2-1 FB Old tomatoes

The importance of genetics to modern agriculture. New Energy Farms company co-owner Dean Tiessen got on the phone with me the other day and reveled over the differences in prices between tomatoes way back when and today. Despite increased input costs, tomatoes  are cheaper now than they were many years ago. How can that be profitable then? Here is Dean with his take. “They have been gasified in coal like back in Germany a long time ago, cleanly, and you can see it in east Germany, I look at the financials and there it is, producing tomatoes for $.62 a pound at the time and today we are producing them for $.42 a pound. Inflation has gone up many, many times but we were paying $.09 a gallon for bunker fuel, today we are paying $2.55. I keep telling my dad back in the 70’s we went into the wrong business. Here we produce a good quality tomato and today we are getting $.20 a pound less than what we were back then that we are paying many, many times for the energy and how could we have survived. In a lot of the cases it has been technological advances in our industry, computers and growing systems but the main thing was the genetics.”