Outside Backyard Farms’ greenhouse, the land is just starting to wake up as one last spring snow covers the emerging green.

Inside this multiacre farm operation in Madison, it’s already summer. Bumblebees, thousands of them, zigzag in the rich, earthy-smelling air searching for flowers to pollinate. Though the ground outside is frozen, inside ripening tomatoes hang from vines that climb about a dozen feet into the air and would climb even higher if their human caretakers would let them.

Backyard Farms’ general manager and grower, Tim de Kok, who has worked in greenhouses both in this country and abroad, sees the $25 million horticultural marvel as a model of ingenuity. “This kind of layout, nobody is even close to this,” he says.

With about 320,000 tomato plants growing at any one time, this isn’t your ordinary New England greenhouse. Set on former dairy farmland, it covers about 24 acres, roughly the size of seven of the new Lowe’s home improvement store that opened in Brewer in early February.

Then again, Backyard Farms isn’t your ordinary business. The company is based in New England, but its roots extend to Europe. The company was founded by three produce-loving visionaries: Paul Sellew, whose family runs the largest wholesale nursery in New England; Arie Vandergiessen, who has operated massive greenhouses in his native Holland, as well as in this country; and Wayne Davis, a former executive with Fidelity Investments.
Everything here is carefully planned to simulate natural growing conditions while stimulating maximum production of these “Backyard Beauties.” The rows and rows of high-rising tomato plants—each row about 150 yards deep—make for a well-manicured jungle. Younger plants are started beside each older growing plant to assure the next generation is ready when needed.

The greenhouse is divided into eight regions, each with a monitoring system that regularly checks temperature and humidity, while infrared cameras measure the plants’ heat. A growth meter checks to see how much water the plants are using.

Weekly, biologists check the plants for healthiness and any signs of problems. Growing 10 to 14 inches per week, depending on the season, the plants are pruned routinely, further spurring on growth.

“Plants look happier if you take the time and care to prune them right,” de Kok says. His slight accent gives away his Dutch heritage.Though he has been in the U.S. since 1992, de Kok is a fourth-generation horticulturist. “I was born in a greenhouse,” he says with a smile.

Backyard Farms’ first shipment of tomatoes went out in early 2007, and can be found in grocery stores throughout the northeastern U.S. But the seed was first planted in the winter of 2004, when cofounder Paul Sellew realized that every tomato in his grocery store was grown overseas. Sellew’s family owns Prides Corner Farms, New England’s largest wholesale nursery, so he knows what it takes to create a great tomato: letting it ripen on the vine, not in transit.

When Sellew and his cofounders began searching for a location for their year-round tomato farm, it was more than just the good open land that drew the company to Madison, an old paper mill town. The state and town kicked in tax incentives. But the clincher for Backyard Farms, whose greenhouse uses thousands of 1,000-watt grow lights, was the reduced power costs that were being offered.

“Currently, we have the lowest rate in the New England area,” says Madison town manager Norman Dean, who pegs the local residential and commercial rate at 8.1 cents per kilowatt, less than half of the 16.8 cents per kilowatt average in New England.

Those kilowatts are not squandered. Borrowing from European tradition and lessons learned from the American Southwest—where greenhouses are 10 to 20 times the size of Backyard Farms’—as well as a little Yankee know-how, the company has come up with a facility that goes a long way toward being self-contained and at the same time minimizing its impact on the environment.
“We try to be as environmentally friendly as we can,” says Roy Lubetkin, a former Agway executive and food industry veteran who came on board with Backyard Farms last December as the company’s president and CEO.

Lubetkin explains how: In the winter, a propane boiler system is needed to keep the greenhouse in the 70s, the optimal temperature for growing tomatoes. This heat is carefully preserved and recycled with thermal blankets; a heat-recapture system stores heat during the day and uses it at night. Even the CO2 emissions from the boilers are pumped through special tubing that gives the plants a chance to “breath” in the gas, which, along with light, helps increase sugar content, sweetening the fruit.

Water conservation is also part of the eco-equation. The greenhouse’s roof is slanted three degrees, and precipitation, whether melting snow or rain, makes its way to a massive collection basin outside where it is pumped inside and heated to provide liquid nourishment for the plants, as well as passed through pipes to provide radiant heat to complement the 11,600 high-intensity grow lights.

Some pesticides are occasionally used, but the company prefers to use more natural methods, including the weekly deployment of about 300,000 eggs of tiny predatory wasps, which, when hatched, curb the growth of pests like the white fly.

“It’s a very exciting business; so many factors are involved,” de Kok says. “You still rely on Mother Nature quite a bit and the green thumb comes into play.”

The company employs 110 people, most of them from the area, and the success of Backyard Farms is good advertising for the town’s 52-acre business development park, called the Madison Business Gateway. But the benefits of this Maine tomato factory have been turning up at tables all over the state. Consumers can’t get enough of the sweet, red, locally grown tomatoes that have been making a splash since their introduction about a year ago.
“It’s an absolutely incredible tomato,” fawns Barbara Gulino, marketing team manager for the Whole Foods Market in Portland, part of a larger chain of 200 stores in this country, Canada, and England. Whole Foods sells the tomato in its stores from Maine to about Virginia, and it already has become the biggest seller in her store’s produce department. The tomatoes can be found locally at Hannaford, Shaw’s, and Wal-Mart stores.

Backyard Farms limits its sales area to a day’s travel, further ensuring picked-from-the-vine freshness. It’s something that customers have noticed and taken heed of, particularly in the winter months when tomatoes can be coming from faraway places like Mexico or Europe.

“We’re selling every tomato we grow and unfortunately we have had to turn some customers away,” Lubetkin says about an enviable predicament.

Already Backyard Farms is looking at adding a second greenhouse, about 18 acres, as part of a long-range additional $125 million investment that would also see the company start its own research-and-development facility and add newer heating methods, such as a biomass boiler. Backyard Farms already is experimenting with 19 other varieties of tomatoes, including beefsteak and cherry tomatoes, in addition to the main on-the-vine tomato they are growing.

But everything in time. The company isn’t in a rush. “We’re making sure what we’re doing in the marketplace, we’re doing right,” says Lubetkin, whose company measures annual tomato production in the millions of pounds, about 15 million pounds in its first year.

Patience is more than a buzz word at Backyard Farms. Just ask Erik Walter, the Madison dairy farmer and former millworker who sold the 100 acres the greenhouse sits on to Backyard Farms. Paul Sellew met once a week for about six months with Walter talking about the company, its clean business practices, and its plans for the future. Walter had watched farmland in the state sold to subdivision developers and he wanted more for his town, which for much of its history has relied on Madison Paper Co. as its main employer and tax base.

In the end, not only did Walter sell the land: Garbed in a plaid shirt, overalls, and a cap, the amiable farmer now appears in Backyard Beauties’ advertisements and displays as the company’s silent pitchman.