When it comes to tomatoes, California's extreme weather is serving up uncertainty and risk for growers and Bay Area restaurateurs.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Tommaso's Restaurant in San Francisco's North Beach serves up some of the most authentic Italian food outside of the"Bel paese."
"Sixty gallons a week of tomato sauce and about 10 cases of fresh tomatoes," Crotti's wife Anna said as she took a break from preparing sauce for the restaurant. "A lot of it has to do with the weather. It will be another really rough tomato season," Crotti's sister Carmen said. "There's a lot of tomatoes in the ground right now but the real challenge is going to come at harvest time," farmer Cannon Michael said. Fresh market and processing tomatoes is the largest crop on his 11,000-acre farm.In California, tomatoes are planted, harvested and processed according to a staggered, state-wide schedule.
Eleven tomato processors operate 16 plants throughout the Central Valley. If the extreme weather continues, the impact could be crushing. There could be bottlenecks at the plants. Because of shortened planting season, a very unusual situation has cropped up. The nonprofit CTGA told KPIX that, instead of 28 percent of the crop being processed after mid-September, 50 percent of the state's tomatoes will now get processed. That is an unusually large percentage so late in the season.
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