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Vanilla Production in Geodesic Domes
- Pfhreak 6y agoThe dome doesn't appear to be particularly special, but the trellis is interesting - a soil filled, rotating column that sorta simulates a tree. It'll be interesting to see if he can get the plants to reliably flower and pollinate. Best of luck on that front!
- Tossrock 6y agoLooks like a 16' radius 4v conduit dome, pretty standard as that size is the most material efficient when using 10' stock. They cost around two thousand USD in materials (depending on the price of steel).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dejv 6y agoCool concept, trellis system seems interesting, but getting one tonne out of 200 vines sounds quite optimistic, also as far as I know each flower had to be hand pollinated and window to do that is very short. I am a farmer and there is one saying to never count the beans until you have them in the barn.
- mattlondon 6y agoIs there any reason why they have to be hand pollinated? Could you not just stick a beehive in there and let the bees do it (for example)?
- colechristensen 6y agoApparently there's only one species of endangered bee which can pollinate it.
- msandford 6y agoWell they do have a very climate controlled environment so perhaps the bees would be comfortable there.
- phkahler 6y agoIANABK (I am not a bee keeper) but I suspect there are other bees that would love to pollinate a greenhouse full of flowers with easy access at all heights. I'm thinking that in nature only one species shares the same space and prefers vanilla flowers but that's not the same an having only one that CAN do it.
- Finnucane 6y agoIn the wild, in Mexico, vanilla is pollinated by one particular species of bee, that only lives in Mexico. Even there, commercial producers rely on hand-pollination.
- julienchastang 6y agoInterestingly vanilla originates from Mexico and not Madagascar. The plant was introduced to Madagascar for cultivation in the 19th century.
- gboss 6y agoIt's amazing really all of the plants that originated from indigenous Mexican cultivation. Corn, tomatoes, chili peppers, squash, chocolate, vanilla, avocado, and more! The fact that Italians didn't have peppers nor the Irish having potatoes until after columbus always blows my mind. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Crops_originating_from_Mexico https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Crops_originating_f...
- SECProto 6y agoI agree. I'll share two quotes, from near the start and near the end of the article: > Vanilla vines need specific conditions to produce flowers and beans. [...] the challenge was developing a commercially viable way to grow the sometimes tricky and labour-intensive crop. > The vines in the pilot farm are yet to flower, which is when pollination occurs. So I think it's a cool idea, but I'd wait until they actually harvest once to prove it works.
- zaroth 6y ago> The vines in the pilot farm are yet to flower, which is when pollination occurs. I think it's premature to declare success before this important milestone... as I recall from reading about many historical attempts to cultivate vanilla crop, once we figured out to pollinate them by hand, getting the plants to flower in a greenhouse is the truly elusive step isn't it?
- tnjm 6y agoVanilla orchids will flower quite readily in a greenhouse -- at least mine do, when they get tall enough. As others have pointed out, the real problem is more prosaic: getting cheap enough labour to hand-pollinate them. As a commodity, vanilla prices are highly volatile, and while you could perhaps make this work in some years, it's hard to see it being viable in the long term. As the cured beans keep well and are easy to transport, it's not entirely clear to me what the value proposition for greenhouse growing near to the final market really is.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoThe plants are already mobile and constrained to a regular structure. A robotic pollinator wouldn't be much of a stretch.
- mark-r 6y agoAs I understand it, the reason Madagascar is by far the leading producer of vanilla is because it's the only place where labor is cheap enough to do hand pollination economically. Good luck doing that anyplace else, particularly Australia.
- ianai 6y agoSeems an automated farm could be designed to do it economically. Like “that” documentary on Netflix showed them doing in Greenland or some such place.
- markdown 6y agoAre we supposed to know which documentary you're talking about? Sorry, I'm really curious now. Sounds interesting.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ggm 6y agoMadagascar will suffer if we cease trading with them for vanilla and also Madagascan wildlife
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoMadagascar is number 132 in the ranking of GDP of 196 countries. https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/madagascar https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/madagascar Surely there must be other countries where labor is cheap enough (not that GDP really will tell you what labor cost is, but still)
- mark-r 6y agoI think GDP per person might be more informative. I found a couple of references stating it was $400 or $500.
- airstrike 6y ago> "I've patented the design, the greenhouse and the trellises, but what I'd like to be able to do is reduce the production costs, make it very much available to a lot of people to actually buy these greenhouses and grow them for themselves." Hmmm..
- Reelin 6y agoI'm not understanding what about this is patentable? Greenhouse as a geodesic dome surely isn't (and isn't a particularly important design detail anyway). The trellises just look like standard hydroponics to me - is there something novel about their design that I'm missing? This doesn't seem any different from growing <arbitrary crop> in a greenhouse using hydroponics and automated climate controls. Not novel, just not previously economically viable (as far as I know). Is it the fact that the trellises rotate?
- vikramkr 6y agoIt's probably not that difficult to get a really, really narrow patent on some aspect of how the thing is designed, etc. So it might be something with pretty restricted scope or something fairly easy to work around?
- joshvm 6y agoIt's apparently a partnership with a big industrial automation company [1]. Perhaps they filed the patent? It sounds like the sort of thing a big corp would try. There is another group doing this, but seem to be unrelated [2]. If there is a patent, I can't find it anywhere (I tried the US and Aus). Nothing obvious under the author's name, or "vanilla" or "geodesic" in the Australian repository. Quite annoying, this is one of those stories that looks really interesting, but all you can find is the regurgitated press release from all the news companies that picked it up. [1] https://www.se.com/au/en/about-us/press/news/2019/newcastle-vanilla-dome.jsp https://www.se.com/au/en/about-us/press/news/2019/newcastle-... [2] http://vanillaaustralia.com/about-us/ http://vanillaaustralia.com/about-us/
- vikramkr 6y ago
- cma 6y agoArtificial vanilla tastes about the same in blinded taste tests.
- neural_thing 6y agoSynthetic biology can make vanillin at scale cheaply. I believe it's one of the molecules Amyris is developing. Going to be difficult to compete with that in the long run.
- CydeWeys 6y agoPer the linked article, people don't want the fake stuff; they want the genuine article. And fake vanillin is already widespread at less cost than the real bean anyway, so the demand for the real bean already has this competition priced in.
- patentatt 6y agoYup. And anyone who’s tasted both can tell you they’re not the same. At all.
- userbinator 6y agoThat just means they need to put more effort into fine-tuning the synthesis.
- discreteevent 6y agoI think it's likely that, given the financial incentives, someone already has "just put more effort in".
- chongli 6y agoSo bizarre. Super Mario World has an area called Vanilla Dome. Who would have thought a classic 90s video game would predict a revolution in agriculture?
- peter_d_sherman 6y ago>"Mr Soo discovered that vanilla was in hot demand. It sells for about $600 a kilogram and is the second-most lucrative spice crop in the world behind saffron. "A lot of the big food processors or manufacturers, such as Nestle, are now moving or mandating that they only want naturally grown vanilla, they don't want synthetic vanilla," he said. "I thought, 'Well there's an inelastic demand curve there'." Discovering a voracious market was one thing; the challenge was developing a commercially viable way to grow the sometimes tricky and labour-intensive crop."
- 1_over_n 6y agoA whole article and thread about Geodesic domes and not even a nod to buckminster fuller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller#Geodesic_domes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller#Geodesic_do...
- qplex 6y agoHow are the geodesic domes supposed to help in comparison to regular greenhouses? Commercial orchids and greenhouses already grow vanilla and plenty of other stuff in automated hydroponic and aeroponic systems I fail to see what is so special about this.
- Valgrim 6y agoTo be fair the author did talk to another unbiased source than the inventor-businessman. He contacted agricultural scientist Dr. John Troughton, visited the greenhouse with him and asked his opinion on the subject. He asked very specific questions to the author about the advantages of his design (vertical rotating soil-filled trellises). He was transparent about the production costs, the business model of the inventor and the yet-to-be-flowered vines. The problem I see is that the headline is definitely click-baity compared to the article. The author doesn't particularly emphasize the use of a smartphone app, the shape of the greenhouse or the value of the beans (600 000 is much more theorical in the article than in the title), so I'm thinking the title was written by someone else.