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Comment by dejv | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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