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Greenhouses: Fresh tomatoes all year?

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The focus of the greenhouse industry in Canada used to be fresh-cut flowers and bedding plants. The only fresh tomatoes Canadians saw outside the summer months came from California or other foreign climates.

But that changed in the early 1990s. Greenhouse produce-cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes-are now available for most of the year from Canadian greenhouses, chiefly in southern Ontario, British Columbia's Lower Mainland and southern Quebec.

Growers in these regions began shipping their products to adjacent U.S. states in the second half of the 1990s, helped by a low Canadian dollar. But the major impetus for the boom in greenhouse vegetables was the 1988 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, which ended tariffs on exports of food products.

From 1991 to 2001, Canada's greenhouse area more than doubled. By 2003, it reached nearly 1,900 hectares. Vegetables occupied 43% of total greenhouse space in 2001, up from 39% in 1986. In Leamington, Ontario alone, the greenhouse vegetable industry grew larger than the entire greenhouse vegetable industry in the United States.

Greenhouse vegetables cost more to grow, but they're also worth more in the market. For example, Canadian growers sold just over 215,600 tonnes of greenhouse tomatoes to the fresh market in 2003, valued at nearly $377.7 million. That same year, they produced 26,900 tonnes of fresh field tomatoes, valued at $18.9 million.

Greenhouse tomatoes are picked ripe, and fetch a higher price when sold to restaurants, hotels and grocery stores. Fresh field tomatoes are often picked green to ripen on the way to the market.