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> 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?

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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.

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