Smart or Paranoid?

According to this YouTuber, tomatoes are so pathogen-friendly they require special rules at the end of the season:

remove them completely roots and all;
burn or bin them, but never compost them;
rake the soil where they were to remove as many roots as possible; and,
sterilize the rake.

He also mentions stringent crop rotation, which signals to me that he practices traditional monocrop agriculture.

I'm no expert, but it seems excessive. What does the hive think?

The first year I grew tomatoes in a brand new garden, I got early wilt and blossom end rot.  I believe those plants were grown from seed so I doubt I carried over any diseases.  I think I'll continue to be lazy and just plant a few extra to offset the losses...

I do a good crop rotation but I'm not monocrop.  Each 12' row moves up 4 rows in the garden each year.  So you can rotate without having to be a monocrop...

I think he might want to look into disease-resistant varieties.

But, if he knows he's in an area with a lot of tomato diseases running rampant, then the measures he's taking might simply be what he needs to do.

Tomatoes are incredibly susceptible at the genetic level. Carol Deppe writes about what she thinks needs done about that in her book The Tao of Vegetable Gardening. If you look at her website she is looking for funding for tomato breeding. Basically for us to continue into the future with heirloom tomatoes breeding in multiple resistance to late blight is probably necessary. That's just one disease.

The source of the disease resistance genes are the wild species. There are roughly 13 species of tomatoes not one. So while the one domestic species is susceptible, the species complex is genetically robust. In fact some of the species are obligate out breeders much as is tomatillo. This is important because outbreeding species of tomato are massively more diverse at the genetic level than are inbreeding species. Joseph Lofthouse has proposed a solution that should permanently change the susceptibility of domestic tomatoes. Breed the obligate out breeding system into them. We are several years into this effort and it's been very interesting. I've been growing the resulting hybrids in my garden. Mostly hard unpalatable green berries like the wild parents. However, Joseph has already gotten tasty ones, and I think I will this year. So more years of work needed but it seems possible.

Gardeners in humid, warm, and moist climates are most susceptible to tomato diseases. Some areas are infested more than others. Much of Europe has multi strain and thus breeding late blight and thus has overwintering spores. Eastern states tend to have more problems than arid western states. I agree that probably where this guy lives everything he does is necessary. Garden size matters too. I have a large garden on a small acreage where if it wasn't all involved in tomato breeding I could really move tomato plants far each year. Someone with a tiny garden in susceptible and infested area might need to be really careful. Or skip years.

I am fortunate to live in the arid west in a valley where tomato and solanaceae diseases are rare. Farmers raise seed potatoes here for that reason. My garden seems to do pretty well with growing tomatoes year after year and I just rototill the vines in.

So smart some places. Sometimes a gardener will move across the country and continue with now unnecessary practices, so paranoid is also possible after experiencing the trauma of tomato death at some point on your gardening career.

I agree with William. I happen to follow this particular youtuber and he is, in fact, in Fl. An ounce of prevention and all that...

I've been watching Dan for a few years now, and I'm pretty sure he's based out of Sacramento, CA?

Here's his "about" on youtube.

"Description
Hello and welcome to Plant Abundance on YouTube! Here you will find information on growing a garden, organic gardening techniques, establishing a backyard food forest, companion planting, edible and medicinal plants, raising backyard chickens and so much more! New videos uploaded every week! Thanks for stopping by & for hitting that subscribe button! Cheers! Dan

Location: Bay Area; Northern California, Zone 9b"

Not sure if I'm just misunderstanding another post?

Not the most humid place to be, but certainly not dry either.

As a plant breeder, I welcome diseases and pests into my garden. If I don't have a disease or pest, then my plants can't undergo survival-of-the-fittest adaptation to it. Once they have undergone a couple of generations of survival, then they pretty much become immune to that particular pest or disease.

Domestic tomatoes are problematic, because they were highly inbred during domestication, and by the heirloom preservation movement. A crop needs genetic diversity in order to adapt to changing conditions. Domestic tomatoes just don't have much diversity to work with.

Last growing season, one of the interspecies hybrid tomatoes (BHXW with self-incompatible-acting breeding system) produced 8 ounce beefsteak type red fruits. That's not the goal of the breeding project, but it was interesting enough to send it to a warmer climate for an over-winter growout.