I still remember the tomatoes. Big, round, and red, vine attached; the kind of tomatoes you see in a stock photo or magazine ad. Jackpot Brand Tomatoes sprouted to life almost 45 years ago on the Moapa River Indian Reservation in Moapa Valley. My father, Harold Goldsmith, managed the greenhouse operation, funded through a federal public service employment program, and beamed as he showed off the product he named at a market on Nellis Air Force Base.
A few years earlier, living in Israel, he was head grower in a hydroponic greenhouse tomato cooperative in the Negev Desert. While there, he visited Europe and learned of a novel greenhouse cultivation method using peat bags, developed in Ireland in 1973. With his guidance, the tribe’s greenhouse was likely the first in the U.S. to use this method.
According to a federal Bureau of Indian Affairs brochure from the early 1980s, the original crop of Jackpot tomatoes was harvested in 1979. A 1980 case study by the U.S. Department of Labor shows it sold for $20,000, with a projected $600,000 in annual sales once two more greenhouses were built and operational. Employment was expected to grow from 15 to 30, and the tribe was poised to become a major regional tomato supplier.
Mother Nature had other ideas.
In 1981, an unprecedented rain and hailstorm destroyed what the Paiutes and my dad had created. The Moapa Valley was declared a national disaster area, with an estimated $7 million in damages.
The tribe decided not to rebuild. My dad, though disappointed, moved on, opening a custom fertigation company that helped keep Las Vegas green until he passed away in 2017.
Dad brought me to the greenhouse, once, but my memory of this near-successful experiment is fuzzy. Today, I only recall friendly adults who knew my dad’s name, and the wind whipping the desert floor into a frenzied dirt devil until the dust broke free, scattering erratically into the air.
