Amy Hepworth went long tomatoes this year. A farmer in Milton, New York, Hepworth brought new land into production and invested heavily in the crop hoping the effort would help pay for the farm and, in part, help stimulate the local economy. Then came late blight.

Hepworth and her partner Gerry Greco detailed their battle with the air-born fungus when the members of Hepworth’s community supported agriculture (CSA) from Sixth Street Community Center in New York City visited Hepworth Farms two weeks ago. The visit upstate was our first in the long relationship with the organic farm, and as Hepworth and Greco plunged into a discussion on tomato pathology, it seemed the farmers were as excited about the trip as we were.

Early this spring the farmers were already taking every possible precaution to guard against the five other diseases that normally plague the fruit. They bought all new stakes and seed trays and carefully sanitized the seeds in boiling water. Tomato diseases are often borne in the soil, so they chose land that had no disease history, some of which had not been cultivated for a 100 years.

The preparation left Hepworth and Greco feeling confident as they went out to secure growing contracts for the season. Their hope was to generate cash to pay for the farm and employ more workers.

“We are going into fields that don’t have any history of disease, this is our year we don’t have to spray,” Hepworth said of their position in the spring. “We go out and get a lot of contracts for growing, to pay for this. Because we have to employ more people now because the economy is sluggish. Farmers have to pick up, we’re going to kick in some idle land, we’re going to do our part, because we’re the producers, so that is our job. So we go out and get more contracts. Now comes the late blight.”

“Bummer,” someone in the crowd says.

“Yeah,” replies Hepworth.

Late blight is the same air-born fungus that led to the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s. The disease thrives in the unseasonably cool wet weather we had earlier this summer. The blight turns the leaves and stems brown and a white mildew spreads across the surface. Tomatoes become a brown mush. Like most mildew, high temperatures and dry conditions kill the fungus, so it could never sustain the weeks of soaring temperatures that are typical of Northeastern summers.

Instead there is a pandemic. At the first sign of blight a plant must be pulled and destroyed, and the plants around the blight infestation must be torched. Farmers across the Northeast have lost their tomatoes and the thousands of dollars invested in them.

“So meanwhile, back at the ranch, we’re sitting on 10-15 acres of tomatoes and that means for us that after every rain we have to put copper out there,” Hepworth said. “It was really hard to handle and do, but there was not a lot of choice about it. Now you can say, ‘Well, plant another crop.’ Well at this point, there’s a quarter of a million dollars invested in this ordeal here. We have a lot of things going on here to sustain and support a farm to feed people. So we spray. We sprayed the copper this year. And we have tomatoes. There are many, many organic farmers who do not have tomatoes this year.”

Copper based fungicide is the treatment accepted in organic farming practices and it is one of the few tools to fight blight. According to the Cornell University Cooperative Extension, the state’s agricultural research institution, application of copper is advised only after following other organic practices including using land with no disease history, planting in wide rows and determining disease resistant cultivars. Copper application is strictly controlled because it does not break down in the soil and its accumulation is harmful to soil biology.

“The problem is that I have to monitor this in the whole life of the field,” Hepworth said. “There is a protocol. There is only so much copper that you want to put on ever in the whole lifetime of the field. So I just shot a big wad.”

Disease resistant tomato strains are still being developed, and Hepworth said the tomatoes planted at Hepworth Farms this year show mixed signs of resistance. All of the tomatoes will be washed on the farm. During our tour of Hepworth Farms we visited the tomato washing station and sampled a few of the perfectly formed cherry tomatoes.

“We’re washing them all but there is still going to be residues of copper,” Greco said. “It is harmless to you but you should just wash them again.”

Although tomatoes are a cash crop whose success or failure determines the bottom line for many farms, a small number of other crops thrive in the recent weather. Leafy greens are typically grown in the early spring and late fall precisely because it is typically cool and wet. This summer, farmers diversified enough to have summer greens are experiencing bumper crops with little maintenance.

“The insects have gone off to hide in the bush,” Hepworth said. “I’ve never had a greens crop like this.”

Charlie Paley, a Connecticut farmer who also runs Paley’s Farm Market, said he has been inundated with calls from farmers looking to sell their lettuce. Primarily a corn and tomato farmer, he did not plant greens for the height of the summer.

Billiam van Roestenberg did not plant his normal tomato crop this year. We visited Liberty View Farm in Highland New York after leaving Hepworth Farms. Van Roestenberg said he started his seedlings in a cold frame but lost them all when they sizzled in the frames on one hot day in the spring.

“My dad got sick with cancer and died this spring,” van Roestenberg said. “I had all the seedlings and we had a 97 degree day. I forgot to tell the guy to open the green house and the cold frames and everything died.”

Despite a small number of plants, van Roestenberg discovered the blight on his tomatoes in late July.

Liberty View Farm, known for their naturally grown apples, was also hit with apple scale this year. Although the scale does not affect the taste of the apple, the peel of the fruit becomes flecked with small brown spots. van Roestenberg said he is not overly concerned with the ascetics because in the past his apples were so perfect looking that customers often did not believe that no chemical sprays were used on the apples. His secret for pest management he said was a clay-based spray.

Hepworth Farms, also experienced trouble with their fruit trees this year. Early in the spring hail storms damaged many orchards in the Hudson Valley, including their’s.

“Whenever you go out there plant anything, it’s very romantic planting the seed and it’s very romantic planting,” Hepworth said. “To get to the finish line, what it takes is a foot soldier.”

Photos: Stephanos Koullias

Two weeks ago, I noticed that two of my tomato plants had late blight. I was up on the roof, weeding, pulling off yellowing leaves from all the excess rain, and harvesting some early tomatoes when I noticed leaves with yellow and brown spots on them. I’d read the article in the New York Times about the blight, and so I sent out the photo on the left to Twitter, asking my followers, “is this the blight?” The answer, sadly, was yes. So I pulled one plant up, before it could spread to the others, and took all the leaves off the other plant which was confined to a corner, hoping to let it’s three giant tomatoes ripen.

Unfortunately, rooftops are not immune from the soil disease that ravages spuds and tomatoes — I bought my seedlings from two small nurseries upstate, which had grown them locally. But it is possible that contamination had already spread to my tomatoes from the nurseries’ neighbors who bought their plants at big box stores like Lowe’s and Wal-Mart, which sold plants in soil from an Alabama facility that carried the blight. Ironically, it is new growers’ enthusiasm that might have exacerbated the disease through increased consumer demand. And while a record number of people are growing some of their own produce this year, excess rain in the northeast has created the perfect conditions for the blight to flourish — but it is small organic farmers that are taking a punch.

Last week I spoke to some of the farmers at the Union Square farmer’s market. Three of my favorite sustainable farms are not spraying, even though it means a losses of up to $25,000. It’s a depressing worse case scenario. Amy Hepworth, the farmer at Hepworth Farms (my CSA) and Kira Kenney of Evolutionary Organics, both places from whom I normally get beautiful tomatoes for eating and canning, have sustained big losses this year. Another of my favorites farms, known for their tomatoes, has decided to spray to save their harvest — for the first time in 14 years. It’s hard to tell farmers not to spray. As M.K. Wyle wrote on Civil Eats last week, its painful to watch all of that work be destroyed in one fell swoop.

So what can be done, and is this just the farmer’s gambit? On my rooftop, I’ve planted salad greens and kale in the place of my missing tomatoes. But for small farms, most of which grow diverse crops and often don’t qualify for disaster insurance, such a loss could put them further into debt and make their ability to grow in the future uncertain. It is possible that had plants been grown from seed nearby, and soil stayed in its region, we wouldn’t see the blight spreading like it is through the northeast. So should small farms bear the brunt of the burden alone?

Governor Paterson doesn’t think so. He requested recently that the USDA designate 17 New York counties as agricultural disaster areas. If these counties get this designation, low-interest loans will be made available based on the extent of the losses.

But loans aren’t ideal. I’m glad that the option is there, but how about better supports in Washington for diversified growers, who support a healthier population and healthier soil? Loans are more like a band-aid, after the fact. Growers of cotton, soy, wheat, corn and other non-perishable commodities are protected because they are the biggest producers, and as such have the most detailed crop histories, lobbies, and of course that longer shelf life.

Getting crop insurance is based on data sets and tables which are essentially a history of a certain crop’s performance. According to Scott Marlow, of the Rural Advancement Foundation International, there is precious little information being gathered on USDA-designated “specialty crops” (around 10 million acres planted according to the 2007 census, a fraction of the total 310 million acres planted in the US), like tomatoes, and so it’s harder for these farmers to get coverage. It is also harder for them to get loans, which are often based on crop insurance.

Furthermore, planting restrictions put in place by the federal government aim to keep specialty crops at that 10 million acres so as to control prices. If a farmer shifts from commodity crops to specialty crops, they lose the payments on their land. All of this means that a farmer has to feel really passionate about diversified growing, because they are managing their own risk most of the time. And the growth of the local food movement gets stifled by these realities, too.

But I would argue that the farmers growing perishable fruits and vegetables are our insurance policy against future preventable disease; that, in fact, our health is rooted in this issue.

I may be able to withstand losses in my little plot, (an experiment in growing, really) but small farmers cannot. Let’s change the inherant unfairness in our system that favors big over small farms by pushing the goverment to re-evaluate these policies. Indeed, the future of local food is at stake.

I have an entire cookbook devoted to tomatoes.  Admittedly, I have a lot of cookbooks, but tomatoes are the only vegetable in my kitchen with an entire cookbook singing their praises.  But then, they are tomatoes, the crown of the summer growing season and the crop that can make or break a small vegetable farm.  Every strange vegetable from kohlrabi to escarole has its devoted fans, but tomatoes are as much of an American summer institution as baseball and 4th of July fireworks. Tomatoes are the crop that everyone is waiting for.

For those of us living in the Northeast this year, if could be a long wait.  Earlier this summer, tomato transplants sold in Lowes, Walmart, and Home Depot carried the spores of Phytophthora infestans (literally “plant destroyer” in Latin) into the Northeast, where a cool, wet summer provided ideal conditions for an epidemic.  Phytophthora infestans, more commonly referred to as late blight, is an incredibly contagious plant disease, which can knock out entire fields of tomatoes and potatoes in a matter of days.  Late blight was the cause of the infamous Irish Potato Famine of the nineteenth century—this is a plant disease which means business.

Normally, late blight does not affect the Northeast, as cold winters prevent any spores from wintering over.  In the south, where late blight can survive winter, the high heat of summer holds the blight in check and prevents the total crop loss that Northeastern farmers now dread.  What happened this year is the worst case scenario only possible in an industrialized food system.  The disease overwintered in an Alabama nursery, which then shipped infected plants to the Northeast and spread the blight far more quickly and ubiquitously than the disease ever could have traveled on its own.

At the farm where I am working, late blight has been creeping ever nearer for the last two weeks: first it was in all the states surrounding Massachusetts, then it was in nearby counties, then it was here, in Berkshire county, until Friday, when my boss, Don, found the first blighted tomato on our farm.  We had eaten our first cherry tomatoes on Monday.

I’m sure that to a non-grower, this all seems a bit histrionic.  And it is true, no one has died, nor has the farm been hit by a catastrophic natural disaster.  Many of our other crops are flourishing, despite the seeming perma-cloud that has been draping our state as of late.  And we’ll get a harvest of potatoes, albeit a much smaller and less storage-worthy one.  But remember this: we’ve put more hours into these two crops than any others: we built an entire hoop house for tomatoes this spring, showered our transplants with attention, mulched 2800 feet of tomato beds with straw, trellised all of the tomatoes at least three times, and in the potatoes, we’ve spent hours scouting for Colorado potato beetles and picking them off by hand.  Our crops are thriving, or were, before Friday.  All of our plants were uncommonly healthy and robust, flowering and fruiting with verdant abandon.

With the blight in our fields, though, we know what comes next.  Brown spots and downly fungus on the leaves, black spots on the stems, rotting green fruit, and a lot of empty space on the farm.  Every document from every extension office, no matter how green, is sending the same message this summer: spray something (organic or conventional) or lose your tomatoes and potatoes.  There is literally nothing else we can do.  Conventional growers have a number of spraying options; organic growers are permitted to use a copper spray.  On my farm, we won’t spray anything, ever.

For the first time, I can truly understand the desire to spray.  Last year, when bean beetles decimated our green beans and edamame, the thought flickered through my mind, but now, poised on the brink of losing the entire harvest of a crop that on many diversified farms generates 20 or more percent of the annual revenue, I can see what drives a farmer to don a backpack and a mask and start reading chemical warning labels.

For me, however, it was the warning labels that helped me make peace with our decision not to fight.  Here is how one extension service bulletin describes copper fungicide, the certified organic choice (which is only a stopgap measure in terms of effectiveness):

“Corrosive.  Causes irreversible eye damage.  May cause skin sensitization reactions in certain individuals.  Do not get in eyes or on clothing.  Harmful if swallowed or absorbed through the skin.  Avoid contact with skin.  Avoid breathing dust.  Personal protective equipment that applicators and other handlers must wear when using copper is: long-sleeved shirt and long pants, chemical-resistant and waterproof gloves, shoes plus socks, and protective eyewear.  First aid information is also provided on labels for accidental exposure, know this in advance to avoid delay in treatment.”

I recently received an email from a friend apprenticing on a nearby farm, where they had chosen to fight the blight by spraying.  “Ethically, I’m opposed to spraying “ she wrote, “yet I helped [my manager] initiate a spray plan and spent ten hours with a mask and backpack.  That felt like sin.  At some point I spotted infected potatoes.  That was hard to break to her…”

Farmers who spray preventatively—once a week, or more often if there is rain—stand a chance of wringing a harvest out of this terrible season.  As the only folks with local tomatoes, they’ll be able to charge unheard of prices for them.  At the same time, those sprays will be slowly nurturing stronger, more virulent strains of the blight.  My farm is a CSA farm, so the loss of our tomatoes won’t mean financial ruin (unless angry shareholders boycott next year due to this season’s tomato failure).  Other farmers depend on the tomatoes for financial solvency.  They are good farmers; they have done everything sustainably, with sweat and skill and passion.  Do they spray, against everything that they believe in, or accept a massive financial hit in an already challenging year?

On Friday night, after receiving the bad news, I walked down to our plum tomatoes, to the small empty spot where my manager had removed the first telltale plants.  The neighboring tomatoes still stood tall and strong, and a heady tomato perfume hung over that section of the field.  This is a tragic reality check for young farmers, that our path is not always hard work leading linearly to good eating.  But it need not spell the end of our dreams or indeed of the local food movement.  Now more than ever, Northeastern farmers need the support of their customers.  They need CSA members with the grace to accept why their tomatoes are missing this year and market-goers who understand the devil’s bargain many farmers were forced to make.    This is a year that can teach young agrarians humility and restraint and gratitude, if we can bring ourselves to seek it.

Photos: heirlooms by clayirving, late blight on leaves by jmignault