Hot Tomatoes
Backyard Farms tomatoes have become one of the most-consumed fresh, local products in New England. Read the fascinating tale of how these hot Maine
tomatoes get to your hometown grocery store.
What’s not to like about a tomato? It’s red-ripe and round, delicious and nutritious. You can’t make a BLT without the “T”. It’s the blood in a bloody Mary, the sauce on a pizza, the garnish on a backyard burger in the summertime. Cult movie history would be much different had a group of young filmmakers in the 1970s decided instead to make Attack of the Killer Cauliflowers.
Though it’s in everything from ketchup to salsa to garden salads, the tomato defies easy answers. Is it a fruit or a vegetable? Is it pronounced “to-MAY-to” or “to-MAH-to”? Can it be grown year-round in the state of Maine?
The answer to the last question is a definite “yes.” Since 2007, Backyard Farms in Madison has been supplying fresh tomatoes grown in their greenhouses to grocery stores throughout New England. Backyard Farms tomatoes are the freshest tomatoes available this side of seasonal farmers markets, arriving on store shelves less than 48 hours after being picked from the vine.
Madison, Maine, may seem like an odd place to grow tomatoes, but like the varieties Backyard Farms grows, it was carefully selected. “Maine struck a nice balance between access to markets and cost of operations,” says president and CEO Roy Lubetkin.
“There’s a great food culture in Maine. You have fine restaurants in Portland, and an active local-growing movement. It’s a small state in terms of the number of people, but it’s recognized outside the state for high quality food.”
The company’s two greenhouses encompass 42 acres of former dairy farm land near the shore of the mighty Kennebec River, a few miles north of town. They loom out of the morning mist like hangars for the space shuttle, great gray buildings that give no hint of the riot of ripening fruit within. From a kiosk at the front gate, a man with a Dutch accent emerges to check press credentials. Not just anyone can enter. Backyard Farms does not offer tours of its greenhouses to the public. The policy is in place not to preserve company secrets, but to protect the tomatoes.
The ground is still frozen outside, but inside the steel-and-glass buildings there’s some serious gardening going on, and nothing is permitted to interfere with the health of the crop.
“I have one pair of shoes for each greenhouse,” explains Tim Cunniff, executive vice president of sales and marketing. “You don’t want any kind of cross-contamination.”
Backyard Farms is the largest operation of its kind in New England. The two greenhouses produce an average of 500,000 pounds of tomatoes per week (with some seasonal variation) and provide nearly 200 jobs. Trucks from Hannaford and Wal-Mart roll up regularly to load and distribute the outpouring of ripe red bounty.
“It’s the freshest stuff you can possibly get,” says Cunniff. “We limit our distribution area to a day’s travel by truck. About 45% of our product stays in-state. Most of the rest goes to New England. Connecticut, a lot into Boston. When we have flushes, we go down into New York City.”
Cunniff says the company’s founding mission was to compete in the marketplace with huge growers in Mexico, Europe, and South America. “We’re building a brand, but it’s a higher quality product,” he says. “We grow for quality, not for yield.”
The brand’s quality commitment has a Holland connection. Several employees, including grower and general manager Tim de Kok, hail from the Netherlands, long recognized as a leader in the greenhouse industry. De Kok’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all horticulturalists. Industry publications in English and Dutch lie splayed across his large office desk; readouts on computer screens display up-to-the-minute conditions in each greenhouse.
“I’ve been doing this all my life,” he says. “I’ve always been around greenhouses.” De Kok has been with the company since 2007. He’s ultimately responsible for the quality of the product that goes out the door. His job includes selecting varieties, overseeing the design of the irrigation and electrical systems, and determining the right mix of bees and insects inside the greenhouses.
“Here in Maine, the tough part is growing year-round,” he says. “It’s cold outside, but you still have to maintain your ideal temperatures. It’s very strategic. It’s fun to figure out. We’ve selected some different varieties over time to see which ones do better.”
A tomato is a fruit, by the way, at least according to the scientific definition, since it grows from the ovum at the base of the flower and contains the seeds of the plant. But in 1893, the United States Supreme Court—under pressure from domestic cultivators who were being undercut by foreign tomatoes, which, as fruit, were not liable to import taxes—declared the tomato a vegetable. Nonetheless, the word “fruit” falls freely from the lips of everyone associated with Backyard Farms.
Entering the greenhouse, the first thing you notice is the temperature. It’s warm, between 70° and 80° Fahrenheit. Pickers wear jeans and short-sleeved shirts bearing the company logo. It’s hard to see them during working hours—one can get lost in the long rows of tomato vines that reach toward the 21-foot-high ceiling. Heat pipes run along the floor beneath each row, and in the gutter and the ceiling are more heating pipes to melt any snow, which is then used for irrigation.
Remarkably, Backyard Farms irrigates its tomatoes entirely with collected water, from the snow and rain that fall on the roof.
The tomatoes are grown hydroponically, which means they aren’t planted in dirt. The plants root in small, cubical chunks of material called “rock wool,” which is “basically a growing medium,” according to Cunniff. “It’s something for the roots to grab onto.”
Backyard Farms purchases its own seeds, which it then sends to a “propagator” in Ontario, where they are germinated. “When we get the plants they’re about a foot tall in these little boxes,” Cunniff says. “You tear off a little piece of this plastic, like this, and you put in the feeding tube and the irrigation tube. They grow about two inches a day. We keep them for about seven months; they get to be about 45 feet long.”
The cubes, a few of which contain two tomato plants, are placed in troughs at regular intervals slightly more than a foot apart. Some plants bifurcate a few inches above the roots, creating two plants from one. Growers have to watch these closely; the “V” where the stem splits is an inviting place for fungi and bacteria to make a home. A few smaller plants are intermixed with the larger ones.
“We do what’s called interplanting. We grow a crop within a crop,” says Cunniff. “It’s tricky, and not that many growers do it.”
The growing process is aided by thousands of small flying creatures. “We use a ton of bees,” Cunniff says, pointing out a hive near the end of one row. “Bees are basically how you pollinate. You can’t pollinate by hand.”
But bees are just one component of the enclosed ecosystem. “We have an integrated pest management system,” Cunniff says. “There are beneficial predatory wasps introduced to naturally control the whiteflies. We’ve got a wide variety of predatory insects that control our pests. We try to keep a balanced ecosystem with good bugs and bad bugs as well as bees so that you don’t have to introduce any pesticides or herbicides. But you can’t just have good bugs; you have to have something for the good bugs to eat.”
Tomatoes are good business, in part because they’re so prolific. “I’m putting tomatoes into everything I put in the oven,” says Tom Ryder, a picker at Backyard Farms who, like most employees, receives free tomatoes as an informal bonus.
Pickers work a regular 40-hour schedule, 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. each weekday; packers work 7 to 4. The opening of the new greenhouse enabled Backyard Farms to hire 75 new employees in 2009. Workers are eligible for full benefits after 30 days. A monthly production bonus can augment an employee’s pay by up to $1 per hour, retroactive to the beginning of the month. Several pickers who started with the company when it opened have moved up to managerial positions.
Team leader Liza Graham, a Skowhegan native and Husson graduate, supervises 15 crop-care workers in a designated section of the new greenhouse. She in turn is overseen by a crop care manager, who is guided by head grower Tim de Kok.
“I came here just for a summer job initially,” Graham says. “I liked what I was doing, and was good at it, so when an opening came up, I went for it. There are a lot of driven people here, which I like. I am a go-getter, and I like to be around people who are the same way.”
Though he has nothing but praise for the workforce, Cunniff cautions that the job isn’t for everybody. “It is physical work,” he says. “It’s not for older people who have been out of the workforce for awhile and like to mess around in the garden. This isn’t your backyard. It’s our backyard.”
The new greenhouse is “tiered,” which means it’s divided into three six-acre sections that can be separately climate-controlled. It includes three acres of cocktail tomatoes. “This is the newest thing we’re going to try,” Cunniff says. “We want to be able to put something in a package and tell our story a little bit better. This is a sweeter-tasting cocktail tomato. It’s absolutely gorgeous. The fruit shines. It’s got fantastic symmetry, the calyxes are nice and healthy, you’ve got a nice starburst. And the yield is good.”
The calyx is the base of the flower from which the fruit grows, where tomato meets vine. Some more Backyard Farms lingo: A full-size tomato is called a “TOV,” short for “tomato on the vine.” Cocktail tomatoes are referred to as “COVs.” The dead leaves and stems are disposed of in bins called “coffins.”
Looking up, one is momentarily dazzled by the lights, which make this whole year-round operation possible. “It’s all about light,” Cunniff says. “You don’t want any shade. The greenhouse is designed to be structurally sound, but also to make sure there are no dark spots. So you don’t see any huge beams.”
The roof of the greenhouse is made of high-transmission tempered glass, to maximize the exposure to natural sunlight. It can be opened in the summer to let excess heat escape, but its primary purpose is to keep heat and light in. The design of the greenhouses lets Backyard Farms take advantage of cold, crystalline, cloudless days when everything outside is frozen. Still, in the Maine winter, natural light isn’t nearly enough.
“Our big gamble was lights,” Cunniff says. “We did our research pretty significantly to figure out how much light we would need. You can’t just use regular indoor light. It’s all about energy efficiency. For photosynthesis, you want infrared and not ultraviolet, so the lights are geared more toward the infrared part of the spectrum. The lights are also a heat source.”
They’re also the company’s single biggest expense. Light output is measured in lumens, and the light falling on a surface is measured in a unit called the lux, which is the number of lumens per square meter. A night game at Fenway Park is illuminated at 1,200 to 1,400 lux; the measure for the greenhouse when all the lights are on is 15,000.
“You don’t keep the lights on all the time, of course,” Cunniff explains. “Plants are like people; they have to rest. There’s not a linear relationship between the lights and the sun. It takes about three hours with the lights to get one hour of natural sunshine. Even though we’re growing all through the winter, what happens is we still have the same number of plants, the tomatoes are flowering, but the ripening speed slows down. Instead of ripening in 40 or 45 days, it takes about 55 days, so it seems like we have fewer tomatoes because they’re not coming out as fast.”
The greenhouse can be completely canopied at night so that more of the heat stays in and the light does not spill out into the sky. The lights, and the expense of running them, are a major reason Backyard Farms chose to locate in Madison in the first place.
Calvin Ames is the superintendent of Madison Electric Works, the nonprofit power company that has served the area since 1888. Because of the company’s small service area and nonprofit status, it is able to offer substantially lower rates to customers than Central Maine Power or Bangor Hydro, Maine’s two utility giants. Madison Electric serves about 2,000 residential customers, several small businesses, and the Madison Paper mill, their largest customer. The utility also owns the land on which the Madison Business Gateway, a multipurpose business park, was built. The presence of Backyard Farms may enable Madison Electric to lower rates in the long term, Ames says.
“We had a very low energy rate, and we could get the infrastructure in place fast enough to serve them,” Ames says. Madison Electric built new power lines to the greenhouses and a new substation in the nine months before Backyard Farms began operations.
“We look at exactly what it’s going to cost us to serve them, and their rate covers that cost,” Ames says. “To us, they were a really big fish and we were willing to bend over backwards to accommodate them.”
Since 2000, Maine utilities cannot generate their own electricity; they must purchase power from a supplier. But because Madison Electric is nonprofit and local, they can still provide less expensive power than their larger counterparts. “Our delivery costs are cheaper, and we don’t have any stockholders to keep happy,” Ames says. Backyard Farms receives a lower per-kilowatt-hour rate than residential customers, which reflects the lower delivery cost.
Under a five-year deal in place at the time, Madison Electric was able to supply electricity to Backyard Farms at just under 4 cents per kilowatt hour. That contract expired at the end of 2008; a new three-year deal with Florida Power and Light (which owns most of CMP’s former generating infrastructure) caused rates to go up, though they are still much lower than those of Maine’s two large utility companies. Though officials at Backyard Farms and Madison Electric are reluctant to discuss specific figures, they continue to work together to keep costs down.
Backyard Farms was also wooed by state assistance in the form of Pine Tree Development Zone incentives, and by a favorable tax deal from the town on its 350-acre property.
“The state and the town of Madison have been extremely supportive,” says Lubetkin. “Combine that with great access to the New England marketplace, good available land at relatively good value, and access to a good labor pool of hardworking people—you put that all together, and this is the place to be.”
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