LYNDEN – In his relentless pursuit of the perfect tomato, Todd McPhail has become a bee.
One day, with a Sonicare electric toothbrush in hand, McPhail walks the rows of his state-of-the-art greenhouse, gently pollinating the blossoms of 4,200 tomato plants.
“This is going to be the best-tasting tomato right now in Whatcom County,” says the 29-year-old Lynden native.
McPhail wants to bring customers the taste of juicy, perfectly ripe tomatoes – grown year-round locally. Some people laughed at him when he announced his intention to sink several hundred thousand dollars into the commercial venture. Tomatoes, crops usually grown in hotter climates such as California, Florida and Mexico, are notoriously difficult to grow in Whatcom County. And McPhail was going to do it using an elaborate hydroponics greenhouse system.
“I went to the bank to get a loan and they were like, ‘What?’ ” he said.
But with the help of Merle Jensen, a Lynden-bred University of Arizona professor and pioneer in controlled environment agriculture, he built a system on the forefront of a technology that could change the way we eat, by making it possible for crops such as tomatoes to be grown anywhere, in any season.
As far as McPhail knows, it’s the only operation of its kind in Washington state.
Tomatoes are one of the most frequently complained about items in the produce department, says Lee Reynolds, director of produce for Haggen, and a 34-year veteran of the business.
Often, they’re sallow and mealy – a world away from the plump crimson orbs that inspire tomato-lovers to make BLT sandwiches and homemade salsa.
That’s because tomatoes are often grown hundreds to thousands of miles away. To make it to grocery stores in decent shape, they’re often picked unripe and trucked over long, bumpy miles. In the process, “tomatoes take a beating,” said Reynolds.
“And tomatoes don’t take beatings very well.”
McPhail, who recently took over operations of McPhail Berry Farm from his parents, has been growing things all his life. His family’s U-pick berry farm has been selling eight varieties of berries, pumpkins, jams and pies since 1990.
He was working at the U-pick field a few summers back when he met a vacationing Jensen.
Jensen is recognized as a global authority in the field of intensive agriculture. He’s part of the University of Arizona’s groundbreaking climate controlled agriculture program.
His past projects included designing a system to grow salad greens for scientists in Antarctica. Jensen, a busy man, wanted to know if McPhail might be interested in growing tomatoes in his own hometown.
As many backyard gardeners know, tomatoes can be tough to grow in Whatcom County, or anywhere that rain falls regularly. The excessive moisture makes them rot, mold and easily pest-ridden. That pretty much rules them out as a commercial crop for most Whatcom County growers.
With effort and a high-quality plant start, it is possible to grow a great tomato, said Nick Guilford, an organic farmer in the Acme area who sells tomatoes and plant starts along with a variety of other produce.
“It’s certainly possible to get some great tomatoes right outside in the garden around here, but the harvest season is so short and the potential for a blight-induced crop failure keep them from being a viable commercial crop out in the field.”
“Tomatoes in America haven’t been very good,” said Jensen, while strolling through McPhail’s humid greenhouse in April.
“We don’t have the right climate.”
He, like everyone who enters, must first disinfect his footwear.
Keeping the crop growing is like walking a tightrope. Germs and bugs from the outside – even the raspberry fields McPhail spends much of the rest of his time in – could invite pestilence and rapid disaster.
“There’s so much you can do in a controlled environment,” McPhail said. “But there is no room for mistakes.”
With controlled environment agriculture, the only climate that matters is inside the greenhouse. In McPhail’s greenhouse, which costs about $20-$25 per square foot, everything is controlled by computer.
Instead of soil, the plants are anchored in ground-up Sri Lankan coconut husks.
Water and nutrients are delivered through a hydroponics system.
The greenhouse’s design regulates light, temperature and humidity.
Even carbon dioxide levels can be controlled down to parts per million, McPhail said.
With all this precision, the growing system can be incredibly efficient, producing up to 10 tons of tomatoes per acre.
But if something – almost anything – goes wrong, the results could be devastating.
So McPhail and his helpers attend to every miniscule detail – no matter the time of day.
“You’re taking it out of a wild environment. You have to do what Mother Nature would.”
If McPhail sees what he calls a “bad bug” – like a common whitefly, a leaf miner or a saltworm caterpillar – on the plants, he’ll get on the Internet and order a package of “good bugs” to be delivered overnight, at hefty expense, to the greenhouse.
He’ll put the good bugs on the tomatoes to eat the bad bugs – but not too many, or they’ll become bad bugs too.
As the tomatoes grew, there were close calls, like when a worker bumped a valve and water didn’t make it to the plants. In a few hours, a row was dying.
Through weekly phone calls, e-mails and digital pictures sent back and forth from Lynden to Arizona, Jensen guides McPhail through the harrowing process of growing the first crop of tomatoes – some small cherry tomatoes, and larger beefsteak varieties.
Reaching tomato perfection “consumes you,” said McPhail, who also has a full-time job at the BP Cherry Point Refinery.
Sometimes, McPhail found himself still in the greenhouse at 3 a.m.
As time went on, the tomatoes grew from tiny buds to beefsteaks heavy as a baseball.
McPhail’s tomatoes impressed Reynolds of Haggen, who held a “taste test.”
“We had one person that didn’t like any of them,” Reynolds said. “It didn’t have that ‘tomatoey-acid taste,’ she said. I told her, ‘This thing eats like candy! You’re absolutely crazy!’ ‘The rest of us loved it.”
So McPhail agreed to supply area Haggen stores with fresh tomatoes as fast as he could grow them. The tomatoes regularly sell out, Reynolds reports. And that’s at $3.49 per pound, compared to $1.99 a pound for more conventional tomatoes.
McPhail is also taking them to Bellingham and Seattle-area farmers’ markets.
Meanwhile, he’ll continue to tend to his delicate crop with the attention of a nurse on an intensive care ward. Standing in his sweltering greenhouse, he leans in to pluck an immaculate scarlet cherry tomato off a vine. He starts to share it with a visitor.
“Wait, wait, no, not that one” he says.
He picks another identical, immaculate tomato.
This one is the perfect tomato.
He holds it in his outstretched hand.
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