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I’ve been reading a whole lot about tomatoes

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Re: I’ve been reading a whole lot about tomatoes

#131

Post by opinion-is-bad »

hanniabu wrote: post #98
opinion-is-bad wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alfalfa is especially good for adding nitrogen, but clover can do the same for a home 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 n…

I have this issue right now with my tomato plants. Am I right in my understanding that you don't necessarily need to crop rotate and just supplementing the soil with nitrogen would be sufficient?

If you don’t control the fusarium from time to time, the tomato plants will look great but give no yield. One of the other commenters mentions a new technique for winter cover crop to avoid rotation. I’m not really sure how much of a risk fusarium is for a home garden, it might be as much as our farm or perhaps minimal.

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.

Re: I’ve been reading a whole lot about tomatoes

#132

Post by opinion-is-bad »

aweiland wrote: post #129
opinion-is-bad wrote: post #28

Interesting, but not that dissimilar to the United States. I grow a couple thousand acres of tomatoes in California, all of which are for processing into juices and pastes. These tomatoes are all transported in open-topped trailers by semi, and the losses have always bothered me. There is a tight turn just after leaving our property and the pile of tomatoes there grows steadily with the season as they roll off the to…

New research has shown that winter cover cropping with hairy vetch will suppress fusarium.

Very interesting, I’ll look into this.

Re: I’ve been reading a whole lot about tomatoes

#133

Post by opinion-is-bad »

lenova wrote: post #96
opinion-is-bad wrote: post #28

Interesting, but not that dissimilar to the United States. I grow a couple thousand acres of tomatoes in California, all of which are for processing into juices and pastes. These tomatoes are all transported in open-topped trailers by semi, and the losses have always bothered me. There is a tight turn just after leaving our property and the pile of tomatoes there grows steadily with the season as they roll off the to…

> I grow a couple thousand acres of tomatoes in California I would love to hear more about your lifestyle, please! Is this for work, or for pleasure?

Well I am an owner of the farm, along with my brother, which my great-grandfather purchased as a retirement project in 1950. Total area is about 7,000 acres, of which tomatoes will soon be replaced by almonds as the primary crop. We used to be the largest asparagus operation on the US, but NAFTA has ended that industry and it was a difficult 20-year transition to find almonds. There was a long-standing belief that our soil wouldn’t handle almonds due to excessive water, but that is proving to be very wrong.

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.”

Re: I’ve been reading a whole lot about tomatoes

#134

Post by opinion-is-bad »

coldtea wrote: post #117
lenova wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I grow a couple thousand acres of tomatoes in California I would love to hear more about your lifestyle, please! Is this for work, or for pleasure?

While it can be rewarding work, would 2000 acres just be something you grow "for pleasure"?

With the operational structure we have in place, I would describe it as fairly pleasurable for me. I get to work on interesting problems when I want to, and not much else. I’d say it’s actually the size that makes this possible, we could never afford our general manager on just a few hundred acres.

Re: I’ve been reading a whole lot about tomatoes

#135

Post by aweiland »

opinion-is-bad wrote: post #132
aweiland wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New research has shown that winter cover cropping with hairy vetch will suppress fusarium.

Very interesting, I’ll look into this.

I'm experimenting with it in my garden right now. Definitely had a fusarium issue this year (tomatoes in the same location for 3 years running). I have hairy vetch in now as a cover crop in that bed and will plant tomatoes again next year to see how it goes.

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.

Re: I’ve been reading a whole lot about tomatoes

#136

Post by tharkun__ »

morelisp wrote: post #109
tharkun__ wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in fact potato fruit are poisonous! Just remember that when you grow potatoes and you get those "nice small tomatoes" on the potatoes that do bloom and fruit :) Luckily not many bloom and fruit usually, so most people that just grow a few potatoes for fun don't even get tempted. Then again they don't ripen red anyway, so I guess there's that to "save the curious". EDIT: Anyone else have an unusually many potatoes…

The bigger warning to any potential potato farmers is to make sure you keep the potatoes underground; any tuber above ground will also have heightened levels of solanine. If they're light-skinned they'll also turn green from chlorophyll, which helps identify them a bit, but better to make sure they're well-buried. (All my potatoes had a couple fruits this year, but I'm in Germany, so I have no clue if that data is re…

That's a good one that people should know even for potatoes they buy. If green, discard.

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.

Re: I’ve been reading a whole lot about tomatoes

#137

Post by girvo »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #127
girvo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vanillin, Cocaine and Capsaicin are closely related alkaloids Based on which metric? Neither vanillin nor capsaicin are tropane alkaloids.

Addictive properties in a behavioral sense are defined differently from chemical dependency. Physiological and psychoactive aspects of neural stimulation are similar among these 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, contain…

> Physiological and psychoactive aspects of neural stimulation are similar among these alkaloids.

Only in the broadest possible sense, and honestly so broad that it doesn't really communicate much useful information in this instance.

It's similar to conflating heroin's affect on dopamine to that of masturbation, and coming to the conclusion that they're "similar": they are, if you read them as a pure set of checkboxes, but they're so qualitatively and quantitatively different in their affect on the human organism that it muddies more than clarifies -- in my opinion (a semi-educated one, I have a BSc in Chemistry, though I'm no professional) of course.

You're definitely right about how fascinating scopolamine is though.

Re: I’ve been reading a whole lot about tomatoes

#138

Post by simonebrunozzi »

davidhunter wrote: post #9

We (Optimal Agriculture) have built an autonomous growing system for high-tech greenhouses and have achieved 'superhuman' performance in a recent tomato trial. We collect a bunch of sensory data about the crop and growing environment, run cloud-based optimisation, and then control the actuators of the greenhouse autonomously (lighting, screening, heating, cooling, irrigation, etc). We are turning $100M greenhouse fac…

Do you know Sfera Agricola in Italy?

Re: I’ve been reading a whole lot about tomatoes

#139

Post by highstep »

dustintrex wrote: post #80
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #10

> One of my former classmates in undergrad is a Visiting Researcher at Purdue in the Agricultural Engineering department; he tells me that many tomato transporters actually own or rent fuel tankers that they fill in the South to sell at a markup in the North. In order to make some extra cash on the trip South with the empty tanker, they carry tomatoes. > I know what you might be thinking: is it even sanitary to trans…

Welcome to the developing world. Here's where your meat comes from in Nigeria: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xscqgr

meat production and processung in the "developed" world isnt much better. in fact this might even be better because those cattle probably weren't raised in factory style density
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