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market-farming - Re: How Many Cherry Tomato Plants?

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  • From: Leigh <lh AT pressroom.com>
  • To: "Market Farming" <market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: How Many Cherry Tomato Plants?
  • Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2002 23:16:33 -0400


Allan,

As a fellow CSA farmer I have a problem with cherry tomatoes. Here is the problem: Cherry tomatoes are extremely labor intensive (almost as time consuming as stringbeans). If I was a market farmer that wouldn't be a problem. I would know how many cherry's I could pick and I would know how much I could sell at what price and I could figure out the correct equation of cherry tomato plants for my market as opposed to growing something else. In other words, if I could make more money per time spent on cherry tomatoes than other crops, I would find that level that I had time and room to grow and that I could also sell.

But as a CSA farmer my concern is different. My customer isn't paying for an individual crop but for the entire package. I have to ask myself, are cherry tomatoes worth it to my customers as opposed to something else.

How much time do I have available each morning to pick cherry tomatoes as opposed to harvesting something else that my shareholders will like just as well. A crop that will take up less picking time, that comes ripe at the same time, and that the shareholders will enjoy just as much is always preferable, in my mind, to a labor intensive crop.

Here is what I do-- since cherry tomatoes come in early, earlier than almost all other tomatoes, I plant enough to give my subscribers an early taste of tomato (as if you can call sungold's tomatoes - around here we tell the children of our shareholders they are undried skittles). And that's it. Once the other tomatoes start coming in along with the other summer vegetables the cherry tomatoes are often ignored and allowed to fall to the ground unpicked. There is only so much time in a day.

The only exception to this rule is the years where I feel like setting up crops for u-pick for the shareholders. Then I will grow a couple hundred extra cherry tomatoes for the shareholders to pick. However, this is often frivolous. Shareholders only come out so often and only pick so many cherry tomatoes. Still, a large percentage of the crop goes to waste.

Also in Norther Virginia
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