Sunco facility promotes vine dining

Max Jacobson

Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2000 | 9:04 a.m.

One of the frustrations about dining out or, for that matter, shopping for groceries, is the difficulty in finding a nice ripe tomato. So Ken Gerhart is devoting his life to making that problem disappear.

His massive North Las Vegas facility, Sunco Ltd., is a half-million-square- foot (around 12 acres) greenhouse at 3950 N. Bruce St. that is devoted entirely to the cultivation and harvesting of tomatoes. These tomatoes are vine-ripened and hydroponically grown, harvested from October through June.

Gerhart sells them all over the United States, but he is aiming to penetrate the Las Vegas market thoroughly, and soon.

He was literally born in a greenhouse, and he learned his trade at an Ohio agricultural school. His father, Al, had a facility in Ohio dedicated to the cultivation of tomatoes and hothouse cucumbers; in fact Al Gerhart was one of the first people in this country to grow hothouse cukes.

Ken Gerhart is a friendly man with a smartly trimmed beard and a vaguely professorial demeanor. He is also someone who can tell you whatever you want to know about hydroponics, a term derived from Greek words that mean "moving water."

It's not just plain water, of course. Sunco's tomatoes are grown through a special process by which nutrient water is moved through special pipes into tomato plants set directly on top of bags of perlite, a material derived from volcanic rock. There are 12 acres and approximately 120,000 plants in this facility, each one yielding around 40 pounds of tomatoes.

Walking into this greenhouse, surely one of the biggest greenhouses in the world, is to be confronted by thousands of rows of leafy green tomato plants, each tied by 35 feet of string to white plastic bobbins suspended from above. The utter silence and vastness of the facility is oddly peaceful, and completely surrealistic.

These are Trust tomatoes, or beefsteak-type tomatoes, and Gerhart describes them as red, round tomatoes that aren't terribly acidic, but that have plenty of that distinct tomato flavor. A tomato is ripe when it reddens, and as Gerhart explains, tomatoes ripen from the inside out. That means that when a tomato is still green on the outside, it will be pink or slightly red on the inside.

Most of us know by now that the redness of a tomato in a supermarket is not necessarily an indicator of its ripeness, because commercially sold tomatoes aren't always allowed to redden naturally on the vine. All tomatoes, even Gerhart's, are picked before they reach the peak of ripeness, mainly to avoid bruising or spoilage before they reach the consumer.

But some producers ripen their tomatoes artificially with ethylene gas, a substance that tomatoes give off during the growing process. And though raising the ethylene levels does theoretically speed up the ripening process, it does nothing for the flavor. According to Gerhart, 80 percent of a tomato's flavor comes from vine ripening, and there is no way around that.

When you get a good tomato, remember that once it has been picked, it is best to keep a tomato at temperatures warmer than 55 degrees Fahrenheit. The earlier a tomato is picked before ripeness, the less flavor it will have, and the more it is kept cold, the more it will lose flavor as well. Most experts agree. Tomatoes should never be refrigerated.

This is an environmentally controlled facility where growing conditions are monitored by computer. The greenhouse is maintained at temperatures between 65 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, ideal for the tomato plant, even in the hottest summer months.

The greenhouse has a fog system, cross-ventilation and irrigation that is controlled remotely, in addition to other tricks designed to produce perfect tomatoes. With this system, Sunco is able to produce delicious tomatoes even during the coldest winter months.

The fertilization room is where Gerhart mixes his chemicals. Giant vats contain nutrient chemicals that are then calibrated and pumped to the individual plants. If you are worried about pesticides, don't be, because Gerhart uses only natural products to inhibit blight. He displays a box of bumblebees, which he buys from an insect hivery in Detroit. The bees are used to pollinate the tomato plant, because without pollen, a tomato plant will not bear fruit.

What happens is beautifully simple. Gerhart displays small brown marks on the yellow tomato flower. "See," he says, "here is the pollen. The bee noses around in the flower, and causes the pollen to fall from the stoma to the stigma."

The plants are also set from the bottom up. The biggest, or most fully grown, tomatoes are closest to ground level. As you move up the vine, the tomatoes get smaller and smaller, until they are the size of large grapes toward the top of the plant.

When they are ripe enough to be picked, approximately somewhere between 50 and 80 percent ripe, the tomatoes end up on a grader, which grades them for size, and then are hand packed into a box for retail sale.

According to Gerhart, there are around 600 acres of hot house tomato plants in the entire United States, and the number is increasing.

Sunco, Ltd. Is not open to the public, but Gerhart will show you the place if you can offer him a good reason for your seeing it. He also will sell his tomatoes wholesale, at anywhere between 75 cents and $1.50 per pound.

You can buy these tomatoes locally at both Von's and Wild Oats supermarkets, where they are sold under the name Las Vegas Delight. The retail price is approximately $2.99 a pound. They should start hitting the shelves in mid-October.

Gerhart isn't going to stop there. He is already growing yellow tomatoes in his facility, and he's experimenting with heirloom tomatoes as well. If we are extremely lucky, that unripe slice of tomato we suffer through at the local salad bar or burger joint will slowly fade away.

Then, all you'll need to enjoy a deliciously ripe tomato is a pinch of salt and a healthy appetite.