Tomato Prices: Who's Making The Money??

Atlanta Journal Constitution
Jan. 19th, 2005

Florida in a tomato glut

A fall tomato shortage has turned into a glut that Florida growers say has forced them to abandon sixty million pounds on the vine in the last few days, generating pledges of help Tuesday from the State. Florida Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson flew from Tallahassee to see the problem for himself, meet with growers and announce a national marketing campaign intended to jump-start demand for a product priced as high as $3.99 a pound since early November.

Yup...our local Publix in Canton, Georgia has been selling tomatoes at $3.95 a pound for the past several weeks.

Grower are getting 12 cents a pound. The combination of grudgingly slow retail price declines following the shortage and rock-bottom prices paid to growers since Thanksgiving have left tons of fresh tomatoes unpicked from farms south of Miami to the Tampa Bay area. Growers have no nearby canneries to turn to. "This is like a wake without a scheduled date for the burial," former grower Luis Rodriguez, Florida Farmers Inc.'s trade adviser, said as he stood beside a field full of tomatoes but no pickers. "The consumer is getting gouged, and the farmer is leaving his crop in the field."