The heat wave raised a bit of stink near Columbia, Illinois, Tuesday night. There were likely hundreds of thousands of pounds of tomatoes rotting in an 18-20 acre field.

Beyond fly-ridden piles of rotten tomatoes are acre after acre of tomatoes rotting on the vines.

Mel Stuckmeyer farms the field. His family’s produce stand has been a landmark for generations. Their tomatoes are among those now stocking your favourite grocery stores.

“If you grow in high volume and they all come at one time with full moon, there’s no way you can control them. You either have too many or you don’t have enough,” he said. “It’s a perishable item. That’s why vegetable growing is kind of tricky. It’s supply and demand.”

And weather.

The scorching heat is ravaging the tomatoes and trapping the odour.

It’d been such a bumper crop that demand faded a couple of weeks ago, he said. Then the heat wave hit, scorching the tomatoes faster than workers could pick them, he said. A field this size can yield well beyond 700,000 lbs. of tomatoes.

“We’ll put the mower in them, mow them down, get the fields cleaned up, get the plastic picked up…I don’t think the odour is that bad. It’s better than cabbage, put it that way,” Stuckmeyer laughed.

He said the odour should be gone within a week or two. The heat had kept workers from being able to clear the field sooner, he said.

State officials said there was no law on the books that would apply to this.

Source - http://www.freshplaza.com/