I don't know how they grew in the wild but the farmers around here don't use stakes. Tomatoes are big business in my county. I think home growers do it to save space and make tending/harvesting them better.

And to keep fruit off the ground, thereby bypassing some soilborne fruit rots.

In the wild, the plants sprawled on the ground. You can do the same if you don't mind the additional effort to harvest.

I've had a few surprise volunteers that I didn't get around to getting something to hold them up, and it was very difficult to keep track of, and harvest the tomatoes from those plants!
Much easier to support them in some way!
I was gone for 2 weeks and even in that time frame, I have a few wild branches that are too big to train ovr to the wire. Nancy

In my experience with tomatoes volunteering in the compost area (it's an area, not a bin!) a couple of years, most fruit end up either on the ground or only a few inches away from the ground (and the weeds). Many times more fruit are lost to bugs than to soil-borne diseases.

The other problem is that if I don't get those vines up on some sort of support, sooner or later the ground is covered with branches: I lose even more fruit because I can't reach them without stepping on the vines.

Think about it for a moment. Obviously garden vegetables have been bred for centuries to produce larger fruit, leaves, roots or whatever characteristic human beings were looking for. The various wild tomatoes, for example, bear little resemblance to the cultivated varieties you might grow. They are lax plants with small fruit which just scramble around neighbouring plants.

Most wild tomatoes are vigorous vines that produce very small fruits. Matt's Wild Cherry is a good example. Like other vines, the plants would spread over the ground and surrounding vegetation before shedding thousands of seeds.

Also, in the wild, only purpose all plants have - is to reproduce them self. They don't need a bucket of tomatoes to reproduce one bush to the stage of getting enough seeds to do the same next year. So they just do not care much) And for them having some fruit on the ground to feed earth creatures and some in the air to feed birds with exchange of seed spreading is even beneficial.

what they all said... but to clarify.. simplify.. i hope ...

a plant in the wild has ONLY ONE goal ... to reproduce ... produce seed ... and if the fruit/veg itself rots where it lays.. all it is doing .. is composting the seed produced ... with me so far ..

a gardener... has no need for seed ... their goal is large pretty produce ... and that is not accomplished.. by letting them lay on the ground ... due to the potential of bugs and diseases mentioned above

easy peasy ... lol.. see what i did there ... its veg related.. lol ..

do NOT confuse industrial production as one above noted ... because ... again.. their goal is different ... near napoleon OH is the campbells soup factory that makes its famous tomato soup ... for lots of miles around... all you see is T fields... and in season.. giant semi dump trucks filled with Ts ... i often wonder how they arent all crushed by the time they get their.. from their own weight piled 8 or 10 foot high ... [probably because they are picked while still rather hard]

the point being.. they arent trying to produce a grocery store perfect T..

you can try going all nature in your process ... all the power to ya .... but i would suggest ... you plant say 3 plants.. stake one.. cage one.. and let one lie ...

i learned more by experimenting.. than i ever did from a book/WWW .. especially since we didnt have the WWW back them ....

good luck

ken

The idea is to keep the stems/vines and especially the fruit off the ground. Tomatoes will reach 6-feet in stem/vine length. Cherry tomatoes a lot more. If you didn't support them, they'd be crawling on the ground, even before tomatoes formed, and certainly afterwards. They might produce down there, but keeping fruit in the dirt from decaying would be hard, and you'd waste a load of growing space.

Of course, since the whole purpose of a plant, to that plant,
is to produce more plants, it's pretty sensible to have the fruit laying on the ground! That purpose isn't served by supporting the fruit. Since the purpose of the plant to us, is to harvest clean and flawless fruit, not so much the case, and plant support makes a lot of sense.