Vanilla Production in Geodesic Domes | Hacker News Reader

Vanilla Production in Geodesic Domes

abc.net.au

96 pointsangrygoat41 comments

As 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.

Seems an automated farm could be designed to do it economically. Like “that” documentary on Netflix showed them doing in Greenland or some such place.

Are we supposed to know which documentary you're talking about? Sorry, I'm really curious now. Sounds interesting.

Madagascar will suffer if we cease trading with them for vanilla and also Madagascan wildlife

Madagascar is number 132 in the ranking of GDP of 196 countries. 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)

I think GDP per person might be more informative. I found a couple of references stating it was $400 or $500.

> "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..

I'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?

It'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?

It'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-... [2] http://vanillaaustralia.com/about-us/

I feel like I wasted a lot of time figuring out how to search Australian patents to come to the same conclusion you did, but I guess it at least taught me something new? Just trying to find anything to understand what makes this so special. I don't know why I felt inclined to spend so much time on it, but I'm a bit of a gardening nut, and really wanted to see what was patentable that could help in food production like that. Can't find anything beyond the marketing fluff, unfortunately.

The article says he has yet to harvest a single vanilla pod from his plants. It very much looks like he intends to primarily create a business selling his greenhouses, rather than actually producing vanilla, which is a long and involved process, you won't simply harvest processed vanilla pods from the magic domes.

Cool 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.

Is 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)?

Apparently there's only one species of endangered bee which can pollinate it.

Well they do have a very climate controlled environment so perhaps the bees would be comfortable there.

Good luck importing any animal species to Australia. Also keeping bees alive and prosper would add another layer of complexity.

Maybe the real opportunity is in tiny robot bee drones, a la Black Mirror.

IANABK (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.

In 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.

Interestingly vanilla originates from Mexico and not Madagascar. The plant was introduced to Madagascar for cultivation in the 19th century.

It'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_f...

Indeed. Read "The Columbian Exchange" book by Alfred W. Crosby. Imagine Hungarians without paprika and Indian cuisine without peppers. :-)

Pollination often has to do with having the right anatomy in the right configuration on bee and flower. Orchid species (like vanilla) in particular often have this single species coevolution trait for whatever reason.

One theory might be that the higher specificity would lead to better firtilization rates when one kind of bee sticks to one kind of flower.

I 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.

> 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?

Vanilla 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.

The plants are already mobile and constrained to a regular structure. A robotic pollinator wouldn't be much of a stretch.

How 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.

To 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.

>"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."

So 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?

A whole article and thread about Geodesic domes and not even a nod to buckminster fuller

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller#Geodesic_do...

The 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!

Looks 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).

Synthetic 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.

Per 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.

Yup. And anyone who’s tasted both can tell you they’re not the same. At all.

That just means they need to put more effort into fine-tuning the synthesis.

I think it's likely that, given the financial incentives, someone already has "just put more effort in".

Artificial vanilla tastes about the same in blinded taste tests.

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