Rutgers

Rutgers is an open-pollinated beefsteak tomato prized for its balance of acidity and sweetness, backed by the thin skin that marks a true New Jersey type. Its indeterminate vines set uniform, globe-shaped fruit, slightly flattened, that typically run about six to eight ounces with smooth, thick, crack-resistant walls. The fruit ripens to a deep, bright red with an intense, classic tomato taste and a firm texture. Unlike tomatoes bred for mechanical harvest and long-distance shipping, Rutgers holds at full ripeness for only a few days rather than weeks.

Rutgers is grown as an all-purpose tomato, suited equally to fresh slicing and to cooking, juicing, and canning.

Rutgers grows as an indeterminate vine that stays relatively compact, rarely exceeding about three feet, and reaches maturity in 70 to 80 days. When the flavor of the original cultivar seemed lost, Rutgers scientists in the Jersey Tomato Project worked from seed preserved by Campbell Soup and, through inbreeding carried out from 2009 to 2014, traced part of the change to a shift in soil fertilizer that had removed sodium. Some growers have also reported that their Rutgers plants avoided Septoria leaf spot outbreaks that struck other varieties grown alongside them in the same season.

Rutgers was released in 1934, the product of a joint breeding effort between a New Jersey university's agricultural research station and a soup company's research facility in Riverton, New Jersey. Dr. Lyman G. Schermerhorn bred it from a stabilized cross between Marglobe and the older Campbell variety J.T.D. Its commercial popularity fell through the 1960s, as its thin skin made it unsuited to automated picking and growers turned to tomatoes that traveled and stored better. By the 1970s it had largely disappeared from commercial production in favor of tougher-skinned, longer-shipping varieties.