The drought has California farmers leaving thousands of acres fallow this year. But growers still chose to plant processing tomatoes. And as Amy Quinton reports from Sacramento, they’re expected to have a record year.
About 95 percent of the nation’s processed tomatoes come from California. Last year, about 12 million tons were produced. Some farmers this year were skeptical they could grow the 14 million tons contracted for by the state’s processors.
But Mike Montna with the California Tomato Growers Association says they hit that mark.
Montna: “It’s not really unexpected we’re usually pretty close to our tonnage number. From the grower perspective they allocated the water that they did have to tomatoes, less rice, less cotton, less corn, they were forced to make choices of which crop am I going to grow.”
Montna says growers were able to secure a higher contract price last year for processing tomatoes, so it made better economic sense.
