Yield and Income of Fall Staked Tomato Cultivars in Eastern Kentucky

To identify cultivars that produce well as a late-season fall tomato in eastern Kentucky, with heat tolerance and resistance to the disease problems of that window.

Production system. Field, white-on-black plastic mulch, drip irrigation and fertigation, staked.

Analysis. Mean separation by minimum significant difference at the 5% level. The report states the number of replications but does not name the experimental design, so no design is asserted here. Letters beside each value are the report's own groups.

The season was wetter and much cooler than normal, with 15.69 inches of rain across July through October and below-normal average temperatures throughout the trial. Late blight was widespread across the region, requiring a shortened spray interval and several newly labelled fungicides. The cool wet weather delayed harvest so that only six of the usual eight harvests were taken, and the authors record that fall yields in 2009 were about half of those obtained in previous years. Blotchy ripening appeared in several cultivars during the final two October harvests.

Diameter-class grading of breaker-stage fruit. Fruit is picked at the breaker stage rather than ripe, then graded by diameter into jumbo and extra-large, large, No. 2 and medium classes. Marketable yield includes every grade except culls. Fruit was culled for catfacing, concentric or radial cracking, disease, scarring and blotchy ripening, so the cull rate under this method mixes physiological disorders with disease damage and cannot be read as a disease score. Standard: Jumbo and extra-large greater than 3.5 in; large greater than 2.5 and under 3.5 in; medium under 2.5 and over 2.0 in; plus No. 2 and cull grades.

Per-acre yield extrapolated from small research plots. Yields are not measured per acre. They are measured on research plots of roughly 8 to 200 plants and multiplied by a correction factor to estimate a per-acre figure. The publication states the consequences of this plainly: small errors are greatly amplified by the multiplication, and because drive rows are excluded from the calculation the resulting per-acre yields are typically much higher than what a commercial farm achieves. A yield produced by this method is therefore a comparison between varieties grown side by side, not a forecast of what a grower will harvest. Standard: University of Kentucky Fruit and Vegetable Research Report, "Our Yields vs. Your Yields".

Mean fruit weight from plot counts and weights. Fruit number and total weight are recorded for every plot at each harvest, and average fruit weight is derived from those two totals. No grading step is applied first, so the average covers all harvested fruit rather than a marketable subset.

This trial grew 20 entries. AMSeed publishes results for 6 of them. The rest are listed by name below with the reason their numbers are withheld, so the trial is represented as what it actually was rather than as the slice we happen to cover.

The authors' own caution: growers should be careful selecting any cultivar on one year's results at a single location. Yields are per-acre extrapolations from six-plant plots. Two further columns published in this trial are deliberately not imported. The income column is an economic derivative of one produce auction's 2009 prices rather than a plant measurement, and the No. 2 grade tonnage could not be aligned to its rows with confidence across independent extractions of the source table.