Summer tomato season is underway in the Northeast, and in Boston and around New England, tomato varieties are at their freshest and most flavorful.
GBH Meteorologist Dave Epstein recently traveled to a greenhouse in Iceland that grows tomatoes all year round under artificial lighting — despite the long, dark winters. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Dave Epstein: Why don’t you tell me the name of the farm? Because I’ve been practicing this, but I’m not necessarily going to get it right.
Matthías Jens Ármann: So the name is Friðheimar, and if you translate it to English directly, it means peace world.
Epstein: This family has been doing this tomato farming for a long time, and we’re going to get to hear this story this morning, the history of it.
Ármann: So my parents moved here in 1995 and they were 25 years old at the time. And they always had this dream of buying a farm because my [father], he studied agriculture and my mother studied horticulture. And my father was really into horses, my mother was really into gardening, so they had this dream of buying a farm in in the countryside of Iceland. They both grew up in the capital town in Iceland, Reykjavik, and they saw this farm called Friðheimar. The price was similar as an apartment in Reykjavik, a small one.
So they got a loan from their family, from a bank, and managed to buy the land. And from the year 1995 to 2003, they were expanding the greenhouses.
In 2003, we started to renovate the houses and start a full-year growing for the tomatoes. So we introduced them to the artificial lights which are above them, and by doing that, we could grow the tomatoes all year round.
Epstein: I want to give folks an idea of what we are looking at. Like, we’re standing in this greenhouse, the sun, it’s a beautiful day here in Iceland, the sun streaming in. So what, what do we see here?
I noticed these tomatoes are thick. So these are not like at home: We plant tomatoes in May and we harvest them, and October they’re done, and we throw them away and we put in new ones. These are clearly older plants.
Ármann: Yeah, so these ones [are] in the middle of their lifespan. So we have a specific house, which we call the baby house, where we plant the tomatoes or seed them, and they grow there in the six weeks of their life, in the first six weeks.
Then they are ready to go into the main houses, which is the house we are in right now. And after the six weeks in the baby house, they are not giving us any tomatoes. So we are putting a lot of energy, you know — water, electricity, labor, into the plants without getting anything from them. So it’s a pretty hard time.
What we do is we put them in between of the plants we have already in the greenhouses, and then we cut the top of the old plants, so they will put all of their last energy into making the tomatoes — so we managed to have constant production of tomatoes in the greenhouses here.
Epstein: I noticed, traveling around Iceland the past few days, all of the geothermal and other ways you get energy. So what are your energy sources? Are you carbon-free? Like, what’s the energy profile like of the farm?
Ármann: So we buy our energy from a company which is located in the south of Iceland. And they make the energy via a hydro-powered, geothermal energy. So we have steam coming from the ground and we use the steam to spin turbines and are therefore able to make this green energy, which we use for the lights of all the plants.
So yeah, all of our energy is green energy here. We always talk about it as “we have green greenhouses.”
If you’d like to learn more about Friðheimar, you can watch Epstein’s video feature on YouTube.
