August 23, 2007

Jewels of the vine
The obsession with finding the perfect tomato
By Kristi Ceccarossi and Darry Madden news@hippopress.com

It’s fair to say that Brookdale Fruit Farm is 450 acres of aggressive commercial production.

The Hardy family has been running the place since 1847 and they’ve fashioned it over those many years as the poster child for diversification. In its early decades, it was a successful dairy farm with a marginal vegetable crop. But when the price of milk collapsed in the 1960s, the family parted with their animals and cultivated the vast pasture land as an orchard.

Today, it’s a booming business of apples, nectarines, pick-your-own berries and all your standard veggies. There’s a factory-size warehouse for packing, an unknowable number of employees harvesting in the fields, and the fields themselves are an immaculate tribute to profitable agriculture: neat crops, separated by well-worn dirt roads and irrigation tubes.

But if you ask for a look at the farm’s heirloom tomato field, the trappings of industry fade. You’ll have to travel a couple bumpy miles from the heart of the farm in a rusty old pickup with a garrulous Rick Hardy at the wheel. The heirlooms here grow on a quarter-acre patch in a secret nook, sequestered from the commercial hum of the rest of the farm. It is weedy, it is untidy and untouched by the heavy hand of tool or spray.

Just the way heirlooms like it, Hardy explained.

Heirlooms are delicate creatures, to be sure, because they’re old varieties, preserved through the seeds of their forebears. They aren’t engineered for durability. They aren’t engineered at all.

Heirlooms defy the Darwinist principles of modern agriculture. They are antique, thin-skinned and susceptible to the vagaries and vicissitudes of the environment. They demand gentle watering and constant attentiveness and must be gingerly plucked from the vine at just the right moment. On a farm like Brookdale, which otherwise operates like a well-oiled machine, that’s a lot of extra work.

“It’s worth it,” Hardy explained, “because that’s the whole point.” And that’s also, in part, why people will pay at least twice the going rate for them, per pound, as they will for a regular tomato.

There is, of course, the flavor, too. Like the initial burst of sweetness you get with a green- shouldered Italian, which mellows to a light zing in your mouth. Or the fruitier, almost apple-like presence of a Box Car Willie.

For Hardy, the choice to cultivate heirlooms was like the choice to grow fruit instead of raising dairy cows. There was a market demand for the tomato and a chance to make Brookdale more viable by answering it. And when you can bring in an average of $4 a pound for those babies, sometimes three times as much as a standard tomato fetches, what farmer could resist?

Hardy wasn’t the only one who heard the call for heirlooms. In the Merrimack Valley, at least half a dozen farms have seriously hopped on the bandwagon, largely with the same success.

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment heirlooms became a darling of the boutique food market. But over the last seven years or so, riding on the coattails of the slow food movement, the push for local agriculture and a colorful spread or two in major foodie magazines, heirlooms have arrived at a celebrity status. They’ve brightened local farmers’ markets, been plated as exquisite appetizers at local restaurants. They’ve even given family-run farms contracts with high-end restaurants and markets in the Boston area.

“Food is very designer-sensitive,” Hardy said, plucking a little yellow and lime striped number off the vine — a green Zebra. “If it’s popular, you have to respond to that.”

A good yarn
Depending on who you ask, you’ll hear a different theory about what makes an heirloom an heirloom. Some say the criteria are broad: ugly and bruised, or lovely and smooth, as long as it’s unconventional in shape and hue. And old — that’s crucial.

But what does old mean? Diehards insist the seeds for an heirloom have to be at least 100 years old. Others say they must date back no later than 1951, since that’s the year that widespread production began of hybrid, genetically superior varieties of tomatoes.

There’s no shortage of folklore about the fruit, and, in fact, some people think that an heirloom earns its stripes only if it’s got a good yarn attached to it.

By those measures, the Mortgage Lifter qualifies. Its story starts in West Virginia, with a man named M.C. Byles, known locally as “Radiator Charlie,” because he ran a radiator repair shop. His business tanked in the 1930s, along with the rest of the country’s industry, and he looked to the tomato to get him out of a financial hole.

Byles wasn’t a trained agronomist, but he had a simple dream of building a better fruit and found a way to cross-pollinate tomato seeds in his backyard. The Mortgage Lifter was his champ after several valiant tries: it was disease-resistant, fruit-bearing until frost and corpulent compared to your average tomato. It ripened at a lighter shade of red and it was meaty enough to fill several aching Depression-era bellies.

Byles went gangbusters with his tomato discovery and in six years, story goes, he paid off the $6,000 he owed on his house. Hence the name.

Carl Kimball grows Mortgage Lifters at Kimball’s Fruit Farm, just over the border in Pepperell, Mass. He bills them as heirlooms, but “the truest heirlooms,” according to him, “come from immigrant communities. Belgian, Italian, Russian or Japanese. ... There’s no USDA standard, no real explanation. We just know they’ve been passed down generations.”

On his 160 acres, Kimball nurtures up to 60 varieties of heirlooms at a time. He happens to be one of the biggest heirloom growers in New England and a prize-winner among his peers.

He started growing heirlooms about 10 years ago and the inspiration struck on a casual stroll through one of New England’s most boutique farmers’ markets: in Cambridge, Mass., just outside the gates of Harvard University. There, Kimball was rapt by a brilliant sight: barrels of multi-colored, misshapen and mysterious tomatoes. They were selling at two or three times the price of a regular tomato and, though he figured out pretty quickly heirlooms were an elusive sort to master, he knew he had to have them for his own market stand.

“It was pink, black, yellow and completely eye-catching,” Kimball said. “Taste matters, but looks matter too at a farmers’ market. The point is, you want to draw people over to your table. And then once you’ve got them started on heirlooms, they can’t go back.”

Used to be, his business was mainly apples and peaches, but in the late 1990s, the New England apple market was drying up in the wake of lower-cost imports from the south. So he knocked down half of his orchards and diversified. In 1997, he experimented with his first set of heirlooms. The Boston Globe caught wind and wrote a feature story. Customers from the city suddenly came calling, and the next year he had to double production, just to send fruit out to farmers’ markets and upscale eateries 40 miles away.

You say tomato, I say risk
Today Carl Kimball’s got four acres of his farm devoted wholly to heirlooms. That could be a gamble, if it’s true what some say about heirlooms being a fad. Skeptics predict they’ll go the way of the dinosaur as soon as the next obscure crop gets splashed all over the pages of Gourmet magazine and chatted up by Emeril Lagasse.

Kimball’s not putting all his tomatoes, so to speak, in one basket, but as long as they’re fashionable, he said, he’ll keep production high.

“It’s costly, but it means I can handle large orders,” he said, including a recent inquiry from Whole Foods Market.

The heirloom investment is high for local farmers. The seeds have to be purchased from exclusive seed saver organizations and they cost more than other cultivars. Plus, the yield is perpetually inconsistent. It’s impossible to tell, Kimball admits, from one year to the next, how any variety will fare. When the weather doesn’t cooperate, the plants can’t abide much abuse. If a variety fails, that’s a lot of hours and upfront costs gone to waste.

“Sometimes, you’ll get a lot of one variety, and with others, just one or two decent tomatoes,” said Pat Cady, who, with his wife Drema, runs Country Dreams Farm in Mason, where there are 4,000 tomatoes of all varieties popping up this year.

“The risk with heirlooms,” Cady said, “is what makes them special.”

Special to the sort who can afford them, of course. And clearly there’s a population of city dwellers and suburbanites who’ll pony up a few extra bucks for the experience of heirlooms, and the bragging rights.

For now, the Cadys say that translates to gold for small farmers. And there it will stay, because it’s something people want and they can’t get it at the grocery store. Not yet, anyway.