![]() “During the drought, our water triples and quadruples in price. “We started off with lower acres because of our water supply with the drought,” explained Barcellos, who is a partner in A-Bar AG Enterprises with his brother, son and nephew. Tomatoes are water and labor-intensive to grow and require more water for cleaning before being cooked. “If you don’t have a tenant in there, you still have all your fixed costs … but you have no income coming from it.”īut water is king for farmers and without enough of the resource, something had to give. “It’s just like owning a second home and trying to rent it out,” Barcellos said of his fallowed land. Montna said every one of CTGA’s farmers currently has some ground fallowed because there just isn’t enough water for all the crops they would like to grow. Those 2,000 acres instead were fallowed this season. On top of that, Montna said inflation ate up most of the 24% price increase growers received this year for a ton of tomatoes compared to the year before.įarmer Aaron Barcellos and his family have grown tomatoes for 25 years but cut back on the number of acres usually dedicated to tomatoes from 2,000 to just more than 500 acres. This is the fourth year in a row where CTGA said production numbers were lower than they would have liked, said Montna, who noted this is the lowest inventory the industry has ever had, spurred on after demand for their products shot up during the intense days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Mike Montna, president and CEO of the California Tomato Growers Association, stands on a farm nearing the end of its harvest for the season. We’re in a flat to declining yield situation and a lot of it’s due to weather and how intensive it is to grow a tomato.” ![]() “We’re not getting the yields that we expected or that we got historically seven or eight years ago. ![]() “We’re going to end up ultimately somewhere around 10.5, 10.4 million tons,” Montna told CNN, estimating that will be about 14% short of their early projections for the year. In May, that number was revised down to 11.7 million tons and now, as the growing season is coming to an end, Montna said the true number will be less than that. In January, CTGA was targeting the production of 12.2 million tons of tomatoes. “Mainly the tomatoes from the growers that I represent … go to your ketchups, pizza sauces, your retail sauces that you see at the supermarket.”Ĭalifornia’s tomato growers produced less than hoped this season. “Ninety-five percent of the processed tomato products consumed in the United States come right here from California’s Central Valley,” said Mike Montna, president and CEO of the California Tomato Growers Association, as he stood on a farm harvesting the last bounty this season. The mighty Mississippi is so low, people are walking to a unique rock formation rarely accessible by foot The Rock itself is separated from the rest of the area by the river and is normally only accessible by boat, but thanks to extremely low water levels it can now be accessed by foot. The geologic formation known as Tower Rock is part of the Tower Rock Natural Area on the Missouri bank of the Mississippi River.
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