Last call for lettuce on Owatonna

Bushel Boy owner Jay Johnson plucks a beefsteak tomato from the vine on Friday. Johnson said the cold snap in Florida had no affect on business at the 20 acre greenhouse operation, which produces 140,000 pounds of tomatoes during this time of year.

By CLARE KENNEDY

ckennedy@owatonna.com

OWATONNA — For the last two years, Bushel Boy Farms has cultivated live heads of lettuce and delicate shoots of basil, but no more. The greenhouse grower is getting back to basics: Beefsteaks, vine-ons and Baby Boys.

“This is the last week of basil and lettuce. We’re going to discontinue both of them,” said owner Jay Johnson. “We’re just going to focus on tomatoes.”

“We had a hard time controlling the quality, not so much here but when it got to the store,” Johnson said.

The greens are grown in a carefully calibrated environment in Bushel Boy’s 20-acre indoor farm where the temperature is always a lovely 75 degrees, the humidity is 80 percent and the “sun” always shines.

“If it’s really cold outside and the humidity in the stores is like 10 percent, it’s really hard for the plants to adjust to that so they would dry up,” Johnson said. “It just didn’t sell that well when it didn’t look perfect.”

Basil — a tropical herb that originated in South Asia and the Pacific rim — is particularly sensitive. If exposed to even mildly cold temperatures the plant will go from succulent to spoiled.

“If it gets below 50 degrees for just a little bit it turns brown the next day, instantly,” Johnson said. “To try and get it here to a grocery store and from a grocery store to someone’s house when it’s 20 below zero it’s almost impossible, as a live plant.”

Instead, the grower will continue to expand into tomatoes, which will take up areas that previously housed the greens. This is not a response to recent misfortunes in Florida, however, Johnson said.

In January, a lengthy cold snap annihilated about two-thirds of the tomato crop in Florida, the nation’s only source for open-air tomatoes during winter months. Tomato crops were not the only produce impacted by the cold. The frigid temperatures also wiped out fields of green beans, squash and sweet corn. As a result, prices have “gone berserk” in the words of Rick Fritz, the produce manager at Hy-Vee Food Store in Owatonna, even if the quality of the goods is fair at best.

In spite of the increase in price, tomato sales had picked up a bit said Max Dains, store director at the Hy-Vee Food Store in Owatonna.

“Once everyone heard they’d be scarce, they picked up. People started buying more even though the price has practically doubled,” Dains said. “They’re afraid they won’t be able to get them for a while. We’ve been able to get tomatoes from Mexico, but they’re not high quality so we haven’t bought much from them.”

Back at Bushel Boy, Johnson said the Floridian tomato famine has not had much of an impact — good or bad — on his company’s business.

“We supply about 170 grocery stores and they weren’t buying from Florida, so it really didn’t affect our business that much,” Johnson said. “We are getting quite a few more phone calls from new people who aren’t our current customers, but we really don’t have any extra product for them, so we can’t supply them at the moment.”

Johnson said it is unlikely that they could fill in that gap, even if they had the juice. Bushel Boy delivers the tomatoes directly to grocery stores, which limits their range.

“When you’re just delivering tomatoes, you really have to be close, if you’re going to go direct to the store like we do and not to warehouses. We try to pick the tomato when it’s this red. That’s when the sugars get transferred from the plant to the tomato. And if you’re going to pick them this red, you really have to get them into the store within a day or two or it doesn’t work,” Johnson said. “If you’re going to go through a warehouse or distributor, you have to pick them green like everyone else does and then they don’t taste as good.”

The company just expanded into Rochester last week. Johnson said they would not likely go much further than that in the near future.

“I’d say 99 percent of what we produce has always gone to the metro area. We do a couple stores here, CashWise and Hy-Vee, and we’ve done four stores in Mankato, but other than that everything has gone to the metro,” he said.

The company may add another item to their repertoire, however. Bushel Boy may introduce cocktail tomatoes, a mid-size model that is all the rage in Europe.

“You can do anything with it, cut it and put it on a salad, eat it as a snack. It’s a high flavor tomato, bigger than a cherry tomato but smaller than a regular tomato,” Johnson said. “We’re testing it right now, not sure if we’re going to do it.”

Clare Kennedy can be reached at 444-2376.

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Member Opinions: By: JonathanM on 3/12/10 man that's really too bad, BB lettuce was my favorite. By: ss_observing on 3/12/10 The Basil was awesome, too, but I know what they mean about how fast it can spoil. By: firemanfrank on 3/13/10 I loved how the basil came as the entire plant and not just some leaves and stems in a plastic case. That's too bad I won't be able to purchse it like that anymore. By: trzosold on 3/15/10 That SUCKS - the basil gets us through the winter so we can still make caprise salad. We ALWAYS but it each time we go to the store. AND, we enjoy buying local which is virtually impossible in MN. Whatever is best for the bottom line, I guess, but Bushel Boy, know there are dedicated customers who are VERY disappointed. By: quinn on 3/15/10 Hey I don't know if this will help anyone out, but have you ever tried an Aero Garden? They rock during the winter when it's hard to grow herbs indoors. By: Missy on 3/16/10 We too are sad to hear that the basil and lettuce will no longer be available for purchase. However, after seeing what 2 BB tomatoes cost us the other day - we will no longer be purchasing those. We like to buy from local groups, but there hasn't really been any cost savings to do so By: Towanda on 3/17/10 I understand BB, and I'll miss fresh greens which were always high quality, but don't worry - I'll continue to be a faithful 'mater customer. Buying local is ALWAYS worth it.
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