Can South Florida grow precious vanilla crop? DNA research from UF raises hopes
Every day, Victor Gonzalez checks on about 1,000 young vanilla plants he is growing at a farm in Homestead. His dream is to fill five acres of land he hopes to buy with the exotic orchid that produces a spice that can cost more than silver.
Natural vanilla is rare and expensive: most of it is produced in Madagascar and demand is always bigger than supply. Flowers bloom only one day per year for just a few hours, and they must be pollinated by hand to produce beans, which happens about every three years. Then the beans are cured in a months-long process that involves wrapping the pods in blankets overnight and sundrying them during the day.
It’s a big endeavor but Gonzalez saw a business opportunity when he learned that South Florida could be a good spot to grow this hot commodity. He’s betting that new DNA research from the University of Flor
ida will help him breed plants that will pique the appetite of top chocolatiers and global food companies.
“In my business plan,
I’m going big time. I’m going for Godiva, Nestle,” said Gonzalez, who lives in Homestead and works as a sales rep for a supplier of agricultural products and services. For now, he is experimenting with vanilla planifolia, the commercial variety, at a client’s farm.
University of Florida scientists have sequenced the planifolia genome to help growers breed stronger and more productive plants that would do well as a commercial crop in South Florida. The goal is to support the development of a niche market to supply local businesses but also to eventually export topquality vanilla.
“The vanilla genome reported in this study will enable accelerated breeding of vanilla pods with
improved bean quality, plants with superior disease resilience and higher yields,” said Alan Chambers, an assistant professor of horticultural sciences at UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS) Tropical Research and Education Center. The results of the study “A phased Vanilla planifolia genome enables genetic improvement of flavor and production” were published last week in Nature Food.
Because vanilla flowers don’t self-pollinate, production hinges on cheap manual labor. The only place in the world where small native bees pollinate vanilla flowers is in Mexico, where the orchid species originated. But even with the bees, it was hit or miss because of the very short pollination window. Though the country was a big producer in the late 19th century, political instability brought on by the Mexican revolution in 1910-1920 and industrialization led to drastic deforestation in vanillagrowing regions. Madagascar overtook Mexico in the 1960s.
The big problem with vanilla is that pollination results are unpredictable, with years of abundant and flavor-packed beans alternating with weak crops that are sometimes destroyed by cyclones that go through the island nation. Prices can go from $20 per kilo to as much as $700 per kilo in the same season.
The university’s DNA research could potentially create varieties that selfpollinate and are able to withstand extreme weather and pests such as fusarium, a disease that make the roots and stems rot.
“Self-pollination would be a game-changer,” said Gonzalez.
That might be a possibility if scientists are able to produce a flower without a little flap of tissue called the rostellum, which separates the male part where the pollen is produced from the female part. The tiny Mexican bee pollinator can crawl inside the flower to get it out, but hand pollinators must use a toothpick to break it and press the pollen-coated male part against the female part so that breeding can happen.
For now, Chambers is focusing on how to increase the content of vanillin, the compound that gives natural vanilla its distinctive flavor, with the information obtained from the genome.
“The quality of vanilla beans is primarily defined by the vanillin content. So if you can produce plants with higher vanillin concentrations, your beans will be worth more,” he said.
The genome is an organism’s complete set of genetic instructions. Each genome contains DNA, or the information needed to build that organism. DNA sequencing — figuring out the building blocks of a molecule in detail — can tell scientists important genetic information about plant varieties and help them make decisions about breeding strategies.
Chambers has been doing some tests with vanilla at the University of Florida Tropical Research and Education Center in Homestead for the past four years, growing over 100 varieties and testing for yield, resistance to disease and flavor. There was so much interest from local growers that UF/IFAS decided to step up its breeding program with the help of some DNA technology.
The university partnered with Elo Life Systems, a North Carolina-based food and agriculture company, to produce the “complete book” of the vanilla planifolia DNA, Chambers said. He hopes to offer South Florida growers information on how to start a successful crop that could potentially rival the beans from Madagascar.
Other countries like Uganda, India, Indonesia and Mexico produce vanilla, but the market still loves the stuff from Madagascar. It still responsible 80% of global production. Connoisseurs say that vanilla is like wine: its flavors and quality have a lot to do with the terroir where it’s grown. Madagascar provides what has become known as the classic natural vanilla taste: sweet and creamy.
Chambers and about 200 hopeful producers are betting South Florida can replicate that winning taste.