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FORTUNE.COM // JULY 2019
A
T WARD’S BERRY FARM, 30 miles
south of Boston, the first day
of May dawns cloudy and cold,
with a spitting drizzle that ren-
ders an umbrella more annoying
than helpful. It’s a bad day to
plant tomatoes. “Tomatoes really don’t prefer
to be below 50 degrees very often,” says Jim
Ward, the farm’s proprietor, who has a hardier
constitution than his plants: He’s wearing a
flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and no
jacket; his ruddy cheeks are the only indica-
tion that he might be cold. But Ward’s crew is
improvising, putting “row cover,” a biodegrad-
able tarp, over the seedlings as they go from
the warmth of the greenhouse into the damp
chill of the ground. “There’s compost down
there that will give us a little heat,” he says.
“You’d be surprised, when you trap it in with
the row cover, it’s pretty nice down there.”
Good for the tomato plants, cozy under
all that compost, but they don’t really have a
choice. They have to go into the ground today
so that come July, the fruits will be ready
for the thousands of Sweetgreen customers
in the Boston area who will bite down on
the juicy little orbs, once informed—through
the salad chain’s email newsletter or smart-
phone app (or, if they know anything about
produce seasonality, common sense)—that
the tomatoes are at their peak of ripeness.
And to help Ward make these tomatoes
extra tasty—though he knows what he’s
doing, as he’s been farming for more than
three decades—there’s something of a secret
weapon lodged in the center of the one-acre
patch: a bright orange hexagon that sits atop a
baseball bat–shape stake. Inside the contrap-
tion are Wi-Fi-enabled sensors that, every 15
minutes, measure more than a dozen factors
that could be affecting the tomatoes: like air
temperature, humidity, light, precipitation,
wind speed. The bat-shape portion extends
36 inches into the soil, where sensors measure
soil temperature and moisture as well as levels
of phosphorus, potassium, pH, and nitrogen.
That data gets uploaded to the cloud and onto
a blockchain—a sequence of data that makes
the tomatoes easily traceable throughout their
journey from fledging plant to salad bowl.
From there, the information can be accessed,
at any time, from a smartphone app devel-SWEETGREEN
Can These
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Evangelists
Persuade
America toFinally Eat Its
Vegetables?
By Sheila Marikar