Tomatoland (27 page)

A big breakthrough came when he hired a crew of experienced Mexican immigrant workers, veterans of agribusiness operations in California and Florida who had moved to Pennsylvania and settled into the Hispanic community in nearby Reading. Although his new employees found his methods crude, amateurish, and borderline amusing (watering with hand-carried milk jugs? manually pulling weeds? not spraying pesticides?), they were dependable and brought a necessary stability to the Eckerton workforce. Not only could they pace themselves to put in long days in the humid fields, they repaired
machines that broke down without coming to Stark and were skilled handymen, able to perform all the chores a small farm demands. Days became less frenetic. Rented U-Hauls became things of the past when Stark purchased a genuine refrigerated produce truck (albeit one with 191,000 miles on it and a refrigeration unit that blew warm air) and painted tomatoes on it above the farm’s slogan: “Home of the Tomato People.” He was able to rent an additional patch of land with a house that he and Jill moved into. Then, two years ago, he finally became a landowner after purchasing a fifty-eight-acre farm. Today, Eckerton employs fifteen workers with a payroll that can top $12,000 a week during peak times of the season. It is home to thirty thousand tomato plants that Stark starts in his own new greenhouse. He and Jill and their two middle-school-age daughters live in a neat cape in Kutztown, a college town about fifteen minutes from his farm. “As long as I have tomatoes, there’s money to be made,” he said. “But I still get nervous when tomatoes aren’t coming in. Early in the season when we’re just planting and staking, money is pouring out of this place.”

Stark can become wistful when remembering the early years. As the public face of the farm, he spends more of his time managing, marketing, and selling than he does planting, picking, and packing. His worries are not so much about weeds and water as they are about making payroll and dealing with a mid-six-figure bank loan. Nonetheless, when I met him the day before that predawn haul into the city, I immediately understood how idealists who are not familiar with the vicissitudes of agriculture can succumb to romantic illusions. Sunlight shone on the rolling fields with a crisp clarity that only comes on cool autumnal days. Stark, who still has the compact muscled build of his college wrestling days, was in black jeans, a black sweater, and dusty work boots. His light brown hair, which was uncannily free of gray given his age and the stress he has endured, was a tangle of waves that badly needed a trim, and several days had obviously come and gone since a razor had passed over his face. As Stark walked out to a field to check on the progress of a crew of about a dozen
workers picking cherry tomatoes and loading them onto flats beneath the shade of a blue plastic tarpaulin, a fox cavorted on the border of the forest, pouncing occasionally on an unfortunate field mouse or meadow vole. “I still think of myself as more of a gardener than a farmer,” he said. “My secret is that I do everything wrong.”

By the standards of the fresh tomato agribusiness in Florida, he does. Eckerton’s crops are grown for their taste, not for a three-week shelf life and the ability to withstand the rigors of factory packing and shipping. His tomatoes are harvested at the moment of full ripeness, not when they are hard and green. What gets picked on one day is sold the next. Instead of growing in perfect parallel plastic-covered rows of sterilized, weed-free soil, Stark’s crops make do with straw mulch and engage in Darwinian competition with weeds. “We put our plants through hell,” he explained. “Maybe that’s what gives them taste and character.” Where factory farms focus on single varieties of one crop, Stark grows more than one hundred varieties of tomatoes alone, both heirloom and hybrid, in addition to peppers, peas, broccoli, carrots, sweet potatoes, leeks, onions, potatoes, herbs, lettuce, raspberries, kale… and the list goes on.

He isn’t organically certified because, he admits, he is not organized enough to keep up with the paperwork required by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In fact, he’s always rummaging around in search of some lost possession—his cell phone, his wallet, his pen, his to-do list, his checkbook. His computer is regularly on the fritz for one reason or another, making it difficult for customers to contact him by e-mail. “If they want to reach me, they’ll call and leave a phone message,” he said. He keeps none of the detailed seasonal planting charts or harvest records that most commercial growers—even those much smaller than Stark—maintain. Everything is in his head. “His mind is like a calculator,” one of his workers told me. “He remembers everything.”

Besides, he reserves the right to apply inorganic chemicals if he must to ensure the survival of his business. In fourteen years, that has happened precisely once, in 2009, when the northeastern states were
hit with an epidemic of
late blight that would have wiped out his all-important tomato crop. When it became time to spray the vines, Stark insisted on doing it himself rather than expose his workers to potentially dangerous fungicides. He uses no chemical fertilizers, instead relying on ground-in
cover crops, spent compost from nearby mushroom growers, and manure from the horses of a neighbor who is more than happy to have someone take it off his hands. Stark demonstrated the extent of his pest management program to me by stopping mid-sentence and nonchalantly plucking a three-inch tomato horn worm off a plant as we walked by and grinding it under his heel. “I still have a gardener’s mentality,” he said.

The money he saves on chemical fertilizers and pesticides is more than counterbalanced by the costs of the extra labor needed to control weeds and pick crops by hand. And not only is his workforce larger than it would be if he resorted to the tactics of industrial agriculture, it is more fairly compensated. Stark says that paying by the amount picked is simply illogical. Different varieties of tomatoes yield different quantities of fruit. If you’re working a row that’s closer to the packing station than another worker, you will be able to bring in more tomatoes. And workdays at the farm involve numerous duties. Mornings may be taken up with picking, afternoons with packing flats. Some days there is no harvesting at all, and attention shifts to weeding, tilling, or maintaining farm machinery. During the 2010 season,
wages at Eckerton started at $10 per hour for college-age interns (above Pennsylvania’s minimum wage of $9.35) and topped out at $15 an hour for experienced employees. Stark pays bonuses at the end of the year. He provides free housing for his help (the interns are expected to “pay” for their board by milking Eckerton’s single nanny goat) in one of two houses on Stark’s properties. His employees are provided with workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance. Stark has tried to find a health insurance company that will cover them, but so far none has been willing to so much as consider it. “I’m proud to pay a living wage,” he said.

Doing so has advantages. Stark’s second-in-command,
Wayne Miller, has been with him since 1998, and he and his wife recently purchased a house on five acres of land three miles down the road from the farm. Other members of his crew, which includes both men and women and is comprised equally of Mexican immigrants and native-born Americans, arrived in 1999 and 2000. “Farming well is not dummies’ work,” he said. “It would be nice if we all respected it more.”

Stark nonchalantly invited me to accompany him over to a house where some of his employees lived. He had pressed some apples a few days earlier and wanted to pick up one of the jugs of cider he had stored in an extra refrigerator there. We bounced off the paved road onto a long gravel driveway bordered by Eckerton’s trademark ranks of shaggy tomato plants and weeds. The lane ended at a restored nineteenth-century log farmhouse on a hillside overlooking a pond. There were three bedrooms upstairs, each serving as a private space for either a single person or a couple. The downstairs was dominated by a bright, open kitchen with a wall of windows and a snug living room. The place was overdue for a renovation and could have used some general sprucing up but was in no worse shape than other farmhouses in the area that rent for $1,000 or more per month.

Despite its benefits, working for Stark can be trying. In describing himself, he often uses the adjective “cranky” and admits to throwing the occasional temper tantrum, especially during late-night sessions in his packinghouse on the day before market. “I’m not the nicest guy. I find myself saying to staff members, ‘Hey! You can pack and talk at the same time.’” He once caught one of his workers texting friends when they had a line of customers at Greenmarket. She was thereafter demoted to field and packinghouse duties. Looking over full boxes ready to be loaded onto the truck, he became visibly angry when he didn’t see enough cherry tomatoes to fill advance orders from chefs. “They must have more, somewhere,” he said, moving a few stacked boxes to one side. “They better have or there’ll be trouble.” At the market, he pulled Miller aside and pointed to a quart box of salad
tomatoes topped by a fruit bearing a black, oozing gash and icily said, “This does not make me happy. We have to watch how they pack these boxes.” And even though a month had passed,
Stark was still grumbling
about a review in
New York
magazine that rated one of his
Cherokee Purple tomatoes eighth out of eighteen heirloom varieties its reviewers taste tested. “They said they went to each grower and asked for his best. Well, they certainly didn’t come to me. I would have never given them a Cherokee Purple. So who did they go to? I don’t know. At least it didn’t do any harm to my business. My customers still like my tomatoes.”

Miller, who comanages the farm, concentrating on supplying the markets (Ignacio “Nacho” Baltazar oversees field operations), credits Stark’s success to “a decent dose of obsessiveness.” Miller sees his role as part buffer between Stark and the employees and part translator of Stark’s instructions, which tend to be delivered in staccato half-sentences that have no immediately obvious linkage to each other. Miller explained, “Tim will come in and go on for five minutes, and when he’s gone a worker will turn to me and say, ‘What just happened? Did we just decide something?’ and I will have to spell out what Tim wants done. Plus, he is a very emotional person and can let problems build up. He’ll stew for a week or two, and then it will come out in a burst. But there is an endearing charm to Tim. He’s engaging, like an absent-minded professor or an obsessed artist.”

Stark’s longtime customer,
Dave Pasternack, chef owner of
ESCA, an acclaimed seafood restaurant in Manhattan, summed up his personality more succinctly, saying that he was “one-fourth farmer, one-fourth storyteller, and half mad.”

The key to success for farms such as Eckerton, Stark says, is clever
niche marketing. His mantra is “eliminate the middleman.” In so doing, he contends that
small farmers can become price makers, not price takers like those who produce commodity crops and sell into vast distribution networks. Even the largest Florida tomato grower is at the mercy of violent swings in market prices that are completely
beyond his control—a freeze sends prices soaring or a stretch of good weather can result in too many tomatoes ripening at once and flooding the market. And if doing away with middlemen means hauling yourself out of bed at three o’clock in the morning three or four days a week from May through November, so be it.

The sun had yet to rise when Stark and I emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan’s West Side. In the hours just before dawn, New York’s sidewalks were eerily devoid of pedestrians. Instead of horn-blaring yellow cabs, side streets were crammed with double-parked box trucks and delivery vans, each tended by a driver in the process of off-loading pallets and cardboard containers. Stark and I pulled up in front of Becco, a theater-district restaurant owned by the renowned
Lidia Bastianich and her son Joseph. A half-asleep kitchen underling unlocked the door, and we carried in two hundred pounds of assorted salad tomatoes. A few blocks south at ESCA, Stark and I lugged eight cartons of tomatoes down into the subterranean kitchen. Those errands out of the way, we headed downtown to Union Square, pulling up just as the eastern horizon began to brighten.

Miller and another Eckerton employee had driven into the city in the farm’s big truck, a faithful 1991 Hino that has logged 250,000 miles ferrying produce from Pennsylvania to Manhattan. They had already set up the booth, covering the tables with the farm’s trademark colorful tablecloths, which were immediately obscured by boxes overflowing with vibrant tomatoes and chiles—red, yellow, orange, purple, green. Even though it was still well before opening time, a cluster of women speaking in lilting Caribbean accents jostled for prime positions in front of one of the tables. As soon as an Eckerton worker put out a carton filled with bright yellow Grenada seasoning peppers, which are flavorful but not particularly hot, I understood why: Within minutes, every pepper had vanished, and then disappeared again when the carton was refilled. The day’s first customers walked away toward the subway with bulging shopping bags. Stark had yet to sell a tomato, but the birth of this small sideline to his main
business demonstrates his niche marketing philosophy in action. Several years ago, a Grenadian woman approached him at the market and held out a single pepper and told him that he would have eager customers if he grew them. A less savvy farmer might have smiled and tossed the pepper on the ground as soon as she turned away. Stark saved the seeds and by the following July had added another popular item to his product line.

As the morning wore on, the market filled with shoppers. Two interns manned the front of the Eckerton stand, handing over produce, making change, and restocking tables as customers picked up cardboard containers that sold for $3.25 to $4 depending on the variety and size, a dollar more expensive than the cheapest tomatoes in area supermarkets at the time, but less expensive than on-vine greenhouse tomatoes and plastic boxes of cherry or grape tomatoes. But the real action went down behind the scenes off the back of the truck, where Stark and Miller, working from memory and a hand-scribbled list, personally filled the advance orders of their restaurant customers, who account for 60 to 70 percent of Eckerton’s business. A parade of sous chefs from New York’s premier eateries—Jean Georges, Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park, Babbo, Blue Hill, Daniel, Four Seasons, Telepan, Savoy, and Otto, to name a few—pushed carts or hailed taxis from behind stacks of produce flats beside the curb. Stark first-named his customers, engaging them in steady, lighthearted banter and jokes.