To pay for the infrastructure, they will probably need to sell the tomatoes for $100 a pound for twenty years.
Pretty close though.
Commodity prices are usually expressed in tonnes. It seems at the moment the price is between $70-$80 per tonne. At $70 per tonne, the price would be about $1.2 million. You also need to pay operating costs. If the infrastructure is $200 million, I don't see how they will possibly pay it back. Even at current low interest rates, I don't think you would be able to pay off your loan.
And yes, commodity prices for food are ridiculously low. All of the money goes to distributors. Fix that and we can have nice things like this.
Maybe as you imply they aren't sold as commodities because the shelf life is too low.
I mean, how much of that is government subsidies.
If you assume its towards the higher price, and the grower sells at 10% of retail, that's over $1 billion over 10 years (the length of their contract).
[0] http://ers.usda.gov/datafiles/Fruit_and_Vegetable_Prices/Veg...
I think they are taking the worst case there, and the amount going to distributors is highly variable depending on the the food itself. If you google around, you should be able to find graphs of various products (probably including tomatoes).
Nature does a pretty good job of producing food mostly by itself. We may as well take advantage of that where we can before playing in hard mode.