Tomatoes

The Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, whose homeland is the Capay Valley along Cache Creek, farms 250 acres of certified-organic land, certified in October 2009. Among its crops are wheat, asparagus, squash, tomatoes and oat hay. The Nation works with the Cache Creek Conservancy on the creek’s banks and has put 1,200 acres under a conservation easement that keeps the land in farming and protects the Swainson’s hawk’s foraging ground.

In southwestern Colusa County, the Kletsel Dehe Wintun Nation, also Patwin, counts more than 400 square miles of ancestral village, hunting and land-management territory, from oak forests and foothills down to the valley plains. Its trust land, the Cortina Rancheria, was set aside on June 26, 1907. Four acorns sit at the center of its seal, honoring what the Nation calls “our primary traditional food source.”

In 1907 California’s canneries took their tomatoes in early September, after the rush of the fruit season, and the fields were usually safe from frost until the middle of November. Growers often got fifteen tons to the acre.

On August 13, 1933, the Sacramento Union wrote up the Bercut-Richards cannery, owned by Peter Bercut and Thomas Richards. Its season opened in spring with asparagus from the Delta, ran through cherries, apricots, peaches and pears, and ended with tomatoes, about 90,000 cases of them. At its peak the plant canned 250 tons of peaches a day. The paper’s photo caption read “Women Everywhere in Main Workroom of Local Cannery.”

Libby, McNeill & Libby opened a cannery at Thirty-first and P streets in June 1913, and the California Packing Corporation, later Del Monte, ran plants on G Street and at Front and P. Campbell’s Sacramento plant began production on September 8, 1947, on 146 acres along Franklin Boulevard. It made soups, sauces and drinks, employed up to 2,000 people at a time, and closed in 2013. The historian Maryellen Burns says the plants employed “thousands, especially women and children from immigrant, Indigenous, and working-class communities.”

Jack Hanna, a UC Davis vegetable breeder, began in the 1940s to breed a firmer tomato that a machine could pick. In 1949 he teamed up with the agricultural engineer Coby Lorenzen, and through the 1950s they refined an experimental harvester. In 1959 they persuaded Blackwelder Manufacturing of Rio Vista to build it. Hanna’s breakthrough was VF145, known as the square tomato. In January 1964 the Sacramento Union reported his “stretched-out tomato,” solid enough, he said, to survive picking and hauling, and long enough to roll.

That year machines picked about 3 percent of California’s crop. The bracero program ended that December, and in 1965 machines picked one-third. Harvest labor fell by 90 percent, and production grew from 2.5 million tons a year in the early 1960s to 10 to 12 million.

In 1979 the California Agrarian Action Project and 19 farmworkers sued the University of California, arguing that its research favored mechanization and large growers over small farmers. They won at trial; on May 25, 1989, the Court of Appeal reversed the judgment.