The small-scale market for fresh Texas tomatoes is growing, serving up an opportunity to gain back some of its steady decline.
Over the last 50 years, Texas tomato acres dropped from about 28,500 in 1960 to an estimated 300 acres today for commercial canning. And Dr. Kevin Crosby, Texas A&M AgriLife vegetable breeder in College Station, said Texas fresh tomato yields from about 900 acres were valued at almost $4.9 million last year.
Crosby noted tomatoes are making a comeback for the small-scale backyard farmers and organic growers, but not for large-scale commercial growers.
“It’s growing in those areas because the value of the crop is very high in that sector, especially around metropolitan areas,” Crosby told AgriLife Today.
Those growers are selling fresh tomatoes to grocery stores and farmers markets for consumers who want fresh, vine-ripe tomatoes.
And that ‘‘fresh’’ mentality was what Crosby had in mind when he released a new tomato variety called Hot-TY.
“It’s very heat tolerant, so if you plant it now from San Antonio to College Station south, it will start flowering within a month,” Crosby said. “And you can harvest late October until after Thanksgiving or until there is a frost.”
According to Crosby, vine ripe, organic tomatoes can gross $50,000 per acre these days.
Even when adjusted for inflation, the value of tomatoes surpasses the prices 50 years ago by almost 40 percent when production in the state was much higher.
“Flavor and quality—that’s what people want in a vine-ripe tomato,” Crosby said. “Maybe that kind of tomato is less than 10 percent of the market, but it’s very lucrative. So theoretically, though the acreage maybe less than 1,000 acres, I guarantee you they’re making a lot more per acre than when there were 40,000 acres.”