Latest / Hydroponics Daily / Vanilla Cultivation - Hand-Pollinated Gold

Transcript

Vanilla Cultivation - Hand-Pollinated Gold · Hydroponics Daily

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome back to Hydroponics Daily, your go-to podcast for everything soilless cultivation.
• 0:06
  I'm your host, Dr. Russell Sharp, and today I thought I would talk about vanilla
• 0:12
  cultivation, and particularly about its pollination, because I didn't know about
• 0:15
  this and it's quite interesting.
• 0:17
  But we'll do a gentle introduction about what vanilla is and where it comes from.
• 0:21
  So vanilla is an orchid, and you harvest the seed pods and the seeds inside it,
• 0:26
  and that is what is used for flavoring in
• 0:29
  all things like ice cream and custard things like this
• 0:32
  if so it's an orchid but
• 0:35
  i actually thought it was from madagascar because that's where all vanilla
• 0:38
  comes from turns out it's not it's from central america
• 0:41
  and that's an issue in
• 0:45
  when you come to cultivate it anywhere outside of central
• 0:47
  america because it lacks the native
• 0:51
  stingless bees that would pollinate the
• 0:54
  orchid flowers so all so
• 0:57
  all vanilla crops outside of its natural
• 1:00
  distribution have to have man-made you
• 1:03
  know a human to pollinate every single flower that
• 1:06
  produces a pod that becomes an issue now for some crops hand pollination is
• 1:11
  not such an issue like tomatoes you just give them a shake or vibrate the plant
• 1:16
  and they will self-pollinate however that won't be the case in vanilla because
• 1:20
  vanilla has a flap of tissue called a rosetulum.
• 1:24
  No a rostulum that separates
• 1:27
  the male parts the anthers from the female parts the stigma
• 1:30
  and this barrier prevents easy self-pollination and
• 1:34
  requires precise manipulation to move the
• 1:37
  pollen from one anther to the stigma and it's
• 1:39
  not the thing about orchids they although they produce tiny seeds their pollen
• 1:44
  are actually put into pollen sacks and they're very large they're not dust they
• 1:50
  don't they don't just fly around in the air the dust that requires specific
• 1:54
  picking up the pollen sack and sticking it on the female part,
• 1:58
  So it requires time, and it requires training, and these things will limit the
• 2:05
  growth of the vanilla pods.
• 2:08
  In the wild, as I said, it's almost exclusively pollinated by stingless bees, melipona is the genus.
• 2:17
  And so Madagascar and
• 2:20
  Indonesia are the main areas
• 2:23
  where there are vanilla cultivation
• 2:27
  madagascar traditionally madagascan vanilla is famed but
• 2:30
  indonesia has caught up and also places like nepal and india are looking to
• 2:35
  grow big vanilla crops because it is an expensive crop very expensive if you
• 2:40
  can get it right there are riches to be had and a lot of vanilla is synthetically
• 2:44
  synthesized but this is inferior to the real thing it's always considered inferior.
• 2:50
  So the flowers are also short-lived, so they stay open for only 6 to 12 hours
• 2:55
  on one morning, and if it's not pollinated in that window, it dies.
• 2:59
  And so you need staff there the whole time pollinating.
• 3:03
  So you can see why the farmers are asking plant breeders to breed a self-pollinating
• 3:09
  variety, and they're looking to breed ones that don't have their flap of tissue,
• 3:14
  the rostalum, in there so they can more easily be
• 3:18
  self-pollinated oh it's going to be tricky on this one
• 3:20
  because the pollen's not powder where it can just vibrate the
• 3:23
  plant so not sure if it's going to be possible
• 3:26
  it has to be done by hand the farmers use
• 3:29
  a small stick or needle to lift that rostellum
• 3:33
  up and manually press the pollen onto the stigma that's
• 3:36
  labor intensive slow and requires skill as we've said and a single worker will
• 3:41
  have to pollinate hundreds to thousands of flowers every day during peak blossom
• 3:45
  but mistakes are common and they sometimes if you get one one worker who's not
• 3:51
  doing their job properly then you can waste lots and lots of flowers and lots and lots of plants,
• 3:56
  over pollination can cause lower quality beans as
• 3:59
  well so one plant can only
• 4:02
  support a limited number of beans so too many pollinated flowers.
• 4:05
  Leads to small low quality beans and stressed
• 4:08
  vines so farmers must be careful to limit
• 4:11
  and select the flowers they're going to pollinate so more training more
• 4:14
  experience required and you can see why the
• 4:17
  best growers produce get the highest rewards it's not a case of everyone gets
• 4:21
  paid the same and then obviously the issues around vanilla cultivation vanilla
• 4:26
  orchids can when you get orchid growing wrong it can grow seriously wrong and
• 4:31
  you can lose all your crop just like we saw with the dutch orchid growers where the the vents.
• 4:37
  Wouldn't open because there was a power cut and they could see thousands and
• 4:42
  thousands of their plants dying because they knew they would die because they got too hot.
• 4:46
  It requires very specific humidity, shade, and temperature controls.
• 4:50
  Even that's just for the flowers to open, never mind for the plants to survive.
• 4:54
  And the weathers can change, reduce the bloom and shorten the pollination window.
• 4:58
  And then you've got the issue of once they're pollinated, the
• 5:01
  plant has to actually develop the fruit the vanilla
• 5:04
  can take three to four years before it's
• 5:07
  maturing off to produce flowers and even then it will only produce a
• 5:10
  couple of flowers until it's really fully matured and
• 5:13
  then once pollinated it can take another eight to nine months for a pod to mature
• 5:18
  post pollination so that is massive that's the same time scale as a human gestation
• 5:24
  period so that must be one of the longest periods of any fruit crop to mature, I would guess.
• 5:32
  You think of another one that's longer than that, maybe durian or something like that.
• 5:37
  And then after harvest, the pod needs to be cured, so dried and allowed to rest
• 5:43
  in a controlled environment. And that can go wrong when you can get rots involved in that.
• 5:48
  Anyone who's done curing in other crops like legal cannabis or tobacco,
• 5:52
  we'll know that that is an issue.
• 5:54
  So I wouldn't want to be a vanilla farmer unless the rewards were going to be massive.
• 6:00
  Root rot is a massive issue in vanilla growing and they're.
• 6:07
  Not just the standard species that's used. So the standard species is vanilla planifolia.
• 6:14
  Doesn't have a common name that I'm aware of, but they're looking to breed that
• 6:18
  with, what's the other species called?
• 6:23
  Vanilla pombona for better root rot resistance and resilience to environmental fluctuations.
• 6:29
  So if they were possible, then you could get much better crops throughout the world.
• 6:35
  So yeah, that's an interesting one. And what else can we say about vanilla cultivation
• 6:39
  and hydroponics specifically?
• 6:41
  It's important to note that vanilla is a vine. So lots of tropical orchids are
• 6:45
  actually epiphytes where they live in the trees.
• 6:49
  Whereas vanilla is a vine, so it can grow in soil.
• 6:52
  So you can do soil cultivation, but a lot of modern vanilla farms are now using
• 6:58
  tower hydroponic systems that allow moisture to ooze out all along the stem, the tower.
• 7:07
  Because obviously it's a vine, so it wants to grow up, it wants to get height,
• 7:10
  and so tower-based hydroponic systems suit it down to the ground.
• 7:15
  So that's been a short dive into pollination in vanilla and some other aspects
• 7:20
  of growing vanilla crops.
• 7:21
  The active ingredient in vanilla is valaninin,
• 7:25
  I think it's called, and you get about 2% in a pod,
• 7:28
  so compared to like synthetic material which
• 7:32
  is 100% pure probably about 99% pure
• 7:35
  but is not as good because probably a few other biochemicals in
• 7:38
  there add to the flavor and the texture and things like this so hopefully
• 7:42
  you found that interesting if you did please leave us a review for
• 7:45
  hydroponics daily on apple and make sure you follow the podcast so you don't
• 7:49
  miss an episode it is a daily episode and if you're new to hydroponics check
• 7:53
  out some of the earlier episodes because we did an introduction into various
• 7:56
  different methods of growing hydroponically in there and all the nutrients and
• 8:00
  all the pest and disease, whereas these are more crop.
• 8:04
  Specific topics and interesting news articles what
• 8:08
  else can we say and if you're looking for something new to add
• 8:11
  to your hydroponic setup check out utreema.co.uk because we have completely
• 8:15
  unique hydroponic inputs that you won't find anywhere else so always good to
• 8:20
  check out what we're up to ever expanding portfolio of new and interesting technology
• 8:25
  thank you very much for listening and until next time goodbye.