Campbell's challenge

From National Geographic's Water Currents blog:

By Peyton Fleming and Brooke Barton

DIXON, Calif. – California and tomatoes are synonymous. Drive along Interstate 80 near Sacramento these days and you’ll see an endless parade of trucks, each filled to the brim with 26 tons of glistening succulent red tomatoes. It’s so many trucks, one after another, that you begin to understand how California grows 30 percent of the world’s processed tomatoes.

Many of the trucks are headed to Dixon, California, home base of a Campbell Soup processing plant that handles 240 loads of tomatoes every day – 14 million pounds, all of them for use as tomato paste and diced tomatoes that are the foundation ingredient of Prego spaghetti sauce, Pace Salsa, V8 beverages and thousands of other Campbell products.

It’s a mind-boggling operation, especially when you ponder the vast amount of water that’s needed for all this. The processing plant itself uses more than three million gallons a day to move, clean, and cook tomatoes. Out in the fields, growing just one pound of raw tomatoes requires about nine gallons of water. Multiply that times the 20,000 acres that are under production for Campbell and you get the idea.

Add in the fact that hundreds of other crops are also tapping into California’s dwindling water supplies, and you ask yourself, “How do Campbell and its 50 independent growers manage it, and how are they preparing for a likely drier future?’

Last month, Ceres’ water team got some insights during a half-day visit to the 38-year-old processing plant and two nearby farms operated by Dave Viguie and Dustin Timothy, who together grow 1,700 acres of tomatoes.

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