Although Swiftmud recently tossed the drowning trees a lifeline of sorts, Dixon says it's too little, too late to save the nature center's dying forest. It's getting worse and worse. . . . The amount of time it's taken to get to this point is ridiculous. People knew what was happening and nothing was done. Tomatoes are the biggest crop.
Manatee County produces more tomatoes than any other Florida county.
In the 1990s, as the suburbs of Sarasota and Bradenton encroached on farmland near Interstate 75, many farmers sold their land to developers and started over on land closer to the Myakka. Like farmers all over Florida, the Myakka farmers irrigate their crops during the dry months by pumping water from deep wells that tap the underground aquifer. For instance, Pacific Tomato Growers Ltd. pumps up to 4-million gallons a day from underground and then pours it through small furrows that cross its 3,200 acres. Flooding the fields that way is the cheapest irrigation method, Barnes said, so that's what most farmers do, even though a lot of water runs off the farms into drainage ditches, creeks and swamps. By 1998, Swiftmud was allowing Myakka farmers to pump up to 73-million gallons of water a day out of the ground and onto their crops.