Tomatoes must be the most temperamental crop he has ever had to handle, but, says veteran grower Christo Louw of Steelpoort in Limpopo, if lavishly pampered and given just the right treatment, they can also be the most profitable. Louw has a voluptuous stand of tomatoes of the Piersol variety, a type that for many of his neighbours has been nothing but a disaster. He has been growing tomatoes for the past 21 years and, of all the varieties he has tried out, none has responded as well to his care and feeding as Piersol.
"At best," he says, "the other varieties have yielded only half as much fruit a hectare as Piersol over a full year of cropping and for exactly the same amount of time and money lavished upon them. This variety gives an outstanding conversion performance under my conditions. Also, the closely-knit foliage it produces goes a long way towards shielding the fruit from hailstorms that periodically sweep down the valley."
After one particularly devastating hailstorm, insurance assessors were called in to calculate the value of the crop loss. Their figures showed a yield loss of 15,000 boxes/ha. Despite this, Louw estimates that had he planted any other variety, the crop would have been a total loss.
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