ShareThisAfter an extraordinary jump in tomato exports in 2008, California canneries are paying record prices and asking farmers to deliver a record crop.
But drought is squeezing planting in key parts of the Central Valley, and it's not clear the state will be able to deliver on the 26.6 billion-pound request.
With prices up 17 percent over last year, though, tomatoes are sprouting wherever there's water, from Sutter County to Delta islands and the Salinas Valley.
"You're seeing new growers enter the fray," said Don Cameron, a Fresno County farmer who sits on the board of the California Tomato Growers Association.
Canneries reported in January that they intended to contract for 308,000 acres of tomatoes -- up 11 percent from last year. Seedlings are already being transplanted in some fields from Los Banos to Colusa. But rain and snowfall totals in the next few weeks will determine what, if anything, is ultimately planted on thousands of Valley acres.
"That's the big moving target," said John Brennan, a farmland appraiser in Colusa. Tomato acreage totals are reported in late May.
Booming sales across the Atlantic drove most of last year's tomato explosion. The phase-out of subsidies to the European canning-tomato industry opened the market to California's lower-priced product. Total exports more than doubled. Sales to Italy alone jumped from $10 million in 2007 to $74 million.
The weak dollar helped. Now that it's stronger, sales may drop, said Nick Kastle, a spokesman for Woodland's Morning Star Co., which runs the world's largest tomato-paste plant in Williams.
Last year, California farmers grew around 23 billion pounds of processing tomatoes. That's roughly 20 times the size of the state's harvest of fresh tomatoes.
Processing tomatoes are churned into everything from ketchup to pizza sauce. California accounts for more than 90 percent of U.S. production. Processing tomatoes are Yolo County's top crop, and about a third of the state harvest comes from within 75 miles of Sacramento.
It's not clear how the increase in the value of processing tomatoes will impact retail prices of foods that contain them.
E-mail Jim Downing of The Sacramento Bee at jdowning(at)sacbee.com.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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