From Laughingstock to Eye of the Storm: A Small Machine Wreaks Havoc on California’s Tomato Industry
Foodthink Author Qi Miao
A graduate student in Community Development at the University of California, Davis, focused on rebuilding sustainable food systems and alternative food networks, particularly the development of consumer cooperatives in China. She also works part-time for the Community Alliance of Family Farms (CAFF) in California, serving as a Farm to School/Hospital programme assistant, building connections between California family farms and local schools and hospitals, promoting the consumption of locally produced food, and stimulating the local economy.
1
A “Tomato Revolution” Sparked by One Machine
In the 1950s, a plant breeder and an engineer at the University of California, Davis, decided to team up and invent a tomato harvester. Yet every model they designed encountered various failures during trial runs: either the tomatoes were crushed by the machine during harvesting, or the machine broke when it hit a hard clump of soil. Meanwhile, the invention project became a ten-year “laughingstock” of the Department of Plant Sciences at the university: during the Second World War (1942), the US and Mexican governments signed a series of agreements allowing Mexican workers to labour on American farms—the Bracero Program. The programme brought a large influx of low-wage, hard-working Mexican farm workers to the United States—who would ever bother using such a difficult machine?
As the old saying goes, human plans cannot match heaven’s will. In 1964, the US terminated the Mexican short-term labour programme, and by then Mexican farm workers already accounted for 80% of the tomato-picking workforce. Farm owners suddenly lost a vast supply of cheap labour. By a stroke of fortunate timing, the tomato harvester that the two scientists had been developing also achieved a breakthrough around the same period. The companion-bred hybrid tomato variety VF-145, designed to be easier to machine-harvest, had also been released. As a result, California’s entire tomato industry had no choice but to take the risk of adopting this new machine and its companion variety.
Driven jointly by mechanical experts, investors, and the university’s agricultural extension station, California’s processing tomatoes industry rapidly underwent a “makeover,” completing its mechanisation: within five years, 99.9% of processing tomatoes were harvested mechanically; the vast majority of farms began planting hybrid tomato varieties that were easy to machine-harvest but bland in taste; and the tomato processing industry upgraded its equipment to suit the new varieties, no longer paying a premium for hand-harvested tomato varieties with better flavour. As for the fate of the Mexican workers who lost their jobs and income, that is another story.
Who could have predicted that the tomato harvester—once a laughingstock in the ivory tower—would turn California’s tomato cultivation and processing industry upside down a decade later. Image source: UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences
California is the United States’ most important base for tomato cultivation and ketchup production, and these industrial changes therefore had enormous social impact: to make the expensive harvesters work to their full potential, the larger the farm area the better, which pushed small farms unable to purchase more land or equipment out by well-capitalised large enterprises. In the five years following the introduction of the harvester, 4,428 of California’s 5,000 tomato farms went bankrupt or were absorbed, and 32,000 farm workers lost their jobs. Of course, there is another way to tell this story: the invention of the tomato harvester saved California’s tomato industry from the loss of cheap labour. Without it, California’s vast tomato cultivation and processing industry would almost certainly have relocated to Mexico in its entirety as the Mexican short-term workers departed.
2
The Agricultural Technology “Treadmill”: Constant Upgrading—Easy to Get On, Hard to Get Off
The use of harvesters and other agricultural machinery greatly increased farm efficiency, reduced production costs, and profoundly changed the structure of agricultural production. On the one hand, mechanisation reduced the demand for labour in agricultural production, with an extremely high output per unit of labour. On the other hand, farm sizes gradually grew larger, the number of small family farms plummeted, and the economic structure and community relationships in rural areas underwent enormous change. As the chart legend shows, from 1910 to 2007, alongside farm mechanisation, the number of small family farms in the US dropped by 65%, with the largest decline among farms of 100 acres (600 mu) or less. Farmland shifted from ownership by local residents’ family farms to ownership by outside large corporations and conglomerates. Between 1910 and 2007, the total cultivated area changed little, but data from the US Department of Agriculture shows that in 1910, the average farm size across the US was 138 acres (828 mu), while by 2007 the average had reached 418 acres (2,058 mu).
Image source: Ryan Galt, lecture on rural change in the industrialised world.
There are many reasons for the decline in the number of family farms, and the development of agricultural mechanisation is one of the most important factors. Agricultural machinery, especially large-scale machinery, requires large contiguous areas of land and a single crop variety to function more “efficiently,” driving agriculture toward monoculture and large-scale development. On the surface, this “economies of scale” model seems unproblematic. But upon closer examination, it brings far-reaching negative effects on biodiversity, rural community development, consumer choice, and food culture.
For small family farms, first of all, they find it difficult to bear the initial investment in farm machinery, and the pressure to expand land area brought about by mechanisation only makes things worse. Even if they can afford to invest in machinery, because their farm area is relatively small, the per-unit cost of mechanised production is still far higher than that of large farms, and they remain uncompetitive in price.
Moreover, once farmers begin using new agricultural technologies, they find themselves helplessly drawn into a never-ending “arms race” of constantly upgrading to the latest machinery and agricultural inputs. This phenomenon is known as the “Technology Treadmill” —the farmers who first adopt a given agricultural technology see their production efficiency rise and their costs fall below those of farmers who have not adopted it, enabling them to earn greater profits; but as more and more farmers adopt the same technology, overall output rises, prices fall, and profits keep shrinking. In capitalist agricultural production, every farmer is locked in a highly competitive relationship, and to survive in this competition, farmers have no choice but to keep upgrading to new technologies and new products. If they do not step onto this ever-running treadmill, the only outcome is losing their land and being absorbed by the winners of the competition—which is why many farmers take on debt to update their farm equipment. But even those who do step onto the treadmill cannot escape the fate of “invest in new technology—incur debt—bankruptcy.” After all, the technologies of 21st-century chemical agriculture, from giant machinery to expensive seeds to various inputs such as pesticides and chemical fertilisers, are not elements that ordinary farmers can fully understand and master, and the prices are increasingly set by ever more monopolistic large corporations. Farmers can neither determine agricultural production costs nor set product prices; squeezed from both sides, how can any of them survive intact?
3
The “Free Will” Myth in the Supermarket
So how does agricultural mechanisation affect the food on our plates? When it comes to food choices, consumers often believe they have the greatest degree of agency and freedom of choice. Supermarkets and markets are full of a dazzling array of agricultural products with many options—but is that really the case? (See Foodthink original: Popular North American Supermarket Strategy: Shop the Perimeter, Avoid the Middle Aisles!) When I visited a multinational seed company in the California Central Valley region, what impressed me most was in a trial field for a bell pepper variety, where the lead researcher held up a bell pepper and asked us if we knew why its lower end was square-shaped. The reason was that this shape made the pepper easier to package and promote in supermarkets—it stands up more easily on display—so it was bred and cultivated in this shape. In other words, the consumer’s “free choice” of a bell pepper in the supermarket is actually something that has already been decided and pre-arranged by the bell pepper growing, processing, and retail industries.
Bell pepper varieties were originally diverse in shape and colour, but big capital only loves to breed the one that can stand upright on a supermarket shelf. Photo | Qi Miao
As Carolyn Thomas, a professor at the University of California, Davis, has pointed out, the tomato harvester was not merely a technological innovation; it also gave scientists a new breakthrough in their thinking about agricultural development. To make a product more competitive, breeders developing new varieties also had to meet the machine’s requirements: which variety is best suited for machine harvesting, processing, and transport? This has nothing to do with traditional breeding objectives that are genuinely valuable and truly beneficial to farmers and consumers, such as increasing yield, adapting to climate, resisting pests and diseases, and enriching flavour. And so, once you have the tomato harvester, you need a tomato variety better suited to machine harvesting—VF-145, colloquially known as the “square tomato” (which is not actually square in shape, but rather slightly less round than other tomato varieties, to prevent it from rolling off the machine’s conveyor belt).
The “square tomato’s” suitability for machine harvesting and long-distance transport solved a problem that had plagued the entire tomato processing industry for a long time; the vast majority of ketchup in the United States is now made from this type of tomato. In fact, this variety is notoriously bland in flavour, but because mechanised harvesting lowered the price, ketchup, tomato juice, and other processed product manufacturers were willing to buy it: after all, the taste can be adjusted later by adding salt, sugar, and other additives. As for the health risks to consumers from the high salt, high sugar, and additives, that falls outside the food industry’s consideration.
The “square tomato” (VF-145) is not truly square, merely slightly angular in shape. Even fully ripe fruit remains “sturdy,” resistant to cracking, and detaches easily from the stem, making it suitable for machine harvesting. But this tomato is also notorious for its bland taste. Source: KQED
It follows that in a traditional market heavily monopolised by large agricultural corporations, where information is far from transparent, consumers’ freedom of choice is largely reduced to selecting one shelf brand over another. As for which products actually make it onto the shelf—and whether they are tastier, more nutritious, or healthy enough—consumers are often more willing than able to do anything about it.
4
Industrial Masterpiece vs Small Farmers’ Rights
The story of the tomato harvester does not end here. This masterpiece of industrialised agriculture—the machine that saved California’s tomato industry—coincidentally also propelled California’s sustainable agriculture movement. In 1979, the predecessor of a California-based grassroots organisation, the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF), began a decade-long lawsuit against the University of California, Davis. The cause was that the development of the tomato harvester at UC Davis violated the US Hatch Act of 1887, which stipulates that agricultural research funding provided by the federal government should support family farms rather than large agricultural corporations. Although CAFF ultimately lost the lawsuit in 1989, over those ten years, the advocacy of CAFF and numerous organic agriculture activists sparked intense public debate over who should benefit from the scientific and technological research conducted at public universities.
Since its founding, CAFF, like many organisations working in sustainable agriculture, has consistently focused on small family farms, providing them with technical support for sustainable agricultural development, creating a fair market environment, and conducting policy advocacy in favour of small farmers. Because the expansion of large-scale mechanised agriculture is often built on the absorption and plunder of small, diverse farms, small farmers cannot compete with large agricultural corporations, whether in agricultural policy subsidies or in market competition. In fact, whether in California or in the vast majority of the world, small farmers remain the backbone of agricultural production. According to 2012 data, the average California farm is 328 acres (1,968 mu), yet 65% of farms are small farms with an area below 50 acres (300 mu).
The left is a map showing the global distribution of small farms under 10 hectares (150 mu); the right is a map showing the distribution of farms larger than 150 mu. It can be seen that small-scale farms are most widely distributed in Asia, accounting for approximately 85%, while nearly half of the large farms are located in the Americas. Image source: FAO, 2014
The lawsuit sparked by the tomato harvester ultimately also gave rise to two research institutions focused on small farmers and sustainable agriculture: one is the UC Davis Small Farms Project, dedicated to providing market and farm management guidance to small farms; the other is the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Project (SAREP), established at UC Davis in 1985 as the nation’s first such programme, which has provided enormous research and human resources for California’s sustainable agriculture movement from the 1980s to the present.
On 16 September 2017, CAFF partnered with Farmers Guild, another organisation equally focused on small farmers, to hold the fourth annual California “Agricultural Games”—a joyous celebration of music, local food, sustainable agriculture, and family farms. Image source: CAFF
5
Reflection Does Not Mean “Anti-Mechanisation”
The invention of the tomato harvester and its far-reaching impact offer us a lens through which to understand the agricultural and social transformations brought about by mechanisation, and to consider how a single technology shapes the food on our tables and our everyday lives. Mechanisation is a defining characteristic of industrialised agriculture, but we cannot simply blame “mechanisation” as the culprit behind the absorption of countless small farms, the mass unemployment of farm workers, and the loss of food diversity. Nor are we calling for an anti-“mechanisation” stance, nostalgically romanticising a pastoral idyll of small-scale farming. But we must seriously grapple with the internal logic of industrialised agriculture—grow or die. Under this logic, competitors must continuously ramp up chemical inputs and intensify mechanisation, chasing the maximisation of productivity, increasing output while cutting costs—only in this way can they stay ahead of rivals and survive in the market. And as globalisation intensifies, this game of competition will only grow faster and more ruthless. Under the dominance of this logic, large-scale mechanised production is inevitably a big stick wielded by capital, reduced to a tool for plundering the vulnerable small farmers who constitute the vast majority of the world’s agricultural producers.
The image shows a small CSA farm; the number of parked vehicles indicates that many farm workers are at work here. On the right is a large mechanised almond orchard, with no vehicles on either side and no farm workers at work.
The invention of a tomato harvester met the California tomato industry’s needs to reduce labour costs and boost productivity, triggered a decade-long lawsuit over whether technology research at public universities should serve small farmers or capital, and coincidentally built momentum for sustainable agriculture in California—from then on, sustainable agriculture was no longer a trivial pastime of a group of hippies but grew into a prominent social movement. As we look back on this history, we can imagine: had the tomato harvester and other machinery, along with mechanisation-related policies, subsidies, and the like, been designed from the small farmer’s perspective—from farm worker welfare, food diversity, flavour, and environmental considerations—they would have been very different, wouldn’t they? The tomatoes on our tables today would probably be very different too.
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Foodthink does not oppose agricultural mechanisation or technological progress. On the contrary, we look forward to seeing more and better technologies that serve the sustainable development of agriculture and are usable by ordinary farmers. What Foodthink is vigilant about is how technologies serving industrialised agriculture, under the banner of “development,” “progress,” and “efficiency,” mask the problems they bring about: environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, farmer bankruptcy, rural decline, ingredients losing their flavour, and food that is no longer healthy. These issues are both personal tragedies and dilemmas that human society must ultimately confront. So what kind of technology can both lighten farmers’ labour and bring consumers delicious, healthy food—rather than trapping small farmers on the “Technology Treadmill,” awaiting the fate of “grow or die”? Stay tuned for Foodthink’s next article, in which we will introduce an ecological agriculture machine invented by Australian farmers, how it was shared “farmer to farmer” with China, and how a farmer in Shaanxi Province further adapted it for local conditions, thereby supporting a number of ecological farms.
References:
[1] Tomato harvester changed an industry, Ildi Carlisle-Cummins, https://www.davisenterprise.com/local-news/mechanical-tomato-harvester-the-machine-that-changed-an-industry/
[2] Square tomato, https://localwiki.org/davis/Square_Tomato
[3] Levins, Richard A. 2000. Willard Cochrane and the American family farm. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
[4] 2007 Census of Agriculture: farm numbers. Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Agriculture.
[5] How California farms measure up in the 2012 census of agriculture
[6] Industrial Agriculture and Small-scale Farming
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