One Island Grows 80% of the World’s Vanilla
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One Island Grows 80% of the World’s Vanilla
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Re: One Island Grows 80% of the World’s Vanilla
#2*One island roughly the size of Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois combined.
Re: One Island Grows 80% of the World’s Vanilla
#3A slightly more up-beat version: A single county in Pennsylvania grows 50% of the mushrooms in the United States.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/this-small-pennsylvania-...
Re: One Island Grows 80% of the World’s Vanilla
#4Is that really a problem if you can supply the world's needs with 5 plants?
One of the older "life hacks" is to put a teaspoon of vanilla extract in the oven to make the house smell better. Speaking from experience: don't use more than that or you will regret it. I couldn't visit their house for a week.
Re: One Island Grows 80% of the World’s Vanilla
#5To save you a click, that island is Madagascar.
Re: One Island Grows 80% of the World’s Vanilla
#6Growing your own vanilla isn't difficult, but it requires more greenhouse space than you might imagine. The plant grows like a vine, and it'll need to reach about 20' with multiple points of ground contact before producing pods.
(as explained to me by an orchid enthusiast)
Re: One Island Grows 80% of the World’s Vanilla
#7So, I assume everyone else's first thought after reading this was: Let's build a vanilla flower pollination robot using deep learning to process RGB camera images and help guide the robot actuators. Startup, anyone?
Edit: turns out this is, in fact, not a unique thought:
"Implementation of Automated Vanilla Pollination Robotic Crane Prototype, 2017":
https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1109/SYSOSE.2017.79949...
(No deep learning, but I guess these people weren't desperate for funding.)
Re: One Island Grows 80% of the World’s Vanilla
#8And it's even grown only in 2 very specific regions in the north of the island (where most of the cocoa production also come from). There's still huge opportunities if you have enough money and appetite for adventure to start a trading or setting up a plantation. 1ha yields on average 300-400 kg of dried vanilla, a process that takes on average 6-8 months from manual pollination to end of drying.
Madagascar is quite strict on land property though, and it's one of the hot topics on the political landscape right now, foreign investors most of the time work with trusted local proxy to set up the business.
I myself plan to trip to the vanilla producing region in the following months to see how it works, would be so cool to run a vanilla startup. One more thing, vanilla extract and vanilla caviar are even more valuable than the dried vanilla, and still at the hands of very few businesses.
P.S. I live in Madagascar
Re: One Island Grows 80% of the World’s Vanilla
#9To save you a click, that island is Madagascar.
Ok, thanks, but there's more to the article than what island it is.