I’ve just watched 3 of 4 in a new BBC TV series – Jimmy’s Global Harvest. Previously I’ve enjoyed following him set up as a pig farmer, both he and his first pigs became likeable, watchable characters. The pigs went onto pork and Jimmy to do more TV and writing.
Here he’s examining world food production. To quote one of the people who he spoke to in this episode filmed in the US ‘There are 7 billion people in the world, 1 billion of whom are starving , by 2050 there will be 9 billion, the amount of land and water is not going to increase so yields have to go up’.
I need to catch up on the other episodes but the intention seems to be to explore different ways and philosophies on meeting this gap .
And in all this there is a connection to Tomatoes. Lots. Tomato monoculture on an amazing scale.
In Central Valley, California Jimmy visited a 2nd generation tomato farmer whose father picked by hand, at a rate of a ton per 6-7 hours. Now by machine, a ton takes 30 seconds.
The picker is a $400K monster fitted with infrared sensors which filters ripe red tomatoes from unripe green one, shredding the cleaned off vines as it goes, turning them back into the soil as compost.
The tomato has also played its part in this change – being bred to have a skin tough enough to go through the machine without getting squishy.
And nothing of it is wasted. The 90% of the tomato which is water gets squeezed out and recycled to irrigate the fields whilst the stems and seeds get fed to cattle.
This 24 hour vast operation is responsible for producing 1.2 million kilos of tomato paste a day. Tomato Sauces and Pizzas the world over get their glorious redness and tomato flavour from these endless lines of Californian tomato vines.
It was an eye opener as to how complex and knife edge the production of a simple, humble everyday staple is.
(Courtesy of his trip to Virginia and a visit to a wonderfully inventive and productive beef farm I also learnt a new term ‘ mob stocking’ which means to intensively graze pasture with cattle for one day only, moving them on each day to mimic natural grazing patterns. This allows the pasture time (100 days) to rest and mature before the cattle return. There was also a lovely supporting role for a bunch of happy, well fed hens who roamed after the cows in a mobile chicken coop.)
