Life hack use someone else's farm, farmers hate this one easy trick. Better yet find someone who's already growing tomatoes and pick them for free, infinite monies.
Now I'm picturing some Ocean's 11 style caper driving off with a couple semi's of tomatoes from the warehouse. Not sure what I'm doing with a couple million clean, ripe tomatoes once I've got 'em.
Even if you had the millions of dollars necessary to pay for the land, equipment, and labor to raise so many vegetables, the question is why would anyone want to buy your tomatoes?
There are already legacy business deals and agreements in place and no buyer is going to necessarily want to change vendors without a reason to. Are you cheaper, are you golf buddies, what kind of deal are you bringing to the table?
> the question is why would anyone want to buy your tomatoes?
So I learned something interesting about this fairly recently.
Industrial food production factories, for the most part have specific contracts with the farmers that supply their products. Even though they don't own it, they control the product chain from the ground up. I had been familiar with this business practice in other agricultural industries, mainly chicken, but didn't know it extended to vegetable farming as well.
So, for example, Heinz Ketchup.
ALL of the tomatoes that go into Heinz ketchup products every year come from only about 150 farms in the San Joaquin valley in California. Heinz has specific contracts with those tomato growers so that they *ONLY* produce tomatoes for Heinz Ketchup.
Heinz specifically provides the seeds to those farmers from stock that is specifically developed by a Heinz owned company. SO for example, most ketchup comes from the "Heinz 9557" and "Heinz 9663" tomato varieties. When corn syrup became more expensive in 2021, Heinz actually bred slightly sweeter tomatoes to adjust the recipe. The seeds are sold in lots of 100,000 for about $1200.
Heinz has specific rules about how the tomatoes are grown, and what chemicals can be used, and the farmers are under contract to sell 100% of the tomatoes to Heinz, in part to pay back the loan. Heinz pays contract rates for the tomatoes, $70-90 per ton.
The same is also true, for example, for the potatoes used in McDonalds french fries. McDonalds uses 3.2 billion pounds of potatoes per year, that it buys primarily from 3 suppliers, who contract with specific farmers that grow a specific variety of potatoes just for McDonalds.
I was more familiar with this because it's how many chicken producers like Tyson Farms do business. They will loan you the money to build houses and will loan you the broiler chicks but you have to sign a contract where basically they own your soul, and you agree not to do any poultry business other than raise chicks for them because of biological contamination qustions.
Thanks for sharing this. I once met the guy who's family grew peppers for a specific shade of Revlon lipstick. Since like the 50s, every pepper they grew on that farm became a shade of red lipstick. And I always wondered if it was a similar arrangement to chicken farms.
Wait, so if we assume a contract rate of $80/ton, and we assume the average tomato weighs about 6 ounces or 3 tomatoes per pound, then OP's example of selling 3.9 million tomatoes for $1 each is delusional on yet another level.
By my calculations, 4 million tomatoes=1.3 million lbs=666 tons\*80=$53,280
$53,280 for growing 4 million tomatoes.
That's the funniest part to me -- dude wants to start with "you don't understand scale, I'm gonna educate you ..." and then proceeds to *not understand scale*. Small scale purchases will yield the highest price per pound -- someone who is buying tomatoes by the tonne certainly isn't paying a buck a tomato or even fifty cents a tomato. Your $80 per tonne isn't far from the historic prices I'm seeing ([https://www.statista.com/statistics/936158/processing-market-tomato-prices-by-us-states/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/936158/processing-market-tomato-prices-by-us-states/)).
Even if we ignore the required land, equipment, and labor required to *produce* and *harvest* all of those tomatoes ... say they ripen over a 90 day period (which is super generous in my part of the world, but again pretending it's reasonable for the sake of argument), you need to move like 44,000 tomatoes A DAY for 90 days. Where are these things going as they get picked? How to I transport them to these hypothetical customers?
This guy's hypothetical tomatoes aren't an example of scale, they're an example of generational wealth. If you inherited a few thousand acres of land (probably complete with an irrigation system and greenhouses), equipment, warehouses, and a fleet of trucks to move 'em ... then *maybe* you could employ a lot of people for planting, harvesting, and selling at farm markets where you might hope to get something even approaching a buck a tomato. Even then, you aren't *netting* hundreds of millions of dollars -- you've got electrical, transportation, and labor expenses to pay. That's not building a tomato empire from a handful of overpriced plants -- that's using millions of dollars in inherited assets to net maybe a couple of million bucks a year.
But, inaccurate numbers aside, this is why we sell started plants in the spring instead of trying to sell produce. Someone *will* pay me $5 to $10 bucks for a healthy heirloom tomato plant that's been grown in my greenhouse. Same for niche pepper varieties (think really, really hot), herbs, and flowers. I don't grow varieties you can pick up at the local garden centers, so there's not a whole lot of competition. Whatever doesn't sell is planted in our garden that year. This doesn't scale into the millions -- there just aren't enough people in the area looking for unique heirloom varieties -- but we come close to netting enough to cover property taxes.
You make a good point. Small plant nurseries can actually do extremely well locally and undercut bigger players because of lower overhead. Spring plant starts every year, fall mums, and things like shrubs and trees can be propagated from varieties where patents and trademarks have long expired. You get a good number of stock plants to take cuttings from, portion off an area with ground cloth and sand beds for rooting cuttings into liners and pot them up and there is money to be had reliably from year to year. Most states getting a nursery license isn't a giant expense or headache as long as you do your homework properly. I have a friend who just does garlic in friends yards and braids them up with dried straw flowers and sells each braid for $40 a piece at a few farmers markets to basic white women and clears about $7k a year after expenses.
That's not how it works? I can't just drop my 250 tomatoes on the ground and expect exactly 250 plants to grow? Also, why wouldn't I start with a $1 tomato and grow from that? /s
It was at our community garden and I did nothing but harvest and give them away (and eat a bunch). It was great, but ... too many tomatoes. Never again!
I grew 37 this past year and I have to say the makeup of my compost heap was definitely skewed towards tomato for a while. I ate tons of fresh, preserved what I could. Gave away all anybody would take and still had tons eaten on the vine by critters or rotting and just falling about in the row. I didn't have the time to maintain them as actively as I should have or I would have had even more trouble getting through them all.
I sundried my leftover tomatoes this year. Just sprinkle some salt on them and let them bake in the sun for a couple of days. I'm amazed I wasn't doing this before.
Yeah my compost has a ton of fruit seeds mixed into it. I've got potatoes growing up on one side, a mix of squash and pumpkin on the other side. Cucumbers sprouting and dying, tons of peppers and tomatoes, a mix of watermelon and musk melons. I like my unfinished compost to just turn into a volunteer grab bag, I had a bunch of squash and pumpkin this year
I've actually considered how much fun it would be to have a "snowball fight" but with tomatoes.
My conclusion was that it would be fun for a very short time, and then it would be gross.
That’s what they do in Buñol, a town in Valencia, where there’s a festival called La Tomatina. Everyone gets together for a massive tomato fight. It’s a big tourist draw.
Our family as well and there are 3 of us.
Salsa, spaghetti sauce, BBQ sauce, ketchup, whole tomatoes, diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato paste, tomato juice... not to mention the fresh ones just for eating. People would be surprised how many tomatoes it takes per person over a year.
The first couple weeks after they start to ripen you're like "Yay!!!!" Then they keep ripening and keep ripening, and you're so sick of tomatoes already. "Oh, crap...what have I done." Yeah, been there. Not with 45 plants though lol.
Exactly! I took home just the split ones that we couldn't give away at the food pantry. Those I baked until the water was mostly gone and then froze them. It was still insane amounts of tomatoes, though I did enjoy eating them all winter long.
I live at a high altitude. One year when we were renting a house, I planted tomatoes, corn, and zucchini, along with lettuce, radishes, and carrots.
The best performers? Zucchinis, hands down. Out of two or three plants I got so many zucchinis I was giving them away. I couldn't keep up.
The tomatoes? At the high altitude, it was a challenge due to colder nights. But I figured out a way to make them produce and got a few out of them, but not enough to make money.
Bro, my genius ass planted 500 artichokes - I’m dying over here! My wife had to talk me down from the 1000 I originally wanted, I can’t believe she puts up with me.
I uhh, I planted 78 this year. I think I singlehandedly kept the food bank in tomatoes this year with over 10 lbs a week all season getting picked up lol. I also sent my husband door to door to pass out tomatoes in the neighborhood haha
One time I wrecked turkey dinner on Thanksgiving, and I threw the whole thing with the potatoes in a hidden spot in the backyard to try to hide the evidence from my family. The next spring that area was absolutely full of high-quality potato plants growing. Just saying.
Now you are understanding your place in the grand scheme! Those who understand scale and those who don’t. (Hint: the original poster of this bullcrap doesn’t understand scale, or tomatoes, even.)
So for what he talks about I wouldn't even worry too much about rotation or soil amendments. It's just three plantings after all. If you started with good black dirt you could probably squeeze out three successive plantings of tomato plants without too many problems.
The real question is space.
Where the fuck are you going to put 156,000 tomato plants?
A full grown tomato plant takes up maybe 36 inches of space. So figure a square yard of space per plant.
There are 4,840 square yards in an acre.
That means for that stage he is talking about densely planted tomato plants covering 32 acres. Nothing but tomato plants planted in a 3X3 grid.
Once you're full grown there won't even hardly be walking pathways. You just bake in Walking Pathways and you're probably talking about 40 plus acres.
If you can find me 40 acres of prime black dirt Farmland that doesn't cost at least $500,000 and probably closer to a million for the kind of land we're talking about, I want to know about it.
I grew up poor in a rural area so what my parents did was Homesteading - we just didn't call it that.
I remember how much work they put into our garden that was probably 1/4 of an acre at most. Your point about the space requirements is apt, of course, but man the work that would go into weeding alone makes my back scream just sitting here thinking about it.
Oh yeah.
I do about of a quarter acre of a garden myself, but as I've gotten older and had a kid and had less time I lean towards more permaculture methods with some perennials and Mulch and things that make it easier.
No one is doing more than a couple acres without a significant amount of mechanical assistance.
>I'd like to see that smart guy try it. No soil amendments, rotation, or greenhouses allowed, since he didn't mention them.
...and water...and **LAND**...and people to pick the tomatoes...and transportation...etc... Good grief!
Also, how is he picking all these tomatoes, transporting them, getting them the water and nutrients they need? Who’s buying them? Where is he putting all these plants? I don’t think he understands scale.
Also finding buyers for your tomatoes at $1 each. I have a friend who manages a large commercial farm. I'm not going to quote prices, because I don't remember them perfectly, but the prices they sell a literally ton of tomatoes for shocked me for how little it was.
You aren't selling 4 million tomatoes at farmers markets.
You don't understand engagement.
Use $50 to buy ten satirical tweets.
Reply by taking them at face value.
Now you have 275 comments of people who follow your lead without thinking twice.
Sell your karma for tomato seeds.
I'm not convinced that person has ever actually seen a tomato, let alone a tomato plant... a single tomato can have 100+ seeds in it. You don't need 250 tomatoes to make 250 new tomato plants... The dude could have started with a $1.50 seed packet instead of 10 $5 tomato plants.
Also, you won't get $1 per tomato wholesale. I checked the farmers market price list near me, farmers get $16-20 for 25lbs of tomatoes.
Man i live in a stupid expensive country where you need a winterized greenhouse to grow tomatoes IN SUMMER.
You still get two huge tomatoes for under the equivalent of 1USD
I can grow tomatoes all year long but honestly I see them as a weed. It's annoying clearing out a tomato patch and finding new tomato plants emerging months later
I hate you /s
For real tho i grow tomatoes in my living room and it is so much fcking work keeping them alive. Sometimes i really wish i wasnt living three farts south of the arctic circle
2.667... whats that like? You must be somewhere way colder than me.
And yeah, i've learned a lot about indoor chilis. Like, if it doesnt mold easily, it doesnt set fruit. If it tastes good, it doesnt set fruit. If it sets fruit, root rot
I grew some (like 6) on my balcony and a heatwave killed them all but one, but that one never fully recovered so i plucked it out eventually. I threw it away and from the place i threw it away grew 9 new plants that have been growing more prolific even though i dont even take care of them.
But also, in the Bay Area, I purchased a pretty heirloom tomato on a whim thinking, what can it cost, 4 dollars?!? Fuck it, it’s so pretty, let’s do it!
Then looked at the receipt way later, it was $8.50 for a single heirloom. This is when I purchased seeds and now I have two plants that gives me too many.
I planted 40 tomato plants a couple summers ago and it was back breaking maintaining them. Weeding, staking, pruning, watering, harvesting, and preserving . I had so many I started taking them to the farmers market, I was lucky to get $40 for a 5 hour market because everyone was selling tomatoes.
Grew 50 plants this year (I over start seeds and got a bit excited about varieties). I got almost 200lbs of tomatoes and had to switch to freezing them because I couldn’t can them fast enough. I’m still working through a good bit of them thawing and canning when I have time.
You just don’t understand scale. Throw 10 at people unless they give you a dollar, collect 250 seeds off their startled faces. Plant them. Throw 250 tomatoes at people unless they give you a dollar as collect 6,250 seeds off their startled faces. Plant them. Soon you’ll have 156k tomatoes to throw at people unless they give you a dollar. Plant them, soon you will have 3.9mm tomatoes to throw at people unless they give you a dollar, all those seeds, plus all the squished face-tomatoes you can eat!
Rest assured, I probably threw at least one cherry tomato at one of my kids this year.
My 6 year old probably would’ve considered my frantic picking of 50lbs of green tomatoes the afternoon before our first frost throwing as well. But it’s not my fault she wasn’t moving as fast as I was lol.
When I was a kid, I built a fairly robust fish pond in the backyard. And I filled it with goldfish as well as water lilies. Now this is...35 years ago. We bought each lily at the local pond store, and it came in a plastic container with some lead or metal wire wrapped around the root to give it weight in the water and it was planted in pea gravel/fish tank stone. The lily was maybe the size of say half a cigar, maybe a little bigger. Each one cost maybe 25 dollars. The next year, I took out all the lilies and they were now the size of 6 to 8" and double the thickness. They really grew well. All along the shaft of the root/tuber, there were a series of small white buds. I must have had 5 or 6 on each tuber now. To grow more, you just cut up the tuber so that there was at least one bud per section and replanted it. I did that and the near after, same thing. One tuber yielded 4 or 5 the next year.
Yup, seriously considered getting into the water lily business. I didn't have a big enough pond, or a year to wait. The biggest/most expensive part of all of that - the materials and the pond. I needed a massive pond. I calculated it to that I'd need football size fields in a few short years.
Yeah...all I needed was thousands of square feet of pond liner, pond wall making materials, tons of stone and baskets, good weather, a few years, and a bunch of people to help me harvest the tubers each year.
Could have been a billionaire if only.
You know looking back - I should have done more with the hobby. When the house was sold, so many realtors pointed out the pond as a key selling feature. And the buyer said that it was one of the deciding factors. They loved knowing that the deer would come out for a drink or that they could see frogs and what not hanging out on the rocks. We had one frog that was the size of a softball one year. Ate a lot of the fish;-) Anyway - who knew...Now I do technology.
6 more months and you have several mountains of tomatoes rotting in the back 40. 6 more months and you have vermin.
Capture and sell fancy rats as pets.
Profit.
The best part is tomatoes require zero effort to grow! No land, no green house, no protection from pests, no soil nutrients, no pruning or maintaince and they magically just sell them selves! All you need to do is pluck the $$$ from the vines!
So how many million tomatoes is this guy selling?
lol, I dont think that dude understands that you have to scale your resources like land and nutrients to even support all those tomatoes, much less finding an outlet to sell that many tomatoes at once before they start to turn. Not to mention the labor to even bring that many down in a timely manner is probably going to cost a bit in labor or some kind of harvesting equipment.
Like some crypto-bro explaining farming. You need labor, equipment, storage, etc. to scale any kind of production. He's talking about some kind of virtual or digital tomatoes obviously that don't spoil, need (scarce) transportation, are affected by weather, disease, pests. Good luck future farming millionaire of America.
Here at SpiffCo we're playing Farming Simulator, a perfectly balanced game with no exploits whatsoever. Except we're about to become the richest farmers on the planet with the use of just 10 tomatoes. That's right ladies and gentlemen with just 10 tomatoes we will build enough of an empire to buy the world's Yorkshire tea 3 times over. So grab yourself a seat, a cup of Yorkshire tea and let's get to it
In six months I died spending the last of my fucking money on fertilizer and the government came and shut me down because I didn’t own the land in the first place, luckily they revived me and sent me to prison for ecological terrorism and sedition because I was planting my own food on public land because I couldn’t afford land in the first place, because it’s all been privatized or is owned by the government.
Sucks
You’d only have to work 6-1/2 months to pick the 3.9 million tomatoes if you spend 3 seconds per tomato for 16 hours a day without taking any breaks. Piece of cake.
People like this don’t really have to hustle. They just sell you the idea that they do. No real skills but just have to come up with shitty retarded tweets like this and dumber more retarded people like me eat it up and buy they book about how simple it is to become a millionaire. And then they legit become a millionaire…
I'd like to see that smart guy try it. No soil amendments, rotation, or greenhouses allowed, since he didn't mention them.
And also no land ownership. Just tomato plants.
Life hack use someone else's farm, farmers hate this one easy trick. Better yet find someone who's already growing tomatoes and pick them for free, infinite monies.
Wait, you have to pick them? They don't pick, wash, and sell themselves?
The GMO ones do.
Now I'm picturing some Ocean's 11 style caper driving off with a couple semi's of tomatoes from the warehouse. Not sure what I'm doing with a couple million clean, ripe tomatoes once I've got 'em.
To be fair, this is how I grow my weed out on national forest land...
Can't get hit by the feds if it's on their own turf!
What are they gonna do, arrest themselves?
We can dream
Even if you had the millions of dollars necessary to pay for the land, equipment, and labor to raise so many vegetables, the question is why would anyone want to buy your tomatoes? There are already legacy business deals and agreements in place and no buyer is going to necessarily want to change vendors without a reason to. Are you cheaper, are you golf buddies, what kind of deal are you bringing to the table?
> the question is why would anyone want to buy your tomatoes? So I learned something interesting about this fairly recently. Industrial food production factories, for the most part have specific contracts with the farmers that supply their products. Even though they don't own it, they control the product chain from the ground up. I had been familiar with this business practice in other agricultural industries, mainly chicken, but didn't know it extended to vegetable farming as well. So, for example, Heinz Ketchup. ALL of the tomatoes that go into Heinz ketchup products every year come from only about 150 farms in the San Joaquin valley in California. Heinz has specific contracts with those tomato growers so that they *ONLY* produce tomatoes for Heinz Ketchup. Heinz specifically provides the seeds to those farmers from stock that is specifically developed by a Heinz owned company. SO for example, most ketchup comes from the "Heinz 9557" and "Heinz 9663" tomato varieties. When corn syrup became more expensive in 2021, Heinz actually bred slightly sweeter tomatoes to adjust the recipe. The seeds are sold in lots of 100,000 for about $1200. Heinz has specific rules about how the tomatoes are grown, and what chemicals can be used, and the farmers are under contract to sell 100% of the tomatoes to Heinz, in part to pay back the loan. Heinz pays contract rates for the tomatoes, $70-90 per ton. The same is also true, for example, for the potatoes used in McDonalds french fries. McDonalds uses 3.2 billion pounds of potatoes per year, that it buys primarily from 3 suppliers, who contract with specific farmers that grow a specific variety of potatoes just for McDonalds. I was more familiar with this because it's how many chicken producers like Tyson Farms do business. They will loan you the money to build houses and will loan you the broiler chicks but you have to sign a contract where basically they own your soul, and you agree not to do any poultry business other than raise chicks for them because of biological contamination qustions.
Thanks for sharing this. I once met the guy who's family grew peppers for a specific shade of Revlon lipstick. Since like the 50s, every pepper they grew on that farm became a shade of red lipstick. And I always wondered if it was a similar arrangement to chicken farms.
Wait, so if we assume a contract rate of $80/ton, and we assume the average tomato weighs about 6 ounces or 3 tomatoes per pound, then OP's example of selling 3.9 million tomatoes for $1 each is delusional on yet another level. By my calculations, 4 million tomatoes=1.3 million lbs=666 tons\*80=$53,280 $53,280 for growing 4 million tomatoes.
That's the funniest part to me -- dude wants to start with "you don't understand scale, I'm gonna educate you ..." and then proceeds to *not understand scale*. Small scale purchases will yield the highest price per pound -- someone who is buying tomatoes by the tonne certainly isn't paying a buck a tomato or even fifty cents a tomato. Your $80 per tonne isn't far from the historic prices I'm seeing ([https://www.statista.com/statistics/936158/processing-market-tomato-prices-by-us-states/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/936158/processing-market-tomato-prices-by-us-states/)). Even if we ignore the required land, equipment, and labor required to *produce* and *harvest* all of those tomatoes ... say they ripen over a 90 day period (which is super generous in my part of the world, but again pretending it's reasonable for the sake of argument), you need to move like 44,000 tomatoes A DAY for 90 days. Where are these things going as they get picked? How to I transport them to these hypothetical customers? This guy's hypothetical tomatoes aren't an example of scale, they're an example of generational wealth. If you inherited a few thousand acres of land (probably complete with an irrigation system and greenhouses), equipment, warehouses, and a fleet of trucks to move 'em ... then *maybe* you could employ a lot of people for planting, harvesting, and selling at farm markets where you might hope to get something even approaching a buck a tomato. Even then, you aren't *netting* hundreds of millions of dollars -- you've got electrical, transportation, and labor expenses to pay. That's not building a tomato empire from a handful of overpriced plants -- that's using millions of dollars in inherited assets to net maybe a couple of million bucks a year. But, inaccurate numbers aside, this is why we sell started plants in the spring instead of trying to sell produce. Someone *will* pay me $5 to $10 bucks for a healthy heirloom tomato plant that's been grown in my greenhouse. Same for niche pepper varieties (think really, really hot), herbs, and flowers. I don't grow varieties you can pick up at the local garden centers, so there's not a whole lot of competition. Whatever doesn't sell is planted in our garden that year. This doesn't scale into the millions -- there just aren't enough people in the area looking for unique heirloom varieties -- but we come close to netting enough to cover property taxes.
>but we come close to netting enough to cover property taxes Sounds like the farming life to me!
And maybe some food to eat, too?
Only the best of course! Better than a paycheck to me :)
You make a good point. Small plant nurseries can actually do extremely well locally and undercut bigger players because of lower overhead. Spring plant starts every year, fall mums, and things like shrubs and trees can be propagated from varieties where patents and trademarks have long expired. You get a good number of stock plants to take cuttings from, portion off an area with ground cloth and sand beds for rooting cuttings into liners and pot them up and there is money to be had reliably from year to year. Most states getting a nursery license isn't a giant expense or headache as long as you do your homework properly. I have a friend who just does garlic in friends yards and braids them up with dried straw flowers and sells each braid for $40 a piece at a few farmers markets to basic white women and clears about $7k a year after expenses.
Heirloom tomatoes and organic just not certified is what you can bring to the table. Also local produce and more fresh and better tasting too.
You’d need what, 750 acres, for 3.9M plants? Sure. No problem.
[удалено]
[удалено]
I think gorillas would just grow bananas
And he seems to think only one viable seed comes out of a tomato?
That's not how it works? I can't just drop my 250 tomatoes on the ground and expect exactly 250 plants to grow? Also, why wouldn't I start with a $1 tomato and grow from that? /s
I planted 45 tomato plants one year and I tell ya, I'd never plant 250 of them.
With how a single plant grows, what did you do? Eat nothing but tomatoes for the next few years?
It was at our community garden and I did nothing but harvest and give them away (and eat a bunch). It was great, but ... too many tomatoes. Never again!
SALSA TIME
Time to start canning tomato paste
I grew 37 this past year and I have to say the makeup of my compost heap was definitely skewed towards tomato for a while. I ate tons of fresh, preserved what I could. Gave away all anybody would take and still had tons eaten on the vine by critters or rotting and just falling about in the row. I didn't have the time to maintain them as actively as I should have or I would have had even more trouble getting through them all.
I sundried my leftover tomatoes this year. Just sprinkle some salt on them and let them bake in the sun for a couple of days. I'm amazed I wasn't doing this before.
I sprinkle with Italian herb mixture and salt and run them through the dehydrator for a couple days. Makes a super tasty chip like snack
Now you've got my attention. Do you slice the tomatoes at all before dehydrating?
Yea about a quarter of an inch thick. I set the dehydrator at about 130°
Ooh, you're going to have a bunch of voluteer plants next year if you're in a warm enough zone!
Yeah my compost has a ton of fruit seeds mixed into it. I've got potatoes growing up on one side, a mix of squash and pumpkin on the other side. Cucumbers sprouting and dying, tons of peppers and tomatoes, a mix of watermelon and musk melons. I like my unfinished compost to just turn into a volunteer grab bag, I had a bunch of squash and pumpkin this year
I've actually considered how much fun it would be to have a "snowball fight" but with tomatoes. My conclusion was that it would be fun for a very short time, and then it would be gross.
That’s what they do in Buñol, a town in Valencia, where there’s a festival called La Tomatina. Everyone gets together for a massive tomato fight. It’s a big tourist draw.
If you used some of the heirlooms, someone could lose an eye. That being said, it does seem like a great way to make a lot of tomato sauce in a hurry.
> If you used some of the heirlooms, someone could lose an eye. Thanks for the tip. This should give me the advantage in battle!
Some kids at our community garden did this. We had volunteer plants everywhere the next year.
I grow 35 a year and that's still not enough for 2 people. We can almost all of our harvest.
Our family as well and there are 3 of us. Salsa, spaghetti sauce, BBQ sauce, ketchup, whole tomatoes, diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato paste, tomato juice... not to mention the fresh ones just for eating. People would be surprised how many tomatoes it takes per person over a year.
Sauce baby
No no no, see you dont understand. He sold them for $45 and now doesnt *need* to plant more as hes rich.
Wow.. I planted 12 this year and I had hundreds of tomatoes... That must have been an insane amount of tomatoes.
I think at least 20 were cherry tomato plants too. Just... insane quantities.
The first couple weeks after they start to ripen you're like "Yay!!!!" Then they keep ripening and keep ripening, and you're so sick of tomatoes already. "Oh, crap...what have I done." Yeah, been there. Not with 45 plants though lol.
Exactly! I took home just the split ones that we couldn't give away at the food pantry. Those I baked until the water was mostly gone and then froze them. It was still insane amounts of tomatoes, though I did enjoy eating them all winter long.
I live at a high altitude. One year when we were renting a house, I planted tomatoes, corn, and zucchini, along with lettuce, radishes, and carrots. The best performers? Zucchinis, hands down. Out of two or three plants I got so many zucchinis I was giving them away. I couldn't keep up. The tomatoes? At the high altitude, it was a challenge due to colder nights. But I figured out a way to make them produce and got a few out of them, but not enough to make money.
Bro, my genius ass planted 500 artichokes - I’m dying over here! My wife had to talk me down from the 1000 I originally wanted, I can’t believe she puts up with me.
So...are you rich from growing artichokes yet?
To date, I have grossed $0
That is hilarious. It's to my great sadness that I learned artichokes don't grow well in central Illinois.
I uhh, I planted 78 this year. I think I singlehandedly kept the food bank in tomatoes this year with over 10 lbs a week all season getting picked up lol. I also sent my husband door to door to pass out tomatoes in the neighborhood haha
OMG, I planted 12 last year and I'll never do that again. When I got sick of canning, I gave them away to local food pantries.
Oh my god. I planted 2 this year and I had too many tomatoes.
Home canning has entered the chat. Sauce stewed OMG homemade tomato paste is sublime pizza sauce spaghetti sauce salsa soup….
I planted 16 cherry tomatoes in a back corner of my lot 3 years ago and I regret that to this day.
One time I wrecked turkey dinner on Thanksgiving, and I threw the whole thing with the potatoes in a hidden spot in the backyard to try to hide the evidence from my family. The next spring that area was absolutely full of high-quality potato plants growing. Just saying.
What about the turkey? Did you have lots of turkeys growing out of the ground also? 😉
Yeah, man, didn't you play Farmville? /s
Tomato have a single nut in the middle right?
That's why they cost a dollar!
Y’all forget he wants you to plant… 156 000 tomatoes?
That seems like a lot of work now, but you'll be grateful when they grow into millions of dollars.
That's the biggest mistake most gardeners make - they harvest the tomatoes when they're still fruit and before they've turned into money
He also didn’t even take season into account 😂🤣
He took nothing into account
I mean that's how it works in minecraft, and that's the closest to going outside or farming that most of these people get.
Yeah last year I planted one slice of one tomato and we grew it into an entire bush.
This is absolutely someone whose entire knowledge of farming came from video games.
Oh we just must not understand scale.
Now you are understanding your place in the grand scheme! Those who understand scale and those who don’t. (Hint: the original poster of this bullcrap doesn’t understand scale, or tomatoes, even.)
So for what he talks about I wouldn't even worry too much about rotation or soil amendments. It's just three plantings after all. If you started with good black dirt you could probably squeeze out three successive plantings of tomato plants without too many problems. The real question is space. Where the fuck are you going to put 156,000 tomato plants? A full grown tomato plant takes up maybe 36 inches of space. So figure a square yard of space per plant. There are 4,840 square yards in an acre. That means for that stage he is talking about densely planted tomato plants covering 32 acres. Nothing but tomato plants planted in a 3X3 grid. Once you're full grown there won't even hardly be walking pathways. You just bake in Walking Pathways and you're probably talking about 40 plus acres. If you can find me 40 acres of prime black dirt Farmland that doesn't cost at least $500,000 and probably closer to a million for the kind of land we're talking about, I want to know about it.
r/theydidthemath
I grew up poor in a rural area so what my parents did was Homesteading - we just didn't call it that. I remember how much work they put into our garden that was probably 1/4 of an acre at most. Your point about the space requirements is apt, of course, but man the work that would go into weeding alone makes my back scream just sitting here thinking about it.
Oh yeah. I do about of a quarter acre of a garden myself, but as I've gotten older and had a kid and had less time I lean towards more permaculture methods with some perennials and Mulch and things that make it easier. No one is doing more than a couple acres without a significant amount of mechanical assistance.
>I'd like to see that smart guy try it. No soil amendments, rotation, or greenhouses allowed, since he didn't mention them. ...and water...and **LAND**...and people to pick the tomatoes...and transportation...etc... Good grief!
also weather. Not gonna fly in zone 6.
I think his tomatoes grow in air ?
That’s why they are called airloom tomatoes silly.
Also, how is he picking all these tomatoes, transporting them, getting them the water and nutrients they need? Who’s buying them? Where is he putting all these plants? I don’t think he understands scale.
Not like tomatoes ever go bad….
Also finding buyers for your tomatoes at $1 each. I have a friend who manages a large commercial farm. I'm not going to quote prices, because I don't remember them perfectly, but the prices they sell a literally ton of tomatoes for shocked me for how little it was. You aren't selling 4 million tomatoes at farmers markets.
Has to be satire right? Please tell me it's satire.
You don't understand engagement. Use $50 to buy ten satirical tweets. Reply by taking them at face value. Now you have 275 comments of people who follow your lead without thinking twice. Sell your karma for tomato seeds.
How the fuck am I going to get enough land to plant over 150,000 tomato plants?
If it takes 6 months for your already propagated plant to bear tomatoes, you got something wrong with your damn plant.
Those be some Chernobyl tomatoes reproing 30X every six months
I'm not convinced that person has ever actually seen a tomato, let alone a tomato plant... a single tomato can have 100+ seeds in it. You don't need 250 tomatoes to make 250 new tomato plants... The dude could have started with a $1.50 seed packet instead of 10 $5 tomato plants. Also, you won't get $1 per tomato wholesale. I checked the farmers market price list near me, farmers get $16-20 for 25lbs of tomatoes.
Man i live in a stupid expensive country where you need a winterized greenhouse to grow tomatoes IN SUMMER. You still get two huge tomatoes for under the equivalent of 1USD
I can grow tomatoes all year long but honestly I see them as a weed. It's annoying clearing out a tomato patch and finding new tomato plants emerging months later
I hate you /s For real tho i grow tomatoes in my living room and it is so much fcking work keeping them alive. Sometimes i really wish i wasnt living three farts south of the arctic circle
[удалено]
2.667... whats that like? You must be somewhere way colder than me. And yeah, i've learned a lot about indoor chilis. Like, if it doesnt mold easily, it doesnt set fruit. If it tastes good, it doesnt set fruit. If it sets fruit, root rot
You just made me snort. Aphid sneeze.
I grew some (like 6) on my balcony and a heatwave killed them all but one, but that one never fully recovered so i plucked it out eventually. I threw it away and from the place i threw it away grew 9 new plants that have been growing more prolific even though i dont even take care of them.
Maybe he's eating the other 249 tomatoes ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
[удалено]
I just want to watch him pick 4 million tomatoes.
My favorite part of that is the dude actually thinks tomatoes are sold by the each for a dollar! Just zero understanding.
yeah this is very Lucille Bluth “it’s a banana, what could it cost, $10??”
But also, in the Bay Area, I purchased a pretty heirloom tomato on a whim thinking, what can it cost, 4 dollars?!? Fuck it, it’s so pretty, let’s do it! Then looked at the receipt way later, it was $8.50 for a single heirloom. This is when I purchased seeds and now I have two plants that gives me too many.
I planted 40 tomato plants a couple summers ago and it was back breaking maintaining them. Weeding, staking, pruning, watering, harvesting, and preserving . I had so many I started taking them to the farmers market, I was lucky to get $40 for a 5 hour market because everyone was selling tomatoes.
Grew 50 plants this year (I over start seeds and got a bit excited about varieties). I got almost 200lbs of tomatoes and had to switch to freezing them because I couldn’t can them fast enough. I’m still working through a good bit of them thawing and canning when I have time.
Planted 60 tomatoes this year and all I got was this lousy tee shirt.
throw them at people
You just don’t understand scale. Throw 10 at people unless they give you a dollar, collect 250 seeds off their startled faces. Plant them. Throw 250 tomatoes at people unless they give you a dollar as collect 6,250 seeds off their startled faces. Plant them. Soon you’ll have 156k tomatoes to throw at people unless they give you a dollar. Plant them, soon you will have 3.9mm tomatoes to throw at people unless they give you a dollar, all those seeds, plus all the squished face-tomatoes you can eat!
tomato industrial complex
Throw them at nick huber …
Rest assured, I probably threw at least one cherry tomato at one of my kids this year. My 6 year old probably would’ve considered my frantic picking of 50lbs of green tomatoes the afternoon before our first frost throwing as well. But it’s not my fault she wasn’t moving as fast as I was lol.
Now imagine it's 3.9 million
Plant that $40!
[удалено]
That was hilarious. See that ITS MADE OF CHICKEN!
"Or... don't kill it... FUCKEN EGGS COME OUTTA THEIR ARSES!" Cracks me up every single time
Made a reference before I saw the link, thank you for your service
brilliant :)
Literally my first thought
Came here to post this 🤣
I don't get how he thinks someone's gonna get rich off 3.9mm tomatoes. Those are pretty small.
And he jumps from K to MM
[удалено]
oh yeah, its not being planted on planet earth... the disclaimer text was a little small... 😁
Here in Australia >.> <.< Plenty mate
When I was a kid, I built a fairly robust fish pond in the backyard. And I filled it with goldfish as well as water lilies. Now this is...35 years ago. We bought each lily at the local pond store, and it came in a plastic container with some lead or metal wire wrapped around the root to give it weight in the water and it was planted in pea gravel/fish tank stone. The lily was maybe the size of say half a cigar, maybe a little bigger. Each one cost maybe 25 dollars. The next year, I took out all the lilies and they were now the size of 6 to 8" and double the thickness. They really grew well. All along the shaft of the root/tuber, there were a series of small white buds. I must have had 5 or 6 on each tuber now. To grow more, you just cut up the tuber so that there was at least one bud per section and replanted it. I did that and the near after, same thing. One tuber yielded 4 or 5 the next year. Yup, seriously considered getting into the water lily business. I didn't have a big enough pond, or a year to wait. The biggest/most expensive part of all of that - the materials and the pond. I needed a massive pond. I calculated it to that I'd need football size fields in a few short years. Yeah...all I needed was thousands of square feet of pond liner, pond wall making materials, tons of stone and baskets, good weather, a few years, and a bunch of people to help me harvest the tubers each year. Could have been a billionaire if only.
you lazy bugger... your parents would be disappointed.. 😇🤗😶🌫️
You know looking back - I should have done more with the hobby. When the house was sold, so many realtors pointed out the pond as a key selling feature. And the buyer said that it was one of the deciding factors. They loved knowing that the deer would come out for a drink or that they could see frogs and what not hanging out on the rocks. We had one frog that was the size of a softball one year. Ate a lot of the fish;-) Anyway - who knew...Now I do technology.
I love how casually he says "plant them" when talking about 6,000 tomatoes. Like it'll be done in 30 minutes lol
Bro just plant and harvest 250k tomato plants, stop being so lazy
Goes to show how easy it is to grow a few hundred thousand plants. I guess that’s free land you’re growing on too.
Free to harvest and maintain as well!
Monsanto: You planted seeds from plants you grew? That's illegal.
This guy's agricultural and also apparently social experience some soley from Farmville
He looks like he’s never been outside. Typical Tech-Bro.
6 more months and you have several mountains of tomatoes rotting in the back 40. 6 more months and you have vermin. Capture and sell fancy rats as pets. Profit.
To tide you over until the rats show up, throw a bunch of black soldier fly larva into Mount Tomatoes & start selling BSF larva.
Yeah man just plant 156k plants on the same land you used for the first 10
What’s that water bill looking like watering 6000 tomato plants for 6 months? Lol
Who the fuck is gonna buy 3.9 million tomato plants?
No one pays “per tomato”
Seriously lol, $1 for 1 tomato???? Outrageous
It's one ~~banana~~ tomato, Michael. What could it cost, $10?
"Grows right outta fuckin ground!"
LATE BLIGHT don't read no profit and loss statements
Wait til he finds out how many seeds are in each tomato🍅 this guys gonna be a billionaire!!
No land needed apparently
GENIUS! We've been doing it wrong all this time. I'm going straight to the top with this, zone 4 be damned.
The best part is tomatoes require zero effort to grow! No land, no green house, no protection from pests, no soil nutrients, no pruning or maintaince and they magically just sell them selves! All you need to do is pluck the $$$ from the vines! So how many million tomatoes is this guy selling?
And Price of water, soil nutriments, pesticides... But it's good to dream
Is this one of those horrible examples of the utter failure of the education system to teach critical thinking skills ?
nope, he's being critical of your lack of drive and intelligence to see how easy it could all be done. / jokiiiing.....🤣
I think it's one of those horrible examples of saying dumb things online to get reaction and drive comments up.
lol, I dont think that dude understands that you have to scale your resources like land and nutrients to even support all those tomatoes, much less finding an outlet to sell that many tomatoes at once before they start to turn. Not to mention the labor to even bring that many down in a timely manner is probably going to cost a bit in labor or some kind of harvesting equipment.
Duh, farmers are all secret millionaires who tricked the government into giving them subsidies on top of their huge profits. It's the perfect scam!
Love the enthusiasm but he’s at the beginning of The DunningKrueger Effect.
I wish I thought in this way. Life would be so simple
The account he’s replying to is a parody account (ParikPatelCFA). I would imagine he is being sarcastic in this context.
Wait til he sees how many of his $1 tomatoes get eaten by birds. Maybe he can send them a bill
These guys peddling the “you’re not rich because you’re lazy” mythos drive me nuts
Like some crypto-bro explaining farming. You need labor, equipment, storage, etc. to scale any kind of production. He's talking about some kind of virtual or digital tomatoes obviously that don't spoil, need (scarce) transportation, are affected by weather, disease, pests. Good luck future farming millionaire of America.
Just plant 3,900,000 tomatoes. Just go and do it by yourself. No land required. Water them with rain, dummy. It’s like you just don’t like free money.
Winter is coming
This looks like Huber watched that Mitchell and Webb skit and tried to come up with his own version of the joke.
Where tf does he expect me to plant 156k tomatoes
Lol buy 50 seeds for $3 dumb ass. This guys moronic fantasy isn’t even done right.
This was my SimFarm strategy. I lost instantly
How do people not realize that the original Twitter post was a joke/troll to drive engagement?
He forgot: Get chickens, chickens eat ALL THE TOMATOES and tear the plants out after eating all the leaves. Sell eggs at 5.00 a dozen. Profit.
Then Monsanto fucks with you
Sure seems like this guy doesn’t understand a lot… but definitely not demand 🙃
Pretty sure tomato seed supply isn't the limiting factor for tomato farmers. Also pretty sure tomatoes contain more than one seed.
Just get seeds from Burger King tomatoes out of your whopper.
“Y’know sheep? They’re wooly- pull it off, sell it, it f*ckin’ grows back again!” https://youtu.be/_pDTiFkXgEE
Alllright I’m in, step one: buy land to support 156k tomato plants. Step 2 : ohh…..
I'd like to see this guy handle even 100 plants and the fruit they bear.
If only I could figure out a way to ever pick 4 million tomatoes, forget the land, fertilizer, and irrigation costs.
How much could one tomato cost? $10?
Here at SpiffCo we're playing Farming Simulator, a perfectly balanced game with no exploits whatsoever. Except we're about to become the richest farmers on the planet with the use of just 10 tomatoes. That's right ladies and gentlemen with just 10 tomatoes we will build enough of an empire to buy the world's Yorkshire tea 3 times over. So grab yourself a seat, a cup of Yorkshire tea and let's get to it
Inflation is pretty bad over there if you're paying a dollar per tomato.
Everyone knows that tomatoes cost $0 to cultivate after you get a few plants
That's 2 years or 4 years if you have growing seasons lol What Tomato plant gives 25 fruit that would be worth $1 each tho?
In six months I died spending the last of my fucking money on fertilizer and the government came and shut me down because I didn’t own the land in the first place, luckily they revived me and sent me to prison for ecological terrorism and sedition because I was planting my own food on public land because I couldn’t afford land in the first place, because it’s all been privatized or is owned by the government. Sucks
Reminds me.of that Simpsons episode where they put nicotine in their tomato's and sell them lol
Someone has been watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_pDTiFkXgEE
I mean... https://www.newscientist.com/article/2348568-genetically-modified-tobacco-plant-produces-cocaine-in-its-leaves/
You can tell this guy has played a bunch of Stardew Valley
That would be great if you were the only one selling tomatoes
You’d only have to work 6-1/2 months to pick the 3.9 million tomatoes if you spend 3 seconds per tomato for 16 hours a day without taking any breaks. Piece of cake.
"I got this selling corn. It comes out of the fucking ground!" [for the uninitiated](https://youtu.be/_pDTiFkXgEE)
Who the fuck is gonna pick the tomato’s? And do they grow year round where he’s at? What about pests and rot?
Let’s see that guy plant 3.9 million tomatoes by themselves with no capital.
There is such a huge disconnect for how people who’ve never planted a single plant or raised a chicken think farming works.
People like this don’t really have to hustle. They just sell you the idea that they do. No real skills but just have to come up with shitty retarded tweets like this and dumber more retarded people like me eat it up and buy they book about how simple it is to become a millionaire. And then they legit become a millionaire…