and settled into the Hispanic community in nearby Reading. Although his new employees found his methods crude, amateurish, and borderline amusing (watering with hand-carried milk jugs? manually pulling weeds? not spraying pesticides?), they were dependable and brought a necessary stability to the Eckerton workforce. Not only could they pace themselves to put in long days in the humid fields, they repaired machines that broke down without coming to Stark and were skilled handymen, able to perform all the chores a small farm demands. Days became less frenetic. Rented U-Hauls became things of the past when Stark purchased a genuine refrigerated produce truck (albeit one with 191,000 miles on it and a refrigeration unit that blew warm air) and painted tomatoes on it above the farm’s slogan: “Home of the Tomato People.” He was able to rent an additional patch of land with a house that he and Jill moved into. Then, two years ago, he finally became a landowner after purchasing a fifty-eight-acre farm. Today, Eckerton employs fifteen workers with a payroll that can top $12,000 a week during peak times of the season. It is home to thirty thousand tomato plants that Stark starts in his own new greenhouse. He and Jill and their two middle-school-age daughters live in a neat cape in Kutztown, a college town about fifteen minutes from his farm. “As long as I have tomatoes, there’s money to be made,” he said. “But I still get nervous when tomatoes aren’t coming in. Early in the season when we’re just planting and staking, money is pouring out of this place.”