After dining with an old friend in Far North Queensland who had an export license for vanilla in Papua-New Guinea but stopped importing thanks to on-the-ground hazards in PNG, David Soo made an entrepreneurial move.
“[My friend] said he didn’t want to do it anymore because it’s too dangerous and I thought, ‘Well, why can’t we do it here in Australia?’,” Soo told ABC-TV’s Landline on 10 May 2020.
Vanilla is a high-value crop ‘in hot demand’. Currently, it sells for around $600 a kilogram, making it the world’s second-most lucrative spice crop.
Moreover, as Soo told Landline, “A lot of the big food processors or manufacturers, such as Nestle, are now moving or mandating that they only want naturally grown vanilla, not synthetic vanilla. I thought, ‘Well there’s an inelastic demand curve there’.”
The next step was to figure out a commercially viable way to grow the oft-tricky, labour-intensive crop. The solution? A custom-designed, 350-cubic-metre geodesic-dome greenhouse in which growing conditions can be precisely controlled via any compatible mobile device.
Now three years into a pilot project on the Central Coast of New South Wales, Soo has around 200 vanilla vines planted in vertical soil-filled trellises. He told Landline his crop is growing three times faster than it would in an open-air plantation – partly because of the novel trellis design, which allows for what he calls ‘three-dimensional plants’, where the root structures come from nodes all along the vine.
Read the full article here.
Source: Sydney inventor David Soo can grow $600,000 worth of vanilla from his smartphone
I ABC Landline