By Tania Phillips
It’s summertime when Granite Belt and Southern Downs cooks and chefs wait patiently for the best, flavourful local tomatoes coming fresh from local farms.
Stanthorpe and Ballandean farmer Lewis Perkins knows a bit about that process – he should do, he grows enough of them.
Five generations of the Perkins family have been farming around the region and for more than forty years Lewis has been producing tomatoes for the East Coast market.
In what is a family affair Lewis, wife Donna, cousin Mark and adult sons Brendan and Dale (both farming since they were 15) have more than 15-18 hectares of tomatoes and produce a couple of hundred pallets a week from December through to June. The boys are in their 30s and are the driving force behind the farm now.
So how long has Lewis been a tomato farmer?
“Far too long,” he deadpans before adding, “Forty odd years. I haven’t even had long leave service leave yet – haven’t worked out what sort of long service leave a grower gets but I’m working on it,” he chuckles.
It’s a long time in the farming game, though it was probably inevitable that he’d become at least a farmer if not a tomato farmer.
“My parents grew tomatoes first,” he explained.
“My great grandfather started a farm at Glen Aplin in the 1800s, then my grandfather farmed there, I grew up on that farm with my parents and my uncle and aunt and cousin Mark Perkins.
“Mark and I started growing tomatoes when we were going to high school – just on the weekends, we’d pick them and send them away and make a little bit money.”
The family farm grew many different crops including grapes, apple, tomatoes, so why did he decide to concentrate on tomatoes?
“Tomatoes are probably the highest production per hectare out of the vegies you can grow,” Lewis explained.
“The potential for earning is very good on them if everything goes right. Of course, if you get bad weather events or over supply in the marketplace but generally they’re fine.
“We just grow the one type of tomato, just the gourmet’s that sells in big numbers in the stores.
“They end up anywhere along the East Coast from North Queensland to Sydney, Melbourne and we distribute from Brisbane all over the country.”
It’s a long season – longer than you might suspect.
“We start planting in September for the early blocks and we finish planting in January for the later blocks. We start to harvest, well we’re a couple of week’s later this year they are ready to start harvesting now, but normally we start in the second week in December and we run through to the first or second week in June.”
He said the tomatoes are a bit later this year due to the cold and wet spring which meant the plants have taken longer to mature.
So does he eat tomatoes or is it a case of too much of a good thing?
“Every day, winter and summer,” he laughs.
“You gotta buy them in the winter, cause you can’t grow them here. But I eat them every day, I love them.
“I love them in sandwiches, in salad, but I don’t like them cooked I just like them raw.”
He says there’s nothing better than very fresh white bread, butter, just a bit of salt, ham cheese and tomatoes warm off the vine.
“All our tomatoes are colour-picked, there is no gasing nothing like that, they are all colour picked off the vine, grown out in the natural sunlight in the paddocks,” Lewis said.
So his tip is to eat them fresh and it’s something he tries to ensure happens for his customers where every they are.
“All our product, we harvest it today, pack today, put it on the truck tonight, in the stores in the morning in Brisbane or South or north are in the stores the following morning, fresh,” he said.
“They don’t improve in cold storage, they only go backwards, they lose their intensity of flavour.”
