3 ms·
It takes a lot to turn a crop into an industry. There's plenty of "miracle" crops out there. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3389/fn
by culi 2y ago
It takes a lot to turn a crop into an industry. There's plenty of "miracle" crops out there.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3389/fnut.2020.593711/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...
A lot of times the issue is just logistics. Many of these are tropical and don't fruit at a predictable, narrow time of the year. Making it hard to time when you hire a bunch of labor and do your harvest.
Then ofc there's always the marketing problem of convincing people to use this new plant
- dan353hehe 2y agoAll very valid points. I live in the dessert, and we have mesquite trees here everywhere. They also produce a bean in a pod which I learned several years ago is edible! I ordered some flour and put it in bread and other things. It’s a sweet flour that tastes like a very interesting chocolate. It’s just hard to harvest, and to mill, and not a lot of people are willing to eat different things. But the tree thrives on less then 8 inches of rain a year.
- culi 2y agoI love mesquite! It's a staple crop of indigenous people there. It's also got some of the deepest roots of any plant ever and can spread rhizomatically. It was introduced into the old world to hopefully fight desertification but has ended up being one of the worst invasive plants ever introduced. You'd basically need an excavator to get rid of one once established