Lettuce with a real shelf life

OWATONNA - When it comes to lettuce on the shelf, you can’t get much fresher than this.

Within 24 hours of harvest, live leaf lettuce, with dripping roots still attached in plugs of dirt, is being loaded onto trucks and driven to Twin Cities-area grocery stores.

Bushel Boy Farms — a Minnesota brand that’s become known for fresh greenhouse tomatoes grown the European way — has launched an experiment to see if consumers like this live lettuce. After harvest, it can live for 10 days or so in refrigerators, inside of plastic bags, as long as the roots are kept moist, said Bushel Boy owner Jay Johnson.

On a sunny morning last week, Johnson paused inside one of his six greenhouses and held up a frilly leaf-lettuce plant, with a cup-sized block of dirt on the bottom, in which the live white roots curled. Droplets fell from the roots, which a moment earlier were drinking up water from a Belgian-made system that operates with moving gullies beneath a sea of green lettuce plants.

The Bushel Boy lettuce has just begun hitting shelves in 150 metro stores, with white panel trucks running it straight from the farm to the grocery stores, six days a week, Johnson said last week.

“We’ve been doing it for 10 days now, and the orders today are better, so I think it’s taking off,” said Johnson, whose main business has been in growing beefsteak, vine-on and grape greenhouse tomatoes and rushing them to grocers.

 It’s an era when, according to the Worldwatch Institute, much of the food in the United States now travels from 1,500 to 2,500 miles from farm to table — up to 25 percent more than two decades ago.

So this week, Johnson is visiting metro grocery stores to explain his new lettuce to curious consumers.

His advice: Take only as many leaves as they want to eat for each meal, then wash them and pop the bag of lettuce, replete with roots, back in the fridge.

“First they have to know what it is, and then try it and see if they like it,” he said.

Locally grown

The operation not only gives consumers fresh produce but also quenches the appetite for locally grown food, said Paul Hugunin, who coordinates the Minnesota Grown program for the state Department of Agriculture.

“Isn’t that cool?” he said of the Bushel Boy lettuce. “It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Bushel Boy farms have combined three kinds of live lettuce — red oak, red leaf and green — into bunches that are tucked into plastic bags bearing the Minnesota Grown logo. The Bushel Boy trucks bear the same logo.

Because it still has roots, this lettuce has a much longer shelf life than traditional leaf lettuce, which is dying by the time consumers buy it without the roots, Johnson said. Most lettuce comes from California or Mexico and sits in warehouses before moving to the stores four to five days after harvest, he said.

Grocers and Johnson say the Bushel Boy lettuce is priced competitively with the traditional California lettuce. So far, it’s in these stores: Kowalski’s, Cub, Rainbow, SuperTarget, Byerly’s, Lunds, Whole Foods and independents such as Bob’s Produce Ranch, Jerry’s, County Markets, and Fresh Seasons.

Mostly tomatoes

Since 1990, Bushel Boy has been selling fresh tomatoes grown in greenhouses on vines that snake up strings hanging from a horizontal wire, as they’re grown in the Netherlands.

Bumblebees buzz in and out of about 240 hives in boxes, pollinating the tomatoes. Pesticides are rarely used; too much could hurt the bees that carry the yellow pollen on their back legs from plant to plant, Johnson said.

 He owns Bushel Boy with Dutch-born partner Marco DeBruin of Albert Lea.

 Their lettuce sales already have a boost because the Bushel Boy brand has built a strong following among those who want fresh tomatoes year 'round.

“We can harvest them at the peak of maturity, and have them in the store tomorrow,” Johnson said of the tomatoes he cultivates in 19 acres of greenhouse space.

 One more acre is devoted to the lettuce experiment.

'As fresh as you can get’

Johnson buys lettuce seeds from Holland, where he learned about greenhouse growing.

The moving gully system, from Belgium, advances the plants, according to their stage, on conveyor belts that have gutters beneath them to carry water that’s sterilized and recycled. It’s a rack-and-pinion system with metal rows that automatically spread out as the lettuce plant grows.

Customers are reporting that they like having a fresh local product available — especially this time of year, said Rick Steigerwald, produce director for Lunds and Byerly’s grocery stores.

 “We’re hearing some early reports from our customers — they really like it,” he said. “It’s about as fresh as you can get it. It’s selling very well.”

Because it’s so new, Steigerwald is waiting to hear if Bushel Boy lettuce passes the consumer taste test. But he has an inkling of how it will go over.

“Our buyers have tasted it, and we’re very pleased with the texture and the taste, and the eating experience has been excellent,” he said. “It’s met our expectations.”

Joy Powell • 952-882-9017