Predicting the future has never been possible, but that doesn’t stop lots of people from trying. Twenty years ago, predictions about what things would look like as climate change progressed were very cut and dry. One of the consequences would be reduced yields of food crops and thus, less food for humanity.
Fast forward two decades and the realities have become more nuanced. Yes, the world is getting hotter overall, but that doesn’t mean every day is hot everyplace around the world. Climate change is changing the weather in many different ways, and its effects on our food supply are different for different crops in different regions. Crops that need consistently cooler weather, such as coffee, are being adversely impacted — as are those that rely on cold winters, such as cherries.
One crop that is experiencing climate change differently is Tomatoes. As the world warms overall, tomatoes can be grown commercially in more places, over a longer season. Climate change is actually causing nighttime temperatures to rise faster than daytime ones. Tomatoes produce more fruit when the nights are warm.
That’s not to say that tomato crops in all locations are producing higher yields. Freak rainstorms during harvest, such as the one we had here in September 2022 or the one in Fresno last week, can wipe out a year’s tomato crop entirely. Tomatoes have little tolerance for getting wet when they are ripe. Extreme heat at the wrong time in the growing season can also cause pollination failure, reducing the yield. And every few years, a new disease shows up that impacts production — many of which are transported by insects whose populations are increasing thanks to the overall warmer weather in both summer and winter.
But worldwide, almost every year more tomatoes are grown on fewer acres of land than the previous year. Another big factor is the continuous development of new, improved varieties with better tolerance for heat, diseases, and insects. Better farming practices also help: in the last twenty years the development and improvement of drip irrigation has led to much higher yields while also reducing the amount of water required.
If you are asking right now, “If tomato production is going up, why aren’t prices I pay for tomatoes going down?” The vast majority of the world’s crop is grown for canning or sauce. Costs for processing, advertising, distribution and everything else that happens after harvest continue to rise. Meanwhile, the price paid to farmers this year is down. And for fresh market tomatoes like those in your CSA boxes today, the yield makes little difference to the end price paid by consumers. The costs to hand-harvest and pack the tomatoes continues to increase every year.
Here at Terra Firma, climate change has lengthened the season in which growing tomatoes is technically possible. We now plant them earlier in the Spring than we used to, and start harvest earlier in the summer. But extending our harvest in the Fall has been more difficult, thanks to insect and disease pressure that tends to build the longer it stays warm and dry — as well as extreme heat in the summer that can affect pollination. Some years we are able to harvest tomatoes well into October; other years the plants produce little or no fruit, shut down or the fruit becomes unmarketable due to disease. This is especially true of heirloom and artisan varieties, which have little or no resistance to the new plant diseases.
Recently, plant breeders have been releasing a raft of new varieties of fresh market tomatoes with a combination of promising traits to address these problems: better heat tolerance during pollination and more disease resistance. This year we are growing three of these varieties in a late planting, and they have just started ripening. You’ll see them in boxes today. They are not heirlooms or artisan-types — almost the opposite, in fact. They are so-called “Slicer” types: big, blocky beefsteaks that we don’t normally grow. But we are very pleased with their flavor and texture, and hope you will be as well.
The timing of the arrival of these new-to-us tomatoes is impeccable. Last week our other fields, which had been producing nicely well into September, gave up the ghost completely. We went from harvesting a thousand pounds of fruit or more each week to a fraction of that. Now, we’re looking at a Tomato season that extends well into October. We won’t know for sure whether or not these varieties will perform the same every year until we’ve grown them a few more times. It may just be a result of the beautiful summer weather we had. But we will certainly repeat the experiment again next year.
Thanks,
Pablito