[Petronius_II]

Not to be throwing too big a wet blanket on your plans, which are noble in intention to be sure...

I do hope you're factoring in labor somewhere in there, right at the very beginning.

Example: 1000 plants/60 = Any process that takes exactly 1 minute per plant, including moving on to the next plant = ~16 1/2 hours to perform the process on all of them. Leading to the next questions, how many times a week are you going to have to perform processes X, Y, and Z?

In the best case scenario, oodles and oodles of ripe tomatoes, at the very least you're going to have to hire somebody to help you with picking them. I'm sure many here can back me up on this: the most labor-intensive part of a successful smallish-scale gardening operation is harvesting.

The watering part of a grow-bag operation needs to be strategized well. Our smallish meetinghouse garden has used a moderately expensive (i.e. capital-intensive) drip irrigation system, which failed to keep up with last summer's heat wave, but which works surprisingly well in cooler weather. All along, I've favored a more traditional "raised-sunken" bed system, sometimes referred to as a "waffle bed," with shallow-trench irrigation. For each bed, you put the hose end in the highest part of the trench, fill up the trench and then turn down the water pressure until the amount soaking into the soil = the amount coming out of the house, and that's what I call "deep watering." Works amazingly well in warm dry climates for tomatoes: as the top layers of the soil dry (hopefully mulched plenty well enough they don't dry out all that quickly,) you're basically telling the plant roots, "there's still water down deeper, come and get it." So the roots do exactly that.

Each bed only needs deep watering once or twice a week, for maybe about 1-3 hours per watering, even in the driest of times, once the roots have reached a certain depth. Building the trenches and little mini-dykes that enclose the bed takes X amount of time, maybe twice as much as setting up a drip system. Keeping the trenches free of silt and debris blockage takes very little time. Weeding takes very little time if you pull up most of your weeds by hand as soon as you can in the spring. And maybe do some companion planting with a few fairly shallow-rooted buddies that the tomatoes will get along with; basil, for instance.

The point being, once your dykes and trenches are in place, watering consists of: moving the hose from bed to bed; turning it on' turning it down; turning it off. Easy as pie.

Jack Nicholson's garden in "The Missouri Breaks" was quite an inspiration to me-- but really, it's just one version of the way people have always grown things in the American West. Very similar to what I've described here.

Grow bags? Well, if they don't dry out too quickly in your climate, that just might work well for you. You would do well to ask around in Montrose, including calling up your USDA extension office, and see what others in your vicinity have experienced with grow bags.