Red Sun Farms has an exclusive on an organic grape tomato in Canada. “It’s a variety called Terneto, and it’s an excellent seed variety,” says Harold Paivarinta. “We just picked our first tomatoes, and they’re already brixing at nine, so it’s only going to get better. We also have it in trials in Mexico right now, but they haven’t started producing yet. The plans are to produce them in the US eventually as well, but when Ohio was ready to start planting, we didn’t have that exclusivity in place yet.” The tomato has a deep-red colour, and is primarily a snacking tomato. It’s currently sold mainly to retail.Organic
Harold continues: “Production is estimated to be just over two million pounds this year. Based on the results we’ve seen so far, I expect we’ll continue expanding in coming years. Right now, we’re selling Terneto in 2-pound bowls, one and a half-pound bowls, and a fibre-based pint.”
Ohio
Golden Sun is one of the Red Sun Farms in Ohio, USA. “We expanded quite a bit in that area, we put 19 acres up there, as a first phase. It’s fully lit, we’ve got over 9,000 lights in the facility. Although we’re only running just a short season now, from April to July, we’ll start our normal season in November, and that will run until July. So we’ll have product under lights in the winter time.”
Backyard tomatoes
“It’s quite a trend in the US and Canada that people grow their own tomatoes. It makes sense for us as an organisation to strategically stagger our production so that the lowest months are typically the slowest months. There’s no point in having peak production when all the backyard gardeners are harvesting their own fruit. It becomes too challenging to be at peak production during the summer months. We understand that and we know there’s always going to be a place for local produce. We try to help the local economy by kind of down-scaling our production during these local seasons,” Harold concludes.
For more information:
Harold Paivarinta
Red Sun Farms
haroldp@redsunfarms.com
www.redsunfarms.com