Organic tomato farmers in the northwest of the USA have been badly hit by late blight this year. New York Times Op-ed author Dan Barber blames heirloom varieties and the surge in home gardening.
Whether you thank Pollan or blame Wall Street, more than a third of American households is growing some of their own food this year, says the National Gardening Association. Home gardening has created a strong demand for tomato plants. And Walmart brings in truckloads of infected plantlets from the South, thus giving late blight an early start in unchecked terrain.
Barber suggests the use of education (plant pathology in the secondary school curriculum?) 1.
For all the new growers out there, what’s missing is not the inspiration, it’s the expertise, the agricultural wisdom and technical knowledge.
And those heirloom tomato varieties that farmers increasingly grow are highly susceptible to late blight. So why not use plant breeding?
It’s nostalgia when I celebrate heirloom tomatoes. These venerable tomato varieties are indeed important to preserve, and they’re often more flavorful than conventional varieties. But in our feverish pursuit of what’s old, we can marginalize the development of what could be new. (…) like the Mountain Magic tomato, an experimental variety from Cornell University that appears to be resistant.
And then there is diversity:
The other day I saw a farmer who was growing 30 or so different crops, with several varieties of the same vegetable. Some were heirloom varieties, many weren’t. He showed me where he had pulled out his late blight-infected tomato plants and replaced them with beans and an extra crop of Brussels sprouts for the fall. He won’t make the same profit as he would have from the tomato harvest, but he wasn’t complaining, either.
The observation that retailers and home gardeners, and heirloom varieties, may have caused a major shift in a crop disease is very interesting. But the evidence is rather anecdotal. Perhaps it was just the weather? I would like to know more. I am sure the plant pathologists at Cornell are working on it.
