Tomato Tradition has Deep Roots at CC
By BARRY NOREEN
ou can say to-MAY-to, or you can say to-MAH-to, but any way you slice it, the tomato ( botanically classified as a fruit ( is considered by most to be a vegetable.
Just about everyone will tell you it's obviously a vegetable, mainly because it appears in the company of other vegetables so often. And, after all, strawberries, apples and oranges are fruits and no one ever identified them as vegetables. How did this oddity in the Plantae kingdom occur?
Toward the end of the 19th century, a tariff was placed on vegetables entering this country. Fruits, however, were not affected by this tax. The Collector of Customs for the Port of New York, being no different than any other tax collector, seized an opportunity to raise the take. He announced that tomatoes were vegetables and therefore subject to the tariff. Importers sued and the case spiraled throughout the judicial system until it reached the highest court in the land. In 1893, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the tomato is a vegetable. Its unanimous decision was based on the opinion that since tomatoes were "generally served at dinner in, with, or after the soup, fish or meats which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits generally, as dessert," they were vegetables.
So it seems that taxes, which have played a significant role in our lives, lifestyles and culture, also have played a major role in the reclassification of our favorite "fruit."
There are thousands and thousands of tomato varieties ( from Ultra Boys and Green Zebras to Early Cascades and White Wonders. Some varieties have been developed for specific purposes, like catsup or salsa. And many varieties were developed in places with varying growing seasons as part of the steady evolutionary process geared toward producing the perfect table-ready tomato. You might say tomatoes are a bit like Colorado College graduates: They appear in diverse fields and climates, making a contribution either on their own in a high-profile way or as part of a team, blending into a successful recipe.
The college is hardly thought of as an important center for agricultural education or research and development for agri-business. Within Colorado, that distinction would go to Colorado State University, a land-grant school which, like so many other A&Ms around the nation, is devoted to such farm-related disciplines as veterinary medicine, soil conservation studies and genetic engineering. Yet more than a few CC grads are turning up in greenhouses or on farms, large and small. In fact, it turns out that there is a rather strong connection between graduates of the College and the tomato.
Vern Twombley '49, Horace Work '62, Thomas DiMare '64 and Meg Anderson '76 embarked on far different paths after leaving school. While at the college, none of them engaged in studies that would have foreshadowed careers in agriculture and, with the exception of DiMare, they had no idea that agriculture would play such a big part in their lives.
For all of them, though, learning and discovery didn't end when they left CC. College provided them with tools to use later on in life.
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Thomas DiMare, now serving on the board of trustees at the college, is a second generation agribusiness professional in Indio, Calif. In any given year, The DiMare Company accounts for 8 to 10 percent of the tomato production in the United States. They sell only fresh produce to large accounts like Safeway, King Soopers and other major grocery chains. In addition, the firm buys and sells numerous other crops, including citrus fruits from California and Florida, delving into the import and export markets with wholesale markets in Japan, New Zealand and Australia.
At the college, DiMare majored in political science ( a field of study that might seem light years removed from the tomato fields of southern California. But when you're dealing with import/export laws and the intricacies in Washington, D.C.; when you're the chairman of the Western Growers Association and the governor of California has appointed you to the State Board of Food and Agriculture, which oversees the state's $16 billion agriculture industry; when you have worked with the Migrant Farmworker Health Insurance Advisory Board ... When you're involved in all that, a background in politics, history and diplomacy is helpful preparation for the tomato wars.
"Food is politics, these days," DiMare says. "Political science has served me well."
In 1990, California environmentalists succeeded in placing an initiative on the ballot that called for banning the use of pesticides. "It would have been disastrous for California agriculture," DiMare says of the initiative, which was voted down. "The irony is that we're the leader in the nation in the moderate and prudent use of pesticides. We're the pioneers of integrated pest management."
Most often, DiMare says, harsh chemicals aren't necessary to deal with pests in the fields. "You use a combination of natural predators and organic compounds." He said his rows of tomatoes can go two or three years without such treatments.
DiMare is no fugitive from the Whole Earth Catalog, but he thinks most people are now so far removed from the land, agriculture and how crops are grown that the resulting ignorance has crucial implications. That's why, for the past 10 years, he's worked with the Advisory Council for the Foundation for Agriculture in the Classroom. It's a program aimed at developing a threshold level of consciousness about where food comes from and how it's produced.
"Kids think that milk comes from a carton from King Soopers. They really don't know. Agriculture in the classroom is a means to teach them," DiMare says. Teaching kids the basics is an outgrowth of the principle lesson-of-discovery DiMare took away from the college in 1964. "I think the essential lesson is that we're forever ignorant, therefore we have to be forever learning," he says. "Life is a process of continuous learning."
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Meg Anderson studied art history, graduating in 1976. Eventually, she found herself in a job as personal shopper at a department store. "I had a townhouse in Minneapolis, but it just wasn't me," Anderson recalls.
Anderson soon sought a new career path, one that included tomatoes, broccoli, lettuce, raspberries, sweet corn and flowers. In 1991, when she arrived on the figurative 'other side of the divide,' Anderson discovered the deeply fulfilling business of creating good soil. With her husband, Anderson started the 35-acre Red Cardinal Farm in Stillwater, Minn., about 25 miles outside Minneapolis.
There, they grow bushel baskets of produce and beautiful flowers -- all organically. They and their customers love what the land produces, but Anderson says "the food is secondary. What is primary is creating really good soil."
It all springs from the Earth, goes the theory. Take care of the Earth and good things will come from it. "We're in this for the long term. We have a bigger vision, which is caring for a piece of land on a sustainable basis. The reason we don't spray chemicals is multi-fold. It upsets the ecosystem."
Much of Anderson's acreage is dotted with gorgeous old oak trees and 12 small wetland ponds. The wetlands, she says, filter out toxins from all of the water they drink.
Anderson's holistic approach goes beyond mere farming. The Red Cardinal Farm is one of a group of organic operations that belong to an international movement known as Community Supported Agriculture. Customers of Anderson's CSA network near Minnesota certainly want the organically produced goods that arrive at designated pick-up spots every week during growing season. But the customers are buying into a lot more than just a way to get organic produce.
Supporting the CSA means supporting small family farms in an age when giant corporations are increasingly dominant in the marketplace. Not everyone can be a farmer; there's a need for personal shoppers, for instance. But the CSA notion is that a personal shopper, or a garage mechanic or a stock broker can help care for the Earth by buying produce from farmers who are creating, not depleting, soil. Anderson says CSA customers "want to change their present relationship to their food sources and feel they have a choice over how their food is grown." Ultimately, Anderson believes "the CSA model is really a model for the future, for how farmers can survive and make it on small farms."
Growing organically, in harmony with her wetlands and the rest of the noisy planet, has a profound effect, Anderson says. "It sort of evolved into looking holistically at my life." Even the 'Red Cardinal' sprang from within. Anderson's father died two weeks before her wedding, and she remembers walking in the Arizona desert, thinking that it would be nice to take something from that place that would serve as a remembrance of her father. She saw a red cardinal, and it brought to mind the red cardinals the populate the farm in Minnesota. Nothing physical was taken from the desert. What Anderson brought back was an enduring memory - and a name for her farm, "because a lot of what brought me here is the values of my dad."
The farm, she says, "has been more work than I ever dreamed of. It's about four to five months of running a marathon. Each year, we add a new level. This year, we added a greenhouse to start all our transplants. We'll probably have 50,000 seedlings in there."
But the Red Cardinal Farm isn't looking to increase market share. "Our long-term picture is to maintain where we are right now. We really don't want to get bigger than 10 acres," Anderson says. "We started out with this five-year plan and we decided, 'yes, we can do it.' This is the level we're going to stay at."
Some people don't spot the cardinals, and some don't ever find their "level." Anderson doesn't take it for granted that she made the discoveries: "I feel blessed that it hit me at a time of life when I could still do something about it."
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As far as is known, the first tomatoes in what is now the United States were taken ashore in South Florida by someone who had sailed from somewhere in Central America. Sadly, the name of the person who performed the heroic deed has long since blended into the sauce of history. But historians have done a somewhat better job of tracking the tomato's relentless march through the life and times of America. People grew tomatoes in Charleston, S.C. as early as the 1760s, and history records that Thomas Jefferson planted tomatoes in 1781. An important year for the tomato was is 1869, when the Campbell's soup company built a cannery, establishing forever the importance of the tomato in our hearts, mouths and stomachs.
The tomato has rolled along nicely since then. In 1986, however, Vern Twombley gave it another push; you might say he did it by supplying some juice. Twombley, who graduated from the college in 1949 with a degree in physics and worked for General Electric during the company's halcyon years in the 1950s. eventually set out on his own, designing power plants in 47 countries. In 1983, he decided a vacation home in Snowmass, Colo., would make a perfect permanent residence.
Not long after, Twombley was ready to retire from his business, but he still wanted to keep busy. As it turned out, Twombley was on the verge of a discovery.
"I got interested in the concept of cogeneration," Twombley recalls. Utilizing a law requiring power companies to purchase surplus electricity from cogeneration units, Twombley and some partners designed a natural gas unit near Rifle, Colo. The idea was to power a greenhouse, grow roses, and sell the excess power to Public Service Company of Colorado.
The electric power part of the equation would ultimately work well, but early-on, Twombley learned that growing roses would not be economical. In recent years, the prices for imported roses have substantially undercut the price for domestic roses. This market reality eventually led Twombley to the tomato; specifically, hydroponic tomatoes, grown in a water medium organically, in greenhouses.
Now, the Rifle operation sells 96 percent of its electricity to the power company and similar units have been built in Brush and Fort Lutpon, both in eastern Colorado. This year, Twombley says, Colorado Greenhouse will ship 30 million pounds of organic tomatoes to 2,000 grocery stores, mostly in the central states and both coasts. Greenhouse tomatoes don't account for even 1 percent of total tomato consumption in the United States, but Twombley's company has quickly become the largest producer of greenhouse tomatoes nationwide.
"We didn't expect the tomato business to be as successful as it has been. We're somewhat dazzled by it," Twombley says with a chuckle. He's proud that the cogeneration/greenhouse concept adheres to an environmental ethic. Natural gas is the cleanest of the fossil fuels and growing inside the greenhouse allows the company to grow tomatoes organically.
"Environmentally, we're squeaky clean," Twombley says. "If you build a facility that way, you save money and you have the satisfaction of knowing you've done it right. I'm really seriously thinking this is the way we're going to grow our fruit and vegetables in the future, not putting a plow to the topsoil."
Oddly, a retirement project became phase three of a career that has taken Twombley around the globe, returning to a place not far from his college roots. "It equips you in many ways that are not really visible when you leave there," he said of the CC. Twombley marveled at what he termed "an extremely circuitous route back to the Earth."
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Music and horticulture have woven the fabric of Horace Work's life. A music theory major at the college who graduated in 1962, Work never studied botany. But as a boy, he loved to collect seeds and experiment with planting things. After college, Work did a stint in the Navy, where "I used to grow things in bottles." There must have been a message in one of those bottles; a message that waited for him to open it up and examine it.
After the Navy, Work studied music in Michigan, where his longtime interest in plants began to, well, take root. "I was always sprouting things and composting," Work said, looking back. "I used to collect apple seeds and orange seeds. But you have to have ground and I never really got into it until I got married and settled down."
Thus it came to pass that the wayward sailor and musician came to be known as "Mr. Compost" in Ann Arbor. Work bought 18 acres near the city in 1978. Part of the property had been used as a quarry and had virtually no soil. "My whole purpose was to get the city to dump the leaves from the north half of town on my property. I started collecting leaves in serious ways. I knew I had to stack them and windrow them. Eventually, after three or four years, I had some pretty fine, finished stuff."
For a time, Work sold his fertile product back to locals in bags but he gave that up in 1983 and started farming the acreage in earnest. "I set up an irrigation system and decided to grow things with the help of an expert. He taught me how to set up a farm," Work says. "Now I'm known as Mr. Compost in Ann Arbor, because nobody else was doing it."
Work, whose farm is known as Garden Works, Inc., started off with organic vegetables; lettuce, shard, spinach - a bit of everything, including a variety of herbs. "Our lettuce three days old is better than anything you'll get from California," he says proudly.
Why organic?
"I have a deep sense of outrage at the way food is produced in this country," Works says. "It's not sustainable. There's no future in it. This is not a way for man to live. We deplete the soil at our farm. That's why we replenish with leaves and whatever else. We need sustainable agriculture. This land looks limitless, but it's not."
Work has sold produce to restaurants and residents of Ann Arbor. "We have a steady market. You might call it a niche market." It's still a small operation, but Work says, "I get a deep satisfaction knowing that I'm doing something good for people. This farming thing has been a real important side of my life."
That discovery filed away, Work says he's now rediscovering music. And he's plowing new ground: "I am in the process of increasing my chess education. What a deep game." It's the sort of direction a person can take when other things have been accomplished. After all, Work points out, "We've got a wonderful compost pile going now."
Barry Noreen is an environmental writer who lives in Colorado Springs.