Roundtable: Towards a Resilient Supply Chain In The Fields

Transcript from the roundtable held during the 2025 Tomato News Conference @ Anuga on 5 October 2025

Click on the image above to watch the recording on Vimeo or read the transcript below.
All the slides are available HERE

Antonio Casana: The first roundtable we will have today is with three participants representing the cultivation supply chain.

In the field, in face of climate change, geopolitical disruption, input cost volatility, inflation and evolving consumer demand and agricultural supply are under pressure like never before. Resilience in this context means more than just absorbing shocks. It means adapting, innovating and anticipating changes so that producers, processors and downstream actors can thrive even under stress. We start from the cultivation because without raw material there is no future for our industry.

We want to focus first on the field to gate leg of the chain. How tomato growers in different geography manage risks, continuity, sustainability and value capture. We will hear perspective from major production areas from California, Northern Italy and South America, Chile; and prove how each is building resilience, coupling this with constraints and positioning for the future.

I start with the introduction of the panelists. We start with Arturo Cerda who represents Chile’s processing tomato sector through Chile’s Alimentos and Patagonia Fresh. And the Chile is an increasingly important player in the global tomato industry, with a cultivated area of around 40,000 hectares and an annual production of approximately 1.3 million tons of fresh tomatoes. The country benefits from Mediterranean-like climate condition. It allows high yield and stable production cycle while protected by natural barriers, West and South Pacific Ocean, in the North is the desert, and then they have the Andes Mountain, so they are the main producer in in the Southern hemisphere. We welcome Arturo. Please come to the stage.

Then I’d like to introduce Carlo Piccinini who is a tomato grower representing the Italian tomato production, the Northern Italian organization, OI Pomodoro Nord Italia. Carlo Piccinini belongs to a producer organization that belongs to this interprofessional organization that brings together producers and processing companies across Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy, Piemonte, Veneto, coordinating more than 40,000 hectares and then link to 2.5 to 3 million tons of tomato each year. So, I welcome Carlo to the stage.

And last, we have a well-known person, Mike Montna. Mike represents CTGA. He has been the president and CEO of California Tomato Grower Association since 2008. Mike is also a past president of the WPTC. The CTGA is a voluntary organization that represents its members with regards to establishing and contracting a fair price for all material, lobbying both state and federal government on the important legislation, and overall representing processed tomato of about 90% of the processed tomato volume. The Association is deeply involved in grower support across production, marketing, research, public policy and trade. Welcome, Mike.

Thank you for coming. We start with a common question for you about field risk and climate adaptation. I ask you what are the main climatic or agronomic risks that you face in your region? Is it drought, hydric stress, water scarcity-based pressure, … ? And how are you reorganizing your farming practice or crop choices to build resilience?

Arturo Cerda: I will start talking a little bit about Chile first. For those who don’t know, Chile is in South America. We have, as Antonio mentioned already, a Mediterranean weather, which is kind of a special in the area because South America is mostly tropical.

But, as Antonio mentioned, we are a kind of an island, because we have in the west, the Pacific Ocean, in the east, the Andes Mountains and then desert in the north and south. We have a very special weather that allow us to grow tomatoes, in fact. So that’s the area. So almost 400km of distance, of length, and then 80km wide. This is where we grow the tomatoes, similar latitude than European processors, and, of course, California. This graph is basically to show that we have clear wintertime in Chile. From June to August is when we have most of our rains. And from September until beginning of December is our plantation process. We are right in the middle of plantation process now, we faced a couple of rains in September and beginning of October. But that’s the window that we have for plantation. And then from February until April is where we harvest. And why is so relevant? Because in general, January, February, March, there is no rain in Chile. But then in April we start having rain. So it’s important for us to harvest as much as possible before end of April.

About these figures, that show all the rainfall information in the last 50 years in Chile. San Fernando and Talca are where we grow most of our tomatoes. There’s a clear downward trend, that make us be really concerned about the water availability.

What has happened in Chile is that we always have snow in the mountains. So there’s not much concerns about water availability. But if you see the trends, you should be concerned. Because in the other hand, we haven’t invested much in Chile. So there’s not enough damps. So we have to do something. If we see the figures, we should be concerned more and do something, because in the future, there’s going to be less and less water. So again, this is 50 years information that that shows a clear trend.

Talking about production area in Chile. The last ten years, plus or minus, have been, let’s say that the last 3 or 4 years have been more stable. Our expectation is to achieve something close to 14,000 hectares, which is something close to 1.3 million tons of fresh tomatoes.

This is not really relevant in terms of the world production share, so 3 to 4%. But if we talk about world trade share, it’s more relevant. Why? Because we export 100% of what we produce. The internal consumption in Chile is really, really small. The other thing that is not in the graph, but it’s relevant to mention, in Chile we negotiate directly with the growers. There is no association. Talking about the average yields, this is what we have had in Chile the last couple of years, around 90, 95 tons, per hectare. And last year was a little bit higher, of course, the weather, as we have seen in California, this year is still relevant. But in Chile, we have done some good things in that direction to improve the yields. Just ten years ago in Chile, only 15% of the crop had drip irrigation and nowadays it is almost 95%. So we have improved that significantly.

This one supposed to be, well, the mechanical harvesting. By 2015 it was like, 70 to 75%, and now it’s 90%. So we have got an improvement on the technology.

What are our main production challenges, our concerns?

In Spanish it’s called Orobanche, but broomrape. We’re facing big issues with that. Irrigation technologies and crop management improvement. Just for you to know, in Chile, around 20 to 30% of the crop has been affected by broomrape, of that, based on the information we have, because there’s no official figures, but around 7 to 8% are severe damage. So there’s a big concern and no solution so far, but the picture on the right shows the work that we have been doing with the growers, in order to clean the harvesters, to avoid additional infection in the crop.

And then, irrigation is something that we have to keep pushing and developing, since in the future there’s going to be a huge cost, there’s a huge concern about the water availability.

Crop management improvement. We have an integrated pest monitoring on, using these technologies also to improve their quality. But that’s why all these things are a concern. Broomrape, it is clear. But the other two, because we still have to do a lot of things in order to educate our growers and ourselves of course to be more competitive.

And the last thing, about sustainability, in Chile we export a lot of fruit. In the case of fruit, we have to follow some specific rules under a sustainability point of view in order to export. In the case of our crop, it’s not a must but nowadays it’s something that we have to do, following what our customer wants.

The FSA is just an example of what some of our customers are asking for. And we are also going in that direction because it’s going to be a must in the future.

And a last slide. What we have been doing with most of the growers in Chile is collaborating all together in the industry. Here I’m talking on behalf of Chile Alimentos, of representing the whole industry from Chile. All that work and the things we have been doing is through them, in order to improve the work with the growers.

Antonio Casana: Thank you for the information that you shared on the challenges that you faced in South America and in Chile, in your country. Now we go to North Italy. So I ask Carlo Piccinini to give us some insight about the situation in northern Italy that was challenging the last two years.

Carlo Piccinini: I’m a producer and a contractor. So, what I’m bringing is some numbers regarding the climate situation, which is probably one of the biggest challenges we are facing right now.

In northern Italy, what you see is the past 15 years, on rainfalls data and the green larger line is what we call the normality range. It’s what is the best situation for the tomato plants. In 15 years, we’ve only had one with optimal rains. So that shows us how we passed from years of drought to years of too much rain.

This is not just to complain, but it is to show our challenges. Especially in northern Italy, we have a few rivers and our main goal is to manage the moments when we have too much rain and the periods of time where we have not enough rain.

On the other side, there is the temperature problem that we had in 2025 that, exactly in the flowering season, we had heat stress and this is what affected the most the 2025 harvest, bringing it down to lower levels than what we were used to.

The next slide is our yields in the past 4 or 5 years. As you can see, that 20, 21, 22 and 23 have higher yields. The red line is the integrated production, the orange is the average and the green is organic. What we see is, in the dry years, we have higher yields. In the years when we have an excess of rain, we have lower yields.

So that should not lead us to think we need less water, because a structural climate change that brings us with drought and not enough water will be disastrous, but 1 or 2 years of low rainfalls gave us higher yields. So, 2025 is not over yet, but the data from last week tells us that we are at 65 tons per hectare, so slightly higher than 2024, probably due to the heat stress that we had.

So how do we phase this? Basically, what we’re trying to do as an organization for the whole northern part of Italy, we are trying to make different projects involving our governments, regional governments, in order to be able to store water when there is excessive rain and to drain more water for when we need to irrigate.

We have different projects going on. Tomato water, that is a huge research trying to find the territories that are more fragile in the irrigation period. So we are trying to make a project where to build new water basins and we also have other projects over genetic improvements and the last is we are developing many chain projects, together with farmers and processors, we’re trying to make projects together in order to improve our infrastructures.

Antonio Casana: Thank you, Carlo, for the insight for your area. And now we move to California that had a very wonderful crop this year.

Mike Montna: You want me to talk about all the problems we have and we had in the past. We did have a good year this year.

Just looking at the tonnage like we talked about, we did try to reduce acres by about 10%. And last year we got 11.1 million. And with a 10% reduction in acres, we did do a little bit better this year at 11.75. As far as risk, long term water supply, the state’s grown to over 40 million and hasn’t really added a new water system since the population was about 20 million.

We have the same issues than everyone else. Everyone didn’t become a better farmer this year than they did two years ago when we had a terrible crop or three years ago. The weather just really cooperated through every stage of the crop and of development. Here we look at our yields.

I think Martin was alluding to it. Everything surprised us. Absolutely. We’ve had what we considered flat to declining yields for 10 to 12 years. A lot of it because, during droughts, our water quality can be a little less than desirable. We’re on different ground in some cases, rotations are a little different in droughts.

Right now, we’re in a period where the reservoirs are, adequately supplied. And the heat that we’ve been having during critical times of plant growth, plant development, didn’t happen. It just doesn’t mean it’s not going to be that way in the future. It’s not something that’s a concern. A lot of money is going into research, for automation, breeding, genetics, all the things that happen.

That’s our crop delivery schedule versus kind of a historical by week. I’d say that’s pretty ideal, kind of up and going, steady climb and then pretty consistent for a period of maybe 5 or 6, seven weeks in the heart of the season. That was really beneficial. Like I said, I’ve called it the unicorn season because we’ve all heard about unicorns. We never really seen one, but now I’ve seen a good season, so I know it exists.

I put a few key factors. Not all because, “success has many fathers, and failure is an orphan”. So anyone that I left off the list that provides any services to us, I didn’t want to be accused of anything later. When we had to do less acres, we kind of stayed on our better soil. I think it was a contributing factor.

We’ve talked about good water. The planting, the bloom crop development, I talked about that, just no stress. It’s amazing what a crop can do, growing when it has very little stress throughout the season. It was really fun to see for everyone involved. It’s a big number, but it kind of reminds us of when we’ve been in these kinds of grinding seasons for the last few years. But when it really goes together. Well, growing, processing plants running. Well, it’s pretty fun to be in the middle of something pretty remarkable. There you go.

Antonio Casana: Thank you. Mike. So the second question I want to share with you is about the cost, the input and input dependency. Given the volatility for fertilizer, energy, water, labor and agrochemicals, how are growers in your area managing this uncertainty and what adjustment are you making in procurement, scale or crop planning? Are you shifting towards less input intensive or regenerative practices and how do you balance yields versus cost? We can start from, from Arturo.

Arturo Cerda: That’s a really complicated question for us. It’s something that of course, we have to negotiate with the growers a year by year. And we negotiate with them in Chilean pesos, and we fix that every year. And again, in Chile, there’s no association. Whatever we’re going to do, we have to do directly with the growers so that is something I don’t know if it is an advantage or disadvantage.

But that’s the reality in Chile that makes us have cases year by year. I guess that’s the most important difference. And of course, we have to negotiate with them every year based on their market conditions or the world conditions. Chile is really small. We have zero incidence in the world price. So that’s, really a specific situation for us.

Antonio Casana: Thank you Arturo. Carlo?

Carlo Piccinini: Same for us, we don’t have a way to influence the prices of what we purchase. What we do is we have organized in producers organizations, northern Italy has 2000 producers organized in 12 organizations. So, what we do is, in a number of things that we buy, we buy them collectively.

But you can’t do it on a large scale. You can’t do it on everything. You don’t buy collectively fuel, fertilizer. We do it with seeds and plants, for example, and insurance, which is an increasing cost. But, on drip tape, chemicals, fertilizer, fuel and eventually energy, in case we pump water with electric wells. That is something we have to deal with. The only thing we can do is structural investments. That is the only thing we can do. So  we change our operations in order to be more efficient and consume less.

Antonio Casana: So the scale matters, maybe even there. Okay. Thank you. Carlo?

Carlo Piccinini: And the last thing is insurances of course. We are trying to get insurance, to have a new way of protecting our profitability, not only the crop, but of course, they won’t do it. So what we’re doing now is mutualistic funds. So as OPs, we collect money in the good years in order to face the worst cases in the bad years. And we’re trying to do that. Well, we’ll see.

Antonio Casana: Thank you. Mike?

Mike Montna: We negotiate and we usually, I think, get to a kind of fair price or what the price should be, some of the things I think we’re concerned about, this year, it’s a real expensive crop to grow. It’s just an annual crop that you’re putting a lot of money into. And I always call it kind of like the little over $5,000 boomerang. You throw it and hope it comes back with more money, and this year, it will. It did. And that’s good. Also, we need to rotate in order to have healthy soils and not one of our members, growers only grows tomatoes. They have multiple commodities that they grow, some permanent plantings. So it all matters. And some of the other crops, they need to rotate, just like we need to put gas in our car to make it go. We need to rotate in order to be able to grow tomatoes. The markets just are a little in flux right now and not really there. So that’s kind of concerning, because there’s your tomato health, but then your overall entity health that is still a little struggling regardless how well the tomatoes do, there’s other commodities they grow that just aren’t there right now.

Antonio Casana: Thank you Mike.

So coming to sustainability and market demands, I ask you how do you integrate sustainability compliance, certification scheme traceability or regenerative practices that grow at a level? And what are the costs and benefits in your region? What about organic crop demand? In Europe, for example, we have fixed the target of 25%, at least for minimum organic farming by 2030. That is an ambitious goal outlined by the farm to fork strategy. But these seem to be not realistic. And so I ask, what is going on about sustainability and organic production in your regions?

Mike Montna: Antonio, let me let me answer again first. That’s burning after you say that. We have this with our state legislator all the time. They act as if we need money to get into organic. We need a market to sell organic into. We have no problem growing it. With our market right now, we’re going to do about 550,000 tons. It’s fluctuated just on Mother Nature from 390, I think, to 770. But the artificial, we want to be 25% organic, okay, but 25% of the people are going to buy it. And we get in that really tough dynamic as growers. Sustainability, our growers are under quite a few plans, because, and this is from a growers perspective, each company might have different demands. And we were more interested in true sustainability plans based on good science, good decisions versus a sustainability plan that says we’re marketing different than the next company. And it’s not our front line processors. It kind of happens downstream, that we see that. So I think we want real sustainability based on good choices, good science, and not really looking from a market, a brochure. We want to have a better reform.

Antonio Casana: Mike, which is the difference in price between organic and conventional in California in percentage?

Mike Montna: It’s (USD) 138 this year for organic and 109 for conventional.

Antonio Casana: Thank you. Arturo?

Arturo Cerda: I agree in terms that, in our case at least, I am in sales, by the way. So, it’s really hard to, the organic market is much smaller than conventional, of course. That’s one thing. And the other is that scale is important. And in the case of Chilean processors, it’s really hard to grow, and specifically organic tomatoes, and process just organic, which is against the conventional because we don’t have enough lines. So it’s not like we’re running 100% of one line with the organic and the other with the conventional. So that’s a big bottleneck for us. And, also, how you organize your growers in order to have all the at once is also an issue in Chile.So we cannot get enough tomatoes at once and crush whatever the factory can crush from those tomatoes. So it’s really complicated for us. We have done it. Most of the factories in Chile, but it’s complicated. That, and we really believe on sustainability. I have to be honest and say that this is driven by the customers, but, in Chile, through the association, we have done a lot of things in terms of clean production, CO2 emissions, water footprint. We’re doing a lot of things on that direction, but so far, I should say, and this is my opinion, they have been a push or driven by the customers and this is why now we have different certifications, and we’re going towards that direction.

Antonio Casana: Thank you Arturo. Carlo?

Carlo Piccinini: Italy has no conventional tomato growing, so we have 90%, integrated production and 10% organic. But we have the European Union that keeps taking chemicals off the list, which is making quite difficult the cultivation, especially for herbicides. We are losing, to 2026, the third principle and that, based on a study made in Italy and another one made in Portugal, we are expecting to go down 40% on the production because, if you can’t control herbs and weeds, that’s the base, that’s the starting point.

The other thing is, organic, the 25% goal set by the European Union. We went from to 2011 to 2021, in ten years, we went from 3 to 10% of the surface, which is not the production because the production yields lower. But then in the past five years, we were stable at 10%. That tells you that that’s what the market demands and there is no more probably there is no more space for organic. The remaining 15% is probably fantasy or yes, poetry, which we like, when we tell stories to our kids. But we need to keep it real and follow the market.

Antonio Casana: Thank you Carlo.

So the last question I would like to address to you is about the way you contract, in your area, between the industry and the farmers organization. And I would also like to see what is your average price field gate, paid in the last two crops, 24 and 25. And what your forecast is for next crop, 26?

Mike Montna: We were at 112.50 last year. and 109 a ton this year. And we were at 138 in 2023, 105 in 2022. 85 in 2021, no, 78 in 21. A lot of changes. It’s weird. We bypassed the whole 90s from a cost standpoint. During Covid, some inflation hit and it never really went away. And what I hear from our members is once the price gets up to here, everyone raises the prices they charge you. And so when it goes back down, they don’t lower the price that they charge you for bearings or belts or whatever it is you may buy on the ranch. We negotiate the price with the processor. It’s a good process. Like I said, we usually get to the right place at the end or a fair place. And I think we’ll get that this year. Whether I know the number I in my mind or not, I would not say, but I don’t really know at this point. We get a lot of data.

Antonio Casana: After a good season, normally the price is reduced a little bit.

Mike Montna: Historically, you could say maybe that’s true. I don’t negotiate on the stage. It’s 8000 miles away from home, so, we’ll usually start with processor meetings in November. We have some things that just haven’t happened in California. There will be processors contract with the growers on the volumes that they want. There’s really no speculation plantings out there, just like probably anywhere. So we’re going to have a lot of discussions on where we’re heading. Processors want the growers healthy and growers want the processors to be healthy. And I believe that to be true. And so with that being said, that means we’ll get to, I think, a fair place.

Antonio Casana: Thank you. Carlo?

Carlo Piccinini: In Italy, we have the interprofessional organization that holds together the producers and the processors. It’s 20 processors and 12 producers organizations. So it’s quite a reasonable number and balanced. It’s 12 and 20. Not the same thing in southern Italy, which is 80 plus, versus 35 OPs, I believe. It’s much different. What we do is, we do meetings and so on. We try to fix the price, by January, February in order to make programs. And what we call the framework contract, it’s a framework that is the base for the whole northern Italy, for further discussions and during the campaign and so on. The interprofessional organizations holds all the contracts and informs us, as the campaign goes on, about the progress of the campaign.

Antonio Casana: Do you think a farmer can keep a fair value for their product?

Carlo Piccinini: Well, it surely is an example of how you can put producers and processors together on the table and discuss what both sides’ needs are and it surely is a way to keep some value in the farms because nowadays, the farmer has huge investments to make, as well as the processor. So we need to be on the same table.

Antonio Casana: Thank you Carlo. Arturo?

Arturo Cerda: Well, I would take this opportunity to talk about a little bit about commercial things because, you know, China has, as everybody says, influenced a lot to market and, been in around our markets, Latin America. We never thought that China would be there. So, having said that, we have to negotiate all our costs, especially raw material but we also respect and we have had the growers for so many years that we are doing our best to keep at least last crop’s prices, but we’re in the middle, we are already negotiating with them. So we are going to pay a little bit less than what we did last crop, in order to face this new market situation. Otherwise, in Chile, at least, we are even considering that we have very competitive rates, no duties, almost everywhere. We still need to compete against China, which is almost, of course, impossible.

Antonio Casana: Okay. Can you share any average price from your country the last few years.

Arturo Cerda: Below $100. But that’s ex-field by the way.

Antonio Casana: So I think also California is field gate.

Antonio Casana: And northern Italy, which prices?

Carlo Piccinini: In 2023 it was (EUR) 150 per ton. And then it went down to 140 last year. And then this year was 142.5.

Antonio Casana: Thank you.

I think we shared all the insights from these three important parts of the world from cultivation. If there is any question from you, we are here available. If someone want to ask something. Thank you very much for your information, for sharing your knowledge here.