The Tropical Fruit Forum

Can anyone here point me to some successful examples of silvopasture with cows and high-density tree plantings? Most examples I see are very widely spaced plantings or dense plantings but within widely spaced rows. I'm interested in seeing something more similar to what we have here which is trees everywhere planted very close.

Sorry Cacao fans this one isn't for you. Cacao seeds are horrible. That's why most people ferment them and add sugar. The labor requirement is immense to actually properly process the seeds. The pulp is very minimal and, I will admit, has a decent flavor, a little sour but OK. However, the amount of pulp is too minimal to be worthwhile. Plus Cacao has next to no tolerance of aluminum saturation, so it's just not a good choice for many tropical soils. Pure cacao doesn't even have a nice stimulating effect. I much prefer coffee or coca leaf if I want something that's a stimulant. Also Cacao is high in oxalates.

We planted Theobroma bicolor. One of them fruited at two years, most fruited at three years. They seem pretty forgiving of poor soil. The pulp is delicious (a creamier flavor vs. the tart flavor of the cacao) and there is a decent amount unlike Cacao. The best part: the seeds. They are like gigantic, fat pumpkin seeds that taste exquisite when toasted.

This is more of a question geered towards folks that have large tracts of land and dense grassy or herbaceous weed pressure.

Our property is a former cattle pasture. We've gone for over a year in certain areas before re-weedwacking them. It got pretty thick, but still manageable. Wasp nest encounters increased. Grass itself isn't such a concern, because it pretty much grows to fullsize within a matter of four months and then stagnates thereafter.

Today I was on one of our steep hills banging the weedwacker blade on many of the hidden rocks on that slope, and thinking to myself, as much money as we spend (waste?) on weedwacking, it would be great to just neglect areas for much longer periods of time.

Of course, I've thought a lot about cows, but that's a big investment onto itself, and demands quite a commitment, as well as patience, which I'm not overflowing with. Also, our trees haven't been large enough to handle the impact. Mostly I still don't feel they'd be ready to handle the impact in most sectors.

On some parts of the property the grass is starting to be significantly shaded, and certainly loses vigor compared to full-sun grass. I'm sure a bunch of climbing vines would start to become problematic like tropical kudzu. Also scattered, woody weeds would probably become more commonplace.. I don't think the trees that are already at least twice as high as the weeds would die all-of-sudden just because the weeds are there. Small trees might die just because they can't photosynthesize, but overall I'd expect the trees to just keep growing. Probably a lot more machete work would be required to ever "recover" the property.

Can anyone point to any examples of tropical orchards that were left fallow? Perhaps some ecological studies with detailed chronological photos? I know a lot of people act like it's the end of the world if there's a lot of dense weediness, so perhaps there's not much firsthand knowledge here?

I look at all these video titles and they pretty much say the same thing: "This was the worst soil on the planet, and then overnight with my super magical green thumb, everything changed!

That pretty much sums it up. Add in a dash of flowery language...voila!

I haven't seen videos where they actually show detailed soil analysis to prove just how "bad" their soil was at the start. Nor is the viewer graced with the results of a third party audit to detail the inputs added or economics of the entire operation. I mean I could make a terrible soil great in a day, just give me a back hoe, rototiller and a few side-dump loads of lime and compost.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc3-3s115mM

And a comment I read in its comment section that pretty much sums up my thoughts:
"Title is a little deceiving, that's not "desert sand", that area of Baja is quite fertile and local farmers have been growing vegetables there for decades. This isn't new at all, why do foreign people like to try to appropriate everything? Give due credit to the local guys who have been doing this for decades and pioneered these techniques."


I'm on this soapbox, because I know everyone's trying so hard to motivate others by making it look easy - like if you just take a PDC and listen to hippies talk about fairies then you can take a box of seeds and some builders clay and scatter seeds in the middle of the Sahara Desert, forests will pop out of nowhere, and the wildebeast will once again roam the ancient plains of the extinct Saharan prairie browsing tree Aloes to help ward off skin cancer. Nonetheless, everything is so much more nuanced than presented and there are situations where the same approach will be a disaster in someone else's neck of the woods.

My favorite ones are the ones where they plant thousands of trees and then "walk away" and come back a few years later, supposedly for the first time, with all sorts of camera gear, and ooh and ahh about how neat the new forest is, and brag about how only a few of the tree saplings have died. Congratulations, you have good soil. Go try that in most parts of the world on severely degraded, marginal, non-ag land and you might as well throw away money.

I've been a regular listener to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast by John Kempf. He definitely favors sap analysis over foliar testing, which I understand. I personally don't have such a service available near here, so I had to do a foliar analysis instead. Either way, I don't think I'm going to be doing either test on a regular basis. I doubt many on this forum would either. It seems more geared towards commercial growers that need to keep things on point to make realtime adjustments. It's a pretty useful tool, but you probably need to have a commercial operation to justify the cost of that level of precision.

What are your recommendations? I'm interested in touring awe-inspiring edible fruit gardens and extremely beautiful botanical gardens with lots of palm trees and vibrant tropical flowers, etc.

Also planning a visit to ECHO, as I've always heard good things about their demonstration gardens to get ideas for rural development work.

Also, what else is fun to do in Florida? Thinking about visiting Key West, as I've never been. Also want to swim with the manatees north of Tampa area.

I probably won't: Do the beaches of Miama, everglades, disney...been there done that.

I understand it's common for them to be intercepted at the destination country, but do you folks ever have problems getting shipments out of the origin country?

Which is it? Can't remember. Apparently one is a cut above the rest, whereas the others aren't even considered "true" cinnamon..Some of the inferior species I've heard are actually somewhat toxic.

There are only a few spots on our land where Avocados have done OK. We started direct-planting more from seed, which has been more successful, but I think it will always be an uphill battle for the most part to have good avocado production here.

Our location is in Amazonia, but with a distinct dry season between June and October. Rainfall is pretty low this time of year. We only received 1.8 inches this year in July. August seems like it might turn out to be even less than that. These are typically the two driest months of the year. The soil is naturally acidic here for the most part, and of course it was leached over multiple decades following deforestation, which made it more acidic, so recommendations should be for a fruit that grows well in acidic conditions. Some parts of the property have pretty bad aluminum saturation, such as the spot from the soil analysis I'm going to share. Would be good for the recommended species to be aluminum resistant. I took the soil sample from the least productive part of the property. Some areas are night and day by comparison, but still I've seen Avocado only thrive in a few key spots, and even those will probably require continued addition of lime in the future.

Someone suggested Macadamias might be good for acidic soil. Well we tried about one hundred trees and only one has performed decently. Most died.

Results from our Avocado foliar analysis are pending.

I'd like to grow something equivalent to Avocado, but I know there is no substitute. Something fatty and delicious would be nice. Maybe tropical Walnut (Juglans neotropica) or Dipteryx alata. Preferably something with a big seed that I can direct sow, which will have enough energy to get the shoot taller than our Brachiaria grasses within the first six months of growth. How about Bertholettia excelsa? Would you recommend African Oil Palm? Surprisingly seeds of many species are hard to find in Peru, as it's not like in the US where you just go online. You really have to know someone in an area where there are trees, and the person has to be trustworthy enough to provide you with fresh stock. Out of all the species I mentioned, I think the African Oil Palm seeds would be the easiest to acquire. We are at about 900m elevation, which gets a little cooler than the low jungle, but I still find it plenty hot. In the dry season most days are sunny and top out at 90 degrees. I haven't gotten solid data on annual rainfall ( just installed a rain gauge last month) for our location. I would say somewhere between 2000-3000mm avg. annual rainfall based on some of the data I've seen for other towns nearby in drier microclimates.

We're three years into this. So most areas already have significant canopy cover with a couple different Inga spp., Schizolobium, and the local Erythrina spp. Therefore, I think some "higher order" trees might perform well being sown at this stage.

The topsoil in our sample surprised me a bit. I wasn't expecting to see the pH that high and the organic matter at 2.58% is higher than I expected. That result is even after excluding the top two inches, because we've been running chickens and other poultry through the area over the past few months, and I didn't want their manure to affect the results too much. The subsoil is still about as awful as when we started three years ago though.

Just a warning though: This is a pretty extreme example. It is the area on the property where we've seen the least amount of growth from all tree species we planted 3 years ago. Some died, and most just sat there stunted. They have been unable to compete satisfactorily with the Brachiaria, whereas in other areas of the property we have seen satisfactory tree growth amongst Brachiaria.

Test Results:

This was off the record, so I'm not sure I should be reporting it, but I remember about eight years ago talking with one of the senior researchers at the USDA lab near Ft. Pierce. I think his name was Randall Neidz. He was talking about how that disease was pretty much decimating the entire crop of oranges in Florida. He showed me some charts indicating the steady decline, and said the outlook was bleak. Basically he predicted an entire collapse of the Florida citrus industry. He said even if they were able to fast-track some sort of GMO citrus, which would still take a minimum of two years, the processing plants were built with a certain volume in mind, and the lack of volume during that interim period would supposedly cause everything to go bust.

Anyway, don't quote me on that. I'm just paraphrasing the guy.

So, what ever happened with that situation?

Here we


use chlorpyrifos in a powdered form, which doesn't work very well. You powder their entrances and lines, and hope for the best. I even get on hands and knees and blow some of the powder down the entrance. Inevitably in a week or so, they will be back, rinse and repeat for weeks on end.
 
A biological agent would work better.

Edit: Here's a nice article from Brazil where scientists conducted an experiment with some sort of processed orange pulp as a carrier bait into which they infused sulfluramid at 0.3% concentration. Apparently the ants incorporated more of the sulfluramid pellets into their nest than even the control group (the processed orange pulp without any insecticide). That might have just been a coincidence, but the mechanism of action sounds very convincing to me.
The sulfluramid is very slow acting, so the worker ants don't perceive the compound. The ants feed this bait to their fungus and only after the bait has been incorporated into the fungus, does the sulfluramid start to affect the worker ants. The workers are not able to associate the bait as being the source of toxicity as they are able to do with more acute toxins from their environment. The article states that after three or four days the ants stop harvesting plant material from the landscape, and all individuals die 16-22 days following the treatment.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0085562619300755

Sounds promising to me. Now I just have to see if I can find a product with this chemical composition.

I was looking at some plant lists of what can grow in acidic soil, and blueberry popped out at me, because the chart said its low end begins at 4.0pH, which is pretty darn acidic.

In Peru, they actually cultivate blueberries in the coastal region. They even find their way to the local markets here in Rioja. I really don't know much about the technicalities of how they're doing it. Yet, I assume that whatever cultivars they're using would probably be successful here in the jungle. We're about 5-6 degrees from the equator and blessed with acidic soil. Before we planted our property, we sent a few soil samples from various spots to the local lab. The lowest reading we got back was 4.76 and the highest 5.06

Edit: Just started reading a Peruvian thesis. Apparently the cultivar, "Biloxi" accounts for 90% of the commercial production in Peru.

I came across this guy's youtube channel, and thought I should share the link to his gofundme on here, because his project sounds relevant to this forum. I don't know the guy, and I won't donate, because we are still investing a lot into our own place with no sign of profitability on the horizon anytime soon. But maybe others are interested. As you may know, many tropical ecosystems are being degraded at an alarming rate. This is one project that should serve as a good example for the region to heal the land:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/regenerating-degraded-land-in-honduras?utm_campaign=p_lico+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer