It was August 2005. I visited Davis, CA and was guest of Chithra and Dr Lux Lakshmanan of California Agriculture Consulting Services. Over the next couple of days Lux (then 77) drove me a couple of hundred miles through a number of agricultural farms producing a range of crops: almonds, cantaloupes, corn, pistachios, pepper, pomegranates, sugar beet, tomatoes. I was struck by the high productivity levels of these crops that are multiple times of those in average Indian farms.
Lux explained the high productivity of tomatoes, at 80 tonnes/acre (California has just 10 inches of rain a year); these are harvested mechanically along with the plants and the fruits separated through vibrators and directly conveyed into 25 tonne bins in trucks moving in parallel. A number of tomatoes fall on the ground and these are ploughed along with the plant’s stems.
