Non-Organic

We left Arcadia, FL. with hopes of winding through the countryside on nothing but the blue roads. Jackie fiddled with the Garmin GPS and had us rocking down the small, uneven, rural, agricultural backroads in no time at all. Florida has some mighty skinny roads out here, some of which are without center lines and hard-to-handle, drop-off shoulders. It's a white-knuckle experience when an orange-hauling semi and our rig cross paths out here.  *It still beats the no-view, no local flavor, Interstate.* We traveled through, at least, 30 miles of orange groves that stretched out from the road as far as the eye could see, and all of the trees were laden with branch-sagging fruit and ready for picking. I hope last nights hard frost didn't do any lasting damage. Maybe eating oranges become "juice oranges" once frozen.

Approaching one intersection where we needed to make a turn to follow these backroads, I noticed a huge plume of smoke. Getting nearer to the source I saw something that was producing this huge gray cloud but it was in the middle of a few hundred acres of tomatoes plants. I pulled the rig far off onto the grassy shoulder, grabbed the camera and crawled on top of the rig. The above picture shows what was producing the smoke.

From what I've been able to find out, tomato growers burn their plants, within 5 days, after the last picking, to make ready for the next planting. I've also read, from a USDA bulletin:

(2) Tomato Plant Destruction. Within five days following the final harvest of a tomato crop, commercial tomato producers shall destroy remaining tomato plants on the production site using a
chemical burn-down with a contact desiccant type herbicide that is EPA labeled and approved for this use such as paraquat or diquat that also contains a minimum three percent oil and a nonionic adjuvant to destroy crop vegetation. This must be followed by immediate complete destruction by crop removal unless double cropping is planned.

Look for these tomatoes, soon to be appearing in a store near you.

Zephyrhills, FL. 27 degrees