Tomatoland Read Free

plants that had desirable traits and crossbred them with varieties that had complementary qualities. He came across a plant that bore large quantities of perfectly round fruits. Unfortunately, they were small, so he crossed and recrossed those plants with large-fruited varieties until, five years after spotting that first smooth-fruited plant in his field, he perfected a variety he called theParagon.
    In addition to being a talented botanist, Livingston had a gift for writing unabashedly hyperbolicadvertising copy—a key job requirement for successfulseed catalog copywriters to this day. The Paragon “was the first perfectly and uniformly smooth tomato ever introduced to the American public, or, so far as I have ever learned, the first introduced to the world.” Giving himself credit where it was due, he wrote, “With these, tomato culture began at once to be one of the great enterprises of this country.”
    Paragon was just the beginning. Livingston himself went on to personally breed a dozen more successful tomatoes, and by 1937 the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that half of the tomato varieties in the country owed a genetic debt to Livingston’s early discoveries. It’s a testament to the nineteenth-century plant breeder’s skills that Paragons can still be found in seed catalogs today. I usually put a few in my garden each summer, my way of paying homage to the Great Man. They may not be the best tomato of the season, nor the most prolific, but, as advertised, Paragons are smooth, round,and juicy. If they have anything to apologize for 140 years after their debut, it’s that by being consistently prolific and uniform, they gave rise to the fresh tomato industry whose dubious benefits we reap today.
    Florida was a late comer to the commercial tomato game. They were grown there as early as 1870 by two farmers named Parry and Wilson in Alachua in the northern part of the state. Two years later,E. S. Blund was harvesting tomatoes on Sanibel Island in southwest Florida. ButJoel Hendrix, a shopkeeper and owner of a commercial steamship dock, as well as a six-acre farm in the settlement of Palmetto, established the commercial model that the Florida tomato industry has followed ever since. On January 6, 1880, Hendrix wrote a letter outlining a business plan that involved exportinggreen tomatoes from Florida that would ripen on their way to northern markets. He then demonstrated that it could be done successfully by shipping a cargo of the unripe fruit from his field in Manatee County (just south of Tampa and still an important tomato growing area) to New York City. No record remains describing the taste or condition of Hendrix’s fruits, which in that era would have endured a bouncy wagon ride over rutted sand trails before being loaded onto one or more steamships and rail cars for the long, often rough journey north. But fresh fruits and vegetables of any sort were rarities in the North at that time, and the Yankees eagerly gobbled up Hendrix’s out-of-season tomatoes. Establishing another policy that the Florida industry still follows, Hendrix priced his product inexpensively at a level that the average winter-weary New Yorker could afford. Green, cheap, and off-season continue to be the three mercantile legs upon which Florida’s tomato industry stands.
    Other farmers followed Hendrix’s lead. By 1890, a decade after that first shipment, there were 214 acres of tomatoes growing in Manatee County, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The industry never looked back. Aided by the arrival of therailroad in 1884, land under tomato production in Florida increased to 6,675acres by 1900, in no small part because the crop thrived in the virgin, disease-free soil. Those carefree days ended abruptly in 1903 when an outbreak offusarium wilt wiped out tomato plantings. But with plenty of vacant land to exploit, growers simply abandoned diseased fields and cleared new ones, slowly pushing inland from the