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NAPLES — It’s time to forget about the past and look to the future in Florida’s tomato industry.

So said Reggie Brown, manager of the Florida Tomato Committee, in a state of the industry address in Naples on Wednesday.

His committee, which markets and regulates Florida’s tomatoes in the winter, is holding its annual conference here this week as the 2008-09 season gets under way.

“Let’s have a good time and not focus on the negative while we’re here,” Brown said.

But it was a tall order _ even for himself.

“There is just this cloud hanging over the industry and this meeting this week,” he said.

He started off his speech by describing the state of the industry as “almost depressing” as growers face higher costs and struggle to recover from a nationwide salmonella outbreak that federal regulators wrongly linked to tomatoes a few months ago.

“We had a lot of different experiences last year, most of them positive, but some of them jolting,” Brown said.

Growers actually are coming off one of their more profitable years.

In the 2007-08 season, the average price paid for a box of round tomatoes in Florida was $13.71, up from $7.69 a year earlier, according to the Florida Tomato Committee’s annual report.

Growers shipped nearly 45.2 million 25-pound boxes of tomatoes last season, down more than 10 percent from about 52.5 million in the 2006-07 season.

With tighter supplies, the cash value of the crop was about $619 million, up from about $404 million the year before.

“The reality is it can work,” Brown said. “We can be profitable.”

Last season ended on a sour note when tomatoes were falsely “indicted” in a salmonella outbreak in June that sickened more than 1,400 people across the country, Brown said. That’s when the tomato business came to a “screeching halt” and “did not exist.”

The market went from $16-$17 a box to “zero,” he said.

“It was a very, very tense time for our industry,” Brown said.

The outbreak, which involved a rare strain of bacteria, was later traced back to jalapeno and serrano peppers grown in Mexico. But the demand for tomatoes is still down.

The damage to the industry from the tomato scare has been estimated at $140 million-$150 million. Growers have lobbied the federal government for compensation, but whether they’ll receive any money is questionable, Brown said.

“I will caution you, don’t spend the money until you get it,” he said. “Congress is in a foul mood when it comes to money.”

Brown spoke as growers gathered for the Florida Tomato Institute, held at the Ritz-Carlton, Naples.

During the event, they heard updates on tomato research, food safety, viruses and the phase out of methyl bromide, a fumigant widely used by tomato and other fruit and vegetable growers in Florida to control weeds and kill insects.

They also heard about new federal restrictions that soon will be enforced on five fumigants: methyl bromide, metam sodium, metam potassium, dazomet and chloropicrin.

Martha Roberts, special assistant to the dean for research at the University of Florida/IFAS in Gainesville, closed the morning talks, saying she saved “the bad news for last.”

Her focus was on food safety.

She talked about the new safety standards that became mandatory in Florida on July 1. They’ve been in the works for several years, long before the salmonella scare hit the industry this summer.

The rules _ the first-of-a-kind for any state _ require growers to have a written food safety plan and to put someone in charge of food safety. A crisis-management plan must be in place to deal with problems as they arise.

Farmers must be able to verify their products can be easily traced back. Fields must undergo safety audits and packing houses get random inspections to make sure they are following the law.

The safety program focuses on three areas: ensuring water quality, limiting animal access to fields and requiring good hygiene for workers.

IFAS received a block grant to help educate and train workers on farms and at packing houses, Roberts said.

She said there’s a reason tomatoes were assumed to be the first culprits of the recent outbreak of salmonella poisonings. Up to 12 percent of food-borne illnesses in the past have been linked to fresh produce, domestic and imported, Roberts said.

“The mind-set is there,” she said. “It’s something we have to overcome.”