Genetic diversity.
Adaptation to different growing conditions.
Among them were true Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter, San Marzano Lungo, German Pink, and Green Zebra.
Purchasing enough high-quality seed to establish five acres of rare heirloom tomatoes would normally have required an enormous investment.
Cole did not have that money either.
But tomato seeds possess a useful characteristic.
Each seed is naturally surrounded by a gelatinous coating associated with the fruit.
Traditional seed saving often uses controlled fermentation to break down that coating before the seeds are cleaned, dried, and stored.
The canning factory viewed the seeds mixed into its processing waste as worthless.
Cole saw something else.
Inside that mountain of fermented tomato material were enormous numbers of heirloom seeds from varieties he could never have afforded to purchase in quantity.
Seeds mixed directly into the same organic material he intended to use to restore the soil.
While the town laughed, Cole went to work.
He borrowed a battered 1972 John Deere tractor from his uncle.
For the next three weeks, he worked the five-acre parcel methodically.
He incorporated the tomato waste into the damaged soil rather than leaving it exposed in large surface piles.
He also blended old wheat straw through portions of the organic material to help balance the heavy, wet tomato residue.
Day after day, the field changed.
The hard surface began to look darker.
Less lifeless.
More like soil than the gray clay that had been sitting there for 15 years.
Cole monitored the field carefully.
By early May, the intense initial decomposition had settled.
The soil temperature stabilized.
Tests showed that the extreme alkalinity had fallen dramatically from its original pH of 8.4.
Then came three days of warm spring rain.
On May 21st, drivers along County Road 7 began slowing their vehicles.
Something was happening across Cole Evans’ field.
The land that everyone had called a landfill was turning green.
On May 21st, after three days of warm spring rain, the entire five-acre parcel did something that shocked every driver on County Road 7.
It did not sprout weeds.
Across five unbroken acres of dark, newly restored earth, a uniform emerald-green carpet of hundreds of thousands of vigorous, thick-stemmed heirloom tomato seedlings pushed through the soil simultaneously.
The seed density was so massive, and the root establishment so aggressive, that invasive weeds struggled to compete for sunlight.
The natural fermentation had produced an extraordinarily high germination rate.
Where the county expected an abandoned wasteland of dead weeds, a dense, thriving sea of heritage vegetation was rising from the earth.
As the summer of 1992 deepened, the Midwest agricultural region was hit by two simultaneous crises.
The first was a brutal economic shock.
The global price of synthetic nitrogen and petroleum-based fungicides surged by 65% due to international supply disruptions.
Commercial growers who relied on chemical inputs, including Arthur Vance, saw their operating costs balloon to catastrophic levels.
Vance was forced to take out $200,000 in emergency operating credit just to keep his computerized drip-fertigation systems running.
The second disaster was biological.
An aggressive strain of early tomato blight swept through the Midwest, carried by humid southern winds.
The modern hybrid varieties planted across thousands of acres had virtually no genetic diversity.
Because every plant in Vance’s fields was genetically similar, the fungal blight ripped through his 6,000 acres with devastating speed.
Glossy green fields turned into blackened, rotting vines in less than two weeks despite repeated chemical spraying.
Across the fence line on Cole Evans’ five-acre parcel, the scene looked like an entirely different world.
Cole’s crop consisted of 40 distinct historic heirloom varieties, each carrying different inherited traits and varying levels of natural resistance.
The blight could not move through the field with the same uniform efficiency it found in the commercial monocultures.
The deep organic material incorporated from the tomato slurry had also encouraged a biologically active root zone filled with beneficial fungi and bacteria.
The plants were not invincible, but the diversity and soil health gave the field a level of resilience the surrounding commercial acreage did not have.
By the first week of July, Cole had pruned and trellised the rows using cedar posts and heavy baling twine.
His five acres had transformed into an eight-foot-tall, nearly impenetrable jungle of dark green foliage.
The vines were so heavy with fruit that some of the wooden support posts bowed under the weight.
And the fruit was unlike anything the county had ever witnessed.
These were not the uniform, pale, mealy red tomatoes stacked in plastic grocery-store containers.
They were massive, irregular, multicolored agricultural jewels.
There were giant two-pound Brandywines with deep pink, fluted shoulders and rich, sweet acidity.
There were Cherokee Purples with dark mahogany-green skins and complex smoky flavor.
There were brilliant yellow Pineapple tomatoes marbled with crimson streaks.
There were elongated San Marzano paste tomatoes with thick flesh perfect for sauce.
The field looked less like a conventional commercial tomato operation and more like a living botanical archive.
While Arthur Vance and other commercial growers dumped thousands of pounds of blighted hybrid tomatoes into drainage ditches at roughly 40 cents per pound, word of Cole’s harvest began reaching the emerging farm-to-table culinary movement in Chicago and Indianapolis.
At first, it traveled through produce buyers.
Then restaurant suppliers.
Then chefs.
On July 14th, an executive chef from a high-end Italian restaurant in downtown Chicago drove four hours to Knox County after hearing a rumor from a local produce distributor.