Pirate's Cove

Well, well, well, this is a new one. I’ve never seen them go after pizza sauce, which is a pretty dirty trick, because everyone loves pizza. Unless you’re weird. Oh, and remember how some leading Warmists say to stop attempting to scaremonger?

Equilibrium/Sustainability — Climate change’s next victim: Pizza sauce

Increasingly hot and dry climate conditions are withering Californian tomato crops on their vines — a crisis that could leave pizza and pasta without a key ingredient: Tomato sauce.

“Warming winters are allowing pests and diseases to nose farther and farther north into new tomato territory,” a National Geographic report found.

Last year’s tomato season encountered such significant heat that by the end of the season, growers across California delivered about 10 percent less than their expected tomato crop, according to National Geographic.

While such amounts might not sound huge at a first glance, California is responsible for 90 percent of the country’s canning tomatoes, which are the second most valuable produce item that the state exports, the magazine reported.

“Even a 10 percent production drop left canners— who provide the tomatoes that become our pizza sauce, pasta sauce, and ketchup —in a tight spot,” the report said. “So this year, amidst an ongoing drought, everyone is hoping for a tomato-shaped success.”

Horrible! Terrible! Wait, you mean drought is something that often happens in California? That there needs be no anthropogenic causation, except an overpopulated state with terrible water management practices? Oh, and

(Vegetable Growers News) “We’ve seen our cost just skyrocket over the past six or seven years,” Barcellos said. “It used to cost us around $3,000 an acre to grow tomatoes. We’re projecting costs of over $4,000 this year coming up. We just haven’t had the revenues to match it.” Yields have been flat or trending down over the past decade, he added, and “we haven’t been able to get those yield increases to offset the cost increases.”

Bruce Rominger, who grows tomatoes in Winters and serves as board chairman of the California Tomato Growers Association, named fuel and fertilizer costs among his top concerns.

“Primarily for us, the fuel cost hurts us in our production,” Rominger said. “All our tractors, all our pickups, everything we do out here burns fuel. We are very concerned about what that does to our cost structure when we see our prices do what they’ve done in the last six months.”

So, yes, drought and heat do affect growing. So do horrible, counter-productive government policies. And with gas spiking thanks to Biden/Democrat policies, 2022 could be bad. Which means some smart farmers could make a bundle by switching to tomatoes.