Oh...by the way, what goes on between five and six? ;)
Now grannie, you wouldn't want me to kiss and tell, would you?
Florida growers abandon 60 million pounds of tomatoes on the vine
CATHERINE WILSON
Associated Press
HOMESTEAD, Fla. - A fall tomato shortage has turned into a glut that Florida growers say has forced them to abandon 60 million pounds on the vine in the last two weeks, prompting pledges of help Tuesday from the state.
Florida Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson flew down from Tallahassee to see the problem for himself, meet with growers and announce a national marketing campaign intended to jump start demand for a product priced as high as $3.99 a pound since early November. Growers are getting 12 cents a pound.
"This is by far the worst I've ever seen," said 20-year grower Kern Carpenter, who hosted Bronson. He has 330 acres of tomatoes waiting to see their next harvesting crew.
The combination of grudgingly slow retail price declines following the shortage and rock-bottom prices paid to growers since Thanksgiving have left tons of fresh tomatoes unpicked from this farm community south of Miami to the Tampa Bay area. Growers have no nearby canneries to turn to.
"This is like a wake without a scheduled date for the burial," former grower Luis Rodriguez, Florida Farmers Inc.'s trade adviser, said as he stood beside a field full of tomatoes but no pickers. "The consumer is getting gouged, and the farmer is leaving his crop in the field."
Supermarket shoppers have turned away from the sticker shock, and outlets from luxury resorts to fast-food restaurants are still telling customers that they're out of tomatoes, farm officials say. The glut has idled an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 farmworkers plus hundreds of packinghouse employees in Florida, which normally supplies 80 percent of the winter tomato crop.
"I was amazed," Bronson exclaimed, holding up a hefty clump of ripening tomatoes weighing about 5 pounds. "We want to break this market loose, let people across the country know."
His department's marketing division is rolling out a program called Storming Across America, a name playing in part on last year's hurricane season. After the skies cleared, the tomato market still looked bad because of a nagging pest in Mexico and a bruised California harvest.
"In our world, it either sells or smells. It smells pretty bad right now," said Nelson Mongiovi, the state's agriculture marketing director. "We're not walking in with a messianic solution, but we do have some ideas."
The state is offering incentives to retailers to put tomatoes in their printed circulars, a surefire sales booster. The logic is that supermarket sales will clear the supply pipeline and allow harvesting to resume.
Jacksonville-based Winn-Dixie, which operates 1,070 grocery stores in Florida and 11 other states, hasn't heard about the marketing push but will be offering large fresh tomatoes for 79 cents a pound in fliers going out Wednesday, said company spokeswoman Kathy Lussier.
Florida growers have voluntarily raised the bar on tomato quality heading to market to give some growers a chance, and an arctic chill touching South Florida is acting as a natural refrigerator to retard ripening. But competition is about to resume from Mexican growers.
Wholesalers are paying $4 to $5 per 25-pound box, but growers must pay $4 a box to pick and pack their crop and have a break-even price of $8 a box.
"Now that we are coming in with some volume, the demand has gone to nothing," said Paul DiMare, a grower and packer since the early 1960s. "We never picked tomatoes below $5 (a box) in all the years I've been here."