I’ve been reading a whole lot about tomatoes(buttondown.email) |
I’ve been reading a whole lot about tomatoes(buttondown.email) |
Interesting fact about tomatoes: if you grow tomatoes for multiple years on the same field your yields will drop to zero due to fusarium fungus destroying the crop. We rotate one year tomatoes with one strand of alfalfa, which lasts 3-5 years and regenerates nitrogen into the soil.
The seedlings are grown in labs and then sold to the greenhouses. And while it is not really organic food, most greenhouses don't use chemicals to keep pests and diseases out. A lot of times different kind if insects are used for this. So it is as bio as it gets.
But you can argue about the taste. While they are as healthy as soil grown tomatoes I think they taste watery.
So for a given plot you do tomatoes for one year every 4-6 years, do I understand correctly?
Does it matter so much what other crop you plant, in terms of reducing the fungus? Alfalfa is just a good choice for its nitrogen fixing? Could you leave it fallow for example? (just trying to get ideas for my garden)
You are correct on the number of years between plantings, but really only 2-3 years off are needed to clear the fungus. Alfalfa just lasts longer.
As another comment mentions, some other common crops have the same disease risk, so avoid potatoes and eggplants too many consecutive years.
Fallowing it an option, but a little nitrogen for a home garden shouldn’t be too prohibitive. When you have a lot of acres it can be a meaningful cost saving measure but it’s not huge.
There are many other plants in the same family (they have worldwide distribution), but a lot of them are poisonous.
Even more fun: It's possible to graft plants of different species within the family, so you can create a plant that grows both potatoes and tomatoes.
I would love to hear more about your lifestyle, please! Is this for work, or for pleasure?
Day-to-day operations are handled by a general manager that is brilliant. My brother is also out there daily working on his distillery and helping to run things. I work mostly on IT and then also handle special projects, especially financial ones.
Life is pretty good to have a large piece of land in CA. Tree nuts have been absurdly lucrative for the past two decades and it has pushed the land values up a lot. It’s put me in the interesting situation of being able to focus most of my energy into equity investing to try and balance my portfolio against the farm holdings. I do, however, attach a strong emotional connection to the land such that when asked what group I most strongly identify with, it is always “Central California Farmers.”
I find the tomatoes in US stores bland and watery. They must be collected when green and ripe on the truck or in the store. I even grew my own tomatoes here from organic seeds and they ended up being just mildly better tasting than store-bought tomatoes. What happened to the tomatoes in the US?
Can someone demystify this for me: where are all the good US tomatoes at?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato#Nutrition
And are 95% water.
They just taste great due to the umami flavour.
Is there any way to grow nutritious food that isn't just transporting water everywhere?
https://tools.myfooddata.com/nutrient-ranking-tool/Water/Veg...
I guess this is the end result of selecting for 'yield' which is basically just weight...
I strongly believe that the best way to help people in other places very different from our own is to open source the best of what we know. Everything we rely on. For example instead of buying refrigerated trucks from an expensive European suppler (let's suppose) they could clone the designs and manufacture refrigeration more cheaply. Such an effort would take time but if we shared the plans for everything we rely on, someone could make it cheaper and offer it to those with less income. A free market of manufacturers would compete based on who can manufacture goods the cheapest, rather than who can both design them and manufacture them.
Maybe refrigeration is already generic enough that this particular item would not get cheaper, but in general if everything was open source then people in places like this would be more able to manufacture what they really need even if they lack certain technical skills required to design the things. And with trade normalization required by the WTO, many of these companies cannot clone certain useful goods due to patent restrictions.
We are so wealthy in the USA and yet we do not often consider sharing our wealth in this way with every other person sharing this time with us.
Also: processing tomatoes and tomatoes eaten out of the hand are two diff markets. Everything from genetics to harvest to inputs is different.
> I know what you might be thinking: is it even sanitary to transport tomatoes that close to gasoline? But that is the least of the issues plaguing these transporters, the biggest one is that they lose about 12% of the tomatoes in a two-day trip.
This doesn't sound safe :(
There's one study hypothesizing that glycoalkaloids can increase/aggravate intestinal permeability (which is a real thing), but this study only looked at mice [1]. The hypothesis has not been rigorously tested in any serious clinical study on humans.
But it is a trade-off. Apparently I got "tomatoes taste good" in return for my "cilantro tastes toxic."
>Cold storage is widely used to extend shelf-life of agriculture products. For tomato, this handling results in reduced flavor quality. Our work provides major insights into the effects of chilling on consumer liking, the flavor metabolome and transcriptome, as well as DNA methylation status.
My research (napkin math) suggested that it would be doable at $8-10/lb, which is certainly high, but probably low enough to attract connoisseurs, high-end restaurants, and regular folks who like to treat themselves. It would be especially valuable during the winter, when you just can't get a proper tomato.
https://www.seriouseats.com/why-you-should-refrigerate-tomat...
We are now building a commercial-scale facility in the US which will produce 50,000kg of fresh produce daily. And then we will scale from there.
Our goal is to accelerate the deployment of new greenhouses around the world to increase the availability of healthy locally-grown food and to secure our food system for the future.
Find out more about our mission: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDJ_QdUaap4
If you want to find out more about us or generally want to geek out on tommies then give me (founder) a shout: david@optimal.ag
The cultivar of tomato determines how "stiff" it is, and somewhat how long until ripe. A different cultivar might result in a slight change in percentage damaged.
Heat ruining the crop? But tomatoes love heat. I know rot can set in much quicker as the tomato matures, if rot or nutrient deficiency was already an issue; for pristine 'maters, they can sit around for weeks at room temperature with no issue. Perhaps part of the issue is tomato health, and another part is ventilation / passive temperature regulation. So maybe someone could construct a cheap filler material that promotes airflow and put between the baskets.
The basket design could be altered to allow tighter packing of baskets. Currently they are circular, and so don't fit very tightly against the truck or each other. If they can be packed tighter, the baskets will help reinforce each other and prevent deflection. Square baskets may be best. There are many different designs for square woven baskets. In addition they can be made smaller which will provide more reinforcement material per pound tomato (this may increase the basket price somewhat but also reduce loss, making it a net gain).
I once read somewhere that many commercial tomato varieties have lost their flavor because they have only been selected for appearance (red/flawless). But I don't know if that is true.
Luckily I found that here in Europe, recently, there have been very flavorful cherry tomatoes in the grocery stores again, but they cost between 6 to 7 euro/kilo (the watery ones around half the price.)
In selecting delicious cherry tomatoes, I observed two criteria:
1) they'll have a somewhat rough surface, rather than smooth - like little particles
2) they'll often have little yellow dots at the top around the stem
As is already suggested, the good US tomatoes and fruit in general can be found at farmer's markets, local farms, and/or local grocery stores that have relationships with local farmers. Also, a lot of smaller local farms that grow tastier veggies tend to supply to locally sourced farm-to-table type restaurants directly instead of selling them in stores,
My parents get their tomatoes from a local hydroponics farm that only sells straight from the farm (in the middle of nowhere), and in bulk to local restaurants.
At the farmer's market. Look for heirloom tomatoes. I get them during the summer from either the farmer's market or a food cooperative in the Seattle area (PCC). Heirloom tomatoes are the only tomatoes I tasted on this continent that are on par with the tomatoes my parents grow in their garden in Europe.
The only good tomatoes I've had in the US come from friends' gardens.
So does this mean we should be trucking tomatoes long distance? Not at all. People should eat whatever fresh produce grows locally, and supplement with canned or fermented foods that capture the benefits of faraway and out-of-season crops without the downside of wastage and shelf-life optimization.
Then just get your staples (grains, potatoes, dairy products), plus fruits which require specialised agriculture, via the commercial food system.
If I had a house, instead of an apartment, I'd test the soil and then replace most of the backyard plants with good-looking and low-maintenance food producers; and replace the front lawn with pollinator-attracting xeriscape and maybe some herbs.
You can find common produce that has even less nutrients, yet is a widely used staple.
If your goal is protein/aminoacid delivery in an efficient manner, you need milk & meat. Or maybe soybean/pea concentrates if you want to go vegan.
No way around that.
> Is there any way to grow nutritious food that isn't just transporting water everywhere?
Yes. Growing literally any one of hundreds legume or cereal varieties.
Put goats in a field. Meat has 20x-100x the energy density of most veggies.
Dried tomatoes?
But you are discounting the rarity of productive labor and the value of R&D. Yes, we have serious vices in the US with our spending on frivolous pursuits, but at the same time we're doing incredibly ambitious things. If we undercut the profitability of those ambitious pursuits, we lower the number of ways to get funding to those enterprises. In the face of low payoffs for big ideas, you just get all that effort put toward more apps to book a masseuse for your dog.
Wealthy people pay to have their problems solved, so undercutting intellectual property just directs more high achievers to cater to 'first world problems' rather than chasing big ideas.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28664769
But the gist of it is: patents prevent many people from innovating. That is the purpose of a patent: others are prevented from following forks of a given idea to the benefit of one entity. I argue that the losses to society from preventing so many people from following forks of an idea are greater than the benefits gained by giving one entity a monopoly. Constantly locking down new ideas for 20 years actually encourages companies with patents to rest on their laurels (see the linked comment above for figures) and prevents motivated newcomers from trying variations on the patented idea.
People often say that without patents, investment would cease. But the linked example in the above comment features a great first hand account from an engineer and hacker about the innovation that happens in China when anyone can take ideas from others. It's a vibrant development environment in fact. My view is that investment would not cease, but the nature of investment would change. Instead of fewer larger investments, we would see more frequent smaller investments. So the economy would continue to function fine, only without constant barriers to copying all the good ideas would spread rapidly and many people would experiment with forks on those good ideas. In the end, the rate of innovation would be higher without patents, I believe, than it is with them. A relatively unorthodox view, but I find that those in the orthodox camp also tend to significantly discount the amount of innovation that happens in the normal course of market competition without intellectual property in play. Market forces already reward innovation. Patents do create a bigger reward for those innovators who make it all the way through the patent process, but at a great cost to society. This is why 3D printers only dropped in price by 50% after their first ten years on the market, and then dropped in price by 98% in the first ten years after the patent expired (see the linked comment for figures).
50k kg a day is approximately 600 acres of tomatoes with our yields. That much land in CA might sell for $6-30M depending on water rights and latitude.
https://thefarmermagazine.com.au/the-costa-group-is-a-runawa...
https://www.tradefarmmachinery.com.au/features/1408/costa-gr...
Edit: Article also mentions a 100kg/m^2/year target.
Yes - but this mainly comes down to the varieties that you grow. You can grow varieties that are very tasty and are usually sold in the premium tier. And you can grow high-yielding tomatoes with less taste.
>Personally, in my area tomatoes are cheap enough to not think about the price, but the products widely available from supermarkets taste like water
Where are you based? High-tech greenhouses already supply a lot of premium-tier produce in Europe but there is an undersupply in the US/Asia.
I think a lot of the really good flavours in tomatoes are a function of sunlight exposure.
Nitrogen is necessary for proteins so you can get larger yields, but if some other nutrient is missing then nitrogen alone won’t help. K and P also need to be present in good quantities, as well as a mixture of iirc 17 elemental trace elements. I’d use a well-rounded fertilizer like 7-7-7, and if it wasn’t growing then assume there was a disease or pest at play.
EDIT: Anyone else have an unusually many potatoes bloom and bear fruit this year? I've never had this many before.
(All my potatoes had a couple fruits this year, but I'm in Germany, so I have no clue if that data is relevant...)
But you are right, some people don't.
I think it is relevant because I'm in Canada and even though we now have a total of statistically irrelevant 2 anecdotal data points only it is something. Lots of fruit on potatoes in the same year on different continents more than 5000 km apart on a plant that usually has very few if any fruit at all. My very first years of planting potatoes I did not even have flowers.
As a bitter taster it doesn’t matter how much sugar you put on the tomato it’s still too much. About the only thing IMO that you can put on a tomato to make it acceptable is a bacon cheeseburger.
People reusing human wastes generally try to compost it for a while, I think, probably partly to reduce the risk of diseases, but probably also in a large part to remove the foul smell. Shoveling shit isn't fun.
This info came from a gardener Youtuber, but it appears backed up from a google search. It appears the experiments were done with watermelons, but I would assume the results would be the same with other crops.
Based on which metric? Neither vanillin nor capsaicin are tropane alkaloids.
Tropane structure of cocaine, scopolamine make them accumulate in liver whereas vanillin, capsaicin etc do not accumulate.
Scopolamine stramonium etc are fascinating too. Datura stramonium (DS) is a widespread annual plant, containing atropine, hyoscyamine, and scopolamine, which can produce poisoning with a severe anticholinergic syndrome. In some parts of the world, ingestion of the roots, seeds or the entire plant is a trick to obtain its hallucinogenic and euphoric effects.
Also was used to poison royalty and by dacoits. It also has medicinal properties. Has been recorded in medical textbooks at the time of Takshila university and in Buddhists texts. Very effective as homeopathic preparations. Jimson weed is still a common weed on road sides in America. Datura is in the same family of plants as peppers, tomatoes, potatoes and eggplants and it contains a lethal set of alkaloids. But they don’t have the same kind. Tomatoes, for example, doesn’t have any alkaloids. Only tomatine.
there is this kind of tomato I buy if there aren't any others. it always looks perfect on the outside...and seems to last forever sitting on the counter at home.
but if its old enough, the seeds will have sprouted when you cut into it.
pretty tasteless regardless
The food elimination diet is very scientific - you add items back in one at a time to test if they cause a negative reaction to your particular physiology.
Most boring month ever. Felt amazing at the end of it.
Was shocking when I introduced things back in.
Dutch tomatoes have a reputation for being bland ("water bombs"), is making more flavourfull ones just product focus? Like picking the right varietal, picking them at the right time, delivering quickly, etc?
In hydroponics the same improvement is achieved by increasing the nutrient solution concentration (since that's what drought stress looks like to the roots), often literally with salt, NaCl. Growers will typically describe this as raising the solution electrical conductivity, EC, since that's an easily-measured proxy for total dissolved ionic stuff. Hand-held EC meters cost a few dollars, or large systems often run with closed-loop measurement and dosing similar to my
Lol - yeah the production of cannabis is not yet legalised in The Netherlands.
This is a great article on the Dutch greenhouse industry (unfortunately behind paywall): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/holland-...
>Dutch tomatoes have a reputation for being bland ("water bombs"), is making more flavourfull ones just product focus? Like picking the right varietal, picking them at the right time, delivering quickly, etc?
I've heard this before too. Maybe this was a thing at one point in history but it's not true any more. If you go into a supermarket today in Europe then all the tomatoes on offer will have been grown in greenhouses. The low-end stuff will have been grown in Spanish/Moroccan low-tech greenhouses (plastic tunnels). The higher-end stuff will have been grown in Dutch glasshouses.
What I find especially funny is
> What the hell am I supposed to do with all these turnips?
Do people really not know what to do with turnips? Turnips are amazing- roast them, put them in soups, they're great. Now radishes, on the other hand, those are a mystery to me.
Radishes are awesome! I like to eat them raw with just a bit of salt, but for a general cooking frame of reference, you can use radishes anywhere you would use a cucumber.
Here's some salads I like to make with radishes:
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= default radish salad =
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* radishes (thin round slices)
* chopped scallions
* dill (a lot)
* salt
* pepper
* olive oil
* chopped fresh parsley (optional)
From here you have a few options:
1. just add some vinegar and/or a bit of lemon
2. for a tzatziki-like route, use lemon, garlic and greek yogurt. Cucumbers are totally optional here (the salad becomes more watery).
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= poor-man's cole slaw =
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* cole slaw without the mayo
* add thinly sliced radishes
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= tomato salad loaded with vegetables =
=======================================
* thick sliced tomatoes (1/2 inch cubes or pyramid-like shape)
* onions
* sliced cucumbers
* diced red bell pepper
* thinly sliced or diced radishes
* olive oil
* salt
* pepper
* half a dozen kalamata/black olives
* greek feta sliced into 1 inch cubes
* chopped fresh parsley (optional)
Dip sourdough bread into the tomato juice at the bottom to get to heaven.Chocolate and “diet” drinks turned out to be massive migraine triggers for me. That was a big surprise