A big thank you to Shree Padre, an amazingly zealous promoter of floral causes. No Padma yet, to my knowlwedge. Eric. http://www.civilsocietyonline.com/pages/1211_rising_fruits.html
Rising Fruits Mysore raspberry stars in Hawaii’s 12 trees project. Can this be a model for India? Shree Padre, Hawaii The Mysore raspberry hails from Coorg in Karnataka. Dismissed as a thorny wild weed no one would ever dream of cultivating it there. You would be laughed at if you had the temerity to make such a suggestion. But far away in picturesque Hawaii, the Mysore raspberry earns an income for small farmers and has a loyal fan following.“It was the number one choice of 54 chefs here,” says Ken Love, president of the Hawaii Tropical Fruit Growers (HTFG) and the moving force behind the 12 Trees Project, an agricultural programme launched in 2005 which has boosted the income of small farmers.Farmers in Hawaii’s Kona region grow one of the most expensive coffees in the world called Kona. It is their main crop but they hardly make any money out of it. Many farmers were abandoning their coffee farms, migrating to cities and selling their fields to developers. The 12 Trees Project sought to reverse this trend. It helped farmers diversify by growing unusual fruits which would find favour with buyers, chefs and consumers. The outcome has been a range of nutritious fruits which have quietly invaded markets, restaurants and homely dining tables 365 days of the year. Hawaii is a tourist hotspot. Chefs tickled tastebuds by conjuring up irresistible recipes with exotic fruits like cherimoya, fig, grumichama, kumquat, loquat, Surinam cherry, tree tomato and the tropical apricot. Included in this list are fruits of Indian origin which have won Hawaiian hearts. The Mysore raspberry, though a controversial plant, is made into jam, dunked into smoothies or converted into a gooey syrup for pancakes. The Rangapur lime, Mysore banana and Mysore peach have their share of followers. The Malabar chestnut, whose seeds can be roasted and eaten like cashew nuts, is also relished. In India we have many unusual fruits which could enhance the earnings of small farmers and provide more choice to consumers. There is kokum and jackfruit. Passion fruit is being grown in the northeast and is making inroads in Kerala and Karnataka. Another rising star is the rambutan which has been introduced in Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. There are aspects of the 12 Trees Project in Hawaii which can be creatively put to use in India. Some agricultural scientists believe the next Green Revolution in India will be in horticulture with fruit trees being raised on marginal and wastelands using drip irrigation.Coffee chimera: “Till the mid-90s, you couldn’t find fruits like abiu, fig, strawberry or guava in our Hawaiian shops,” says Ken Love. “But look now fruits from our 12 Trees Project are found at different times through the year. There is the Surinam cherry, loquat, kumquat, tree tomato, grumichama, tropical apricot, kona lime… sometimes these aren’t enough.”Aptly called the ‘paradise of the world,’ Hawaii is blessed with fertile volcanic ash which looks like black cotton soil. It has a range of micro-climates, tropical, sub-tropical and temperate, which yield a variety of fruits, some of which grow in the wild. Kona coffee is cultivated in the mountainous western part of Hawaii and requires heavy labour. Production, harvesting and processing are all done manually. In specialty retail stores, Kona coffee could sell for as much as $50 per pound. But since production costs are high and output is low, the farmer earns very little from it. A bag of raw coffee sells for around $125. After deducting picking expenses, the farmer is left with only $75! If we subtract the cost of fertilizers and family labour for pruning and weeding, the farmer actually makes a pittance. Ironically, one of the world’s most expensive coffees is a losing proposition!“Hawaii is very different from the rest of the US,” explains Love. “People here are very rich or very poor. Land value is very high. Most of our farmers have only one to two hectares. It’s hard to make enough money from agriculture.”Hawaii’s beauty attracts many middle-class families. Some buy coffee farms hoping to settle down to a happy bucolic life and a decent income. It doesn’t take them long to realise that there is no money in coffee farming. By that time, their hard-earned savings have vanished. Their only option is to sell their land to a developer and find a job. 12 Trees Project: “If we don’t make farming profitable, there won’t be any farms left after a couple of decades,” says Love, a journalist who became a farmer. “I lost two of my sons to the city. I don’t want the city to grab my grandchildren now.”He made up his mind to draw up strategies which would help farmers stay out of the red. With the help of the University of Hawaii and friends, he formulated the 12 Trees Project to enhance the income of coffee farms. After consulting 54 of Hawaii’s chefs, fruit buyers and growers, Love and his team identified a dozen fruit trees which could be grown on coffee farms. Priority was given to seasonality and harvesting time while choosing trees so that fruit could be supplied through the year to local markets and farmers would not need to hire labour. A husband and wife team would be able to harvest different fruits at different times of the year all by themselves. “If you have 10 acres would you prefer to harvest all of that within two months or would you prefer to harvest one acre a month?” asks Love.The fruit varieties selected were: Cherimoya, fig, grumichama, kumquat, loquat, Mysore raspberry, Poha (Cape gooseberry), pomegranate, Rangapur (Kona) lime, Surinam cherry, tree tomato (tamarillo) and tropical apricot. Every farm can’t grow all these fruits. It is up to the farmer to choose what works best for him or her. “Figs and loquat are just two examples of fruits that are more profitable than coffee,” says Love. “These fruits have higher value. Based only on fresh fruit sales one can make five to ten times more money.” At Gerry and Nancy Redfether’s Kawanui Farm on the Big Island, Mysore raspberry and Mysore banana both find favour.“We love berries,” says Nancy. “We have only two native wild berries, the Ohelo and the Thimble Berry. Both are small, not very sweet. When we found that the Mysore raspberry yields fruit through the year, we were interested. We eat the Mysore banana as a snack. It is sweet and tastes different from our apple banana.”Love says the Mysore raspberry is a controversial fruit. It is listed as a noxious weed, as an undesirable invasive plant. “It is illegal to plant it outside the Big Island,” explains Love who feels it is really a misunderstood plant species. “The main problem is its thorns, which can make it extremely painful to harvest. The fruit tastes very good, chefs like it. I hope in future a thorn-less strain can be developed.”Hawaii’s economy is predominantly tourism-driven. So instead of selling a whole lot of a single fruit it is easier to sell a little of different fruits. As a result of the 12 Trees Project, fruits are available throughout the year. You can get jaboticaba for 10 months and mangosteen for eight months. Rambutan takes a break only for a few months. Different varieties of mangoes are grown at different levels, so you can buy mangoes through the year. Another advantage in Hawaii is its tremendous biodiversity. Kona has 200 varieties of avocados, 200 types of mangoes and 100 kinds of bananas! Most such families don’t have any domain knowledge of farming. They love the land, but don’t realize the work that goes into making farming successful. They give up. As a result, Hawaii’s traditional coffee farms have been disappearing at a rapid pace. Teach and earn: Selling this basket of curious fruits to consumers needed inventiveness. Love says information proved to be critical. Informing consumers and buyers about the quality and seasonality of fruit helps in sales. To help farmers explain their new offerings, Love painstakingly created signboards with full information about the fruit. These are downloadable from his website: www.hawaiifruit.net.Such signboards are now displayed in many stores and farmers markets. “With some of our rare Hawaiian bananas, we found giving chefs and grocery stores their fruit history on a signboard helped increase its value. Once growers are educated about what they have to sell, they in turn educate their customers.” Some Hawaiian bananas are very rare and perhaps only 600 trees are left. Once buyers knew this, they were prepared to pay more. Another strategy Love emphasises is farmer-chef relations. He found most chefs didn’t know when figs would be available or which month they could expect lychees. So he designed seasonal fruit charts which showed which fruit would be available in which month.“Chefs are always looking for something new to try. Hotels seek that competitive edge. As farmers we can provide that. It is a tool we should use to become more sustainable,” explains Love. Chefs too pass on information to their customers. Love recalls a funny incident. “To inform customers how a banana looks in its original form, we got one chef to put an entire bunch of bananas on the buffet table. Their customers rushed to get their pictures taken with the bananas. It was hard to get to the food, actually. When other hotels heard about this, they too started placing bunches of bananas on the buffet table.” More restaurants now source local fruits directly from farmers. Restaurants like Four Seasons, Fair Mount and Mona Kea are using Surinam cherry, fresh figs and Hawaiian bananas. Four Seasons, a popular Hawaiian restaurant, buys 25 per cent of its fruit locally. Another advantage for Hawaii’s farmers is their strong local farmers’ markets. Though coffee is their main crop, many farmers grow at least four or five minor fruits and make products with them. To stay in the profession they love, these small farmers are striving hard by doing value addition, diversification and earning that extra money by selling their products at farmers’ markets.Love and his wife Marguerite produce an unbelievable 150 products from a range of minor fruits. Interestingly, they are able to market more than 50 per cent of their products through the Internet to the mainland. Their glass bottles, nicely wrapped in bubble paper and packed neatly in boxes are sent through the postal department! Many small farmers have websites and sell a portion of their products directly through the Internet via mail order.But Hawaiian farmers have their problems as well. The biggest one is the ban on sending fresh fruits to their mainland. Way back in 1908 inspectors from California spotted a fruit fly in an avocado sent from Hawaii. Ever since, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has prohibited transport of fresh fruit from Hawaii to the mainland. Only processed fruit cans or bottles can be exported to the US. Another growing headache is fruit imports. Hawaii grows and sells several thousand pounds of avocado. Yet, over a million avocados are imported every year. This results in locally grown avocados rotting. Big business often takes advantage of local farmers. As a result of ‘buy local, eat local’ campaigns stores do keep local fruits but tuck them away in some dark corner. Says a Kona farmer, “Though our fruits are far tastier, many stores price local fruits exactly half of imported ones. Some other stores hoodwink customers by passing off imported fruits as local.” But stores that genuinely showcase local fruits have seen good sales. The most recent burning issue in Hawaii is the government’s proposed move to make third party certification mandatory for farmers to sell their produce even in farmers’ market. While the government argues this is a step to ensure food safety, farmers suspect big companies are behind this move. They want to diminish the popularity of farmers markets and subsequently bring small farmers under corporate control. India’s humble fruits: Across south India, small farms are up for sale. Farm families, driven to the wall, are selling off their historic, traditional farms.In India demand for land for housing, industry and infrastructure is growing. The money a farmer can get by selling his land is much more than what he can earn from growing crops. The cost of labour has also increased. “We too should come up with a master plan similar to the 12 Trees Project. Of course, here the fruits would be different, but the underlying principle could work for our small farms,” says Balachandra Hegde Sayimane, who is a farmer and journalist based in Sirsi, Karnataka.Some fruits which small farmers could grow easily are jackfruit, kokum (Garcinia indica), a cousin of mangosteen (Garcinia cowa) and passion fruit. Currently, most jackfruit is wasted. (Civil Society, Aug 2010, July & Aug 2011). There is demand for such fruits. At jackfruit fairs, consumers don’t mind paying a little more for better varieties. At the annual jack fair in Bangalore, members of the Toobugere Jack Growers’ Association made sizable profits by selling fresh jack bulbs. There would be a big domestic and export market for Indian farmers were they to do some minimal processing of jackfruit the way it is done in Malaysia. Some innovation has already taken place with jackfruit. Recently, Jose Varkey, Corporate Chef of CGH Earth, a chain of 5-star hotels in Kerala, experimented with jackfruit flour. He peeled the unripe fruit, cut it into cross sections, dried it in the oven and then ground the jackfruit into flour in a wet grinder. He used the flour to rustle up more than a dozen dishes like shammi kababs, seekh kababs, koftas, cakes and cookies.“All these processes which I did at the hotel can be easily mechanized. If jackfruit can be converted into flour, it would have many takers,” he says. In Hawaii, Marguerite Love said that the incidence of celiac disease is on the rise in developed countries. “Wheat flour and white flour are forbidden for celiac patients. My husband is one. We buy gluten-free coconut or millet flour. One pound costs anything between $6 and $13. Why can’t your country produce unripe jackfruit flour or jack seed flour. We won’t have any hesitation in buying it if the price is competitive,” she says.Polycorp Pvt Ltd’s bakery section in Bangalore, Beekays, has incorporated jackfruit into its croissant, Danish pastry, cake and muffin selection. Says BS Bhat, managing director, “Jackseed flour can easily replace corn flour or cassava flour.” Hardikar’s Food Technologies Pvt Ltd in Pune has innovated technology which can produce fine powder from jack carpels. This jackfruit powder can be used for ice-creams and to make desserts. Ankura Food Processing, a new entrant, is introducing jackfruit granules. “It is a great product. Please ensure no sugar is put into it. We can use it in many ways,” says Chef Jose Varkey. Jackfruit ice-cream is also catching on. Natural ice-creams of Mumbai and MILMA, a giant milk cooperative in Kerala, are planning to produce jackfruit ice-cream. What India needs are reliable supply chains, marketing infrastructure and promotion of jackfruit in its hundreds of value-added forms to consumers at home and abroad. In Malaysia, its Federal Agricultural Marketing Authority, (FAMA) has been has been doing this job pretty well. Kokum and passion fruit: Another indigenous fruit ideal for small farms is kokum (Garcinia indica) which is endemic to the Western Ghats. It has many medicinal applications. Kokum butter is a good cure for upset stomachs and burn injuries. Its sherbet cures pitha dosha (excessive bile secretion). Hydroxy citric acid extracted from kokum has anti-obese, anti-cholesterol properties and has a good export market. (Civil Society, June 2011). Love predicts that kokum can be sold as fresh fruit in India. “I rate it far higher than mangosteen because kokum has a sweet and sour taste and a lot of nutritional value.” The rind of the kokum is used for making syrups. An Indian hypermarket group has already decided to market kokum as fresh fruit. Garcinia cowa, a lesser known cousin of mangosteen, has long shelf-life. Syrup extracted from this fruit has an attractive flavour and colour. It can be used as a beverage and as a cocktail with other beverages. Another fruit to watch is passion fruit which is being introduced in Kerala and Karnataka. “Passion fruit would grow well in the Western Ghats. In the past five years due to the initiatives of state governments, around 6,000 to 7,000 hectares of passion fruit have come up in the northeastern states. They have started three to four processing centres and plan to supply the beverage to our metro cities,” says Dr PC Tripathi, Principal Scientist, Indian Institute of Horticulture Research (IIHR) at Chettalli in Coorg. “Unfortunately in Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, passion fruit cultivation is still at a nascent stage with no commercial farms coming up. In fact, passion fruit cultivation is more suited to small farms of one or two hectares. Farmers can process the fruit and get additional returns.” IIHR has recently invented a maroon hybrid passion fruit named Kaveri. It is less acidic and more acceptable to consumers. The Krishi Vijnan Kendra, Gonikoppal, in the Kodagu district of Karnataka, has been offering training in value addition of passion fruit. Passion fruit syrup is popular at home-stays in Kodagu where it is made by many housewives. Mountain Fruits, a new small-scale company in Kerala that produces passion fruit syrup without chemical preservatives, is probably the only one of its kind in south India. According to George Kurian, its proprietor, “Passion fruit is an ideal crop for organic farmers in high range areas. A healthy tree can bear up to 2,000 fruits per year. Our company plans to open direct procurement centres in Idukki district and the neighbouring high range districts of Kerala and Karnataka.” Mountain Fruits is offering `20 per kg of passion fruit to farmers. Dr LC Soans, a leading grower of fruit at Moodabidri, in Karnataka, has introduced several exotic fruits like the rambutan to southern Karnataka. He agrees new fruits need value addition and marketing strategies for farmers to earn a better income. In Kerala, small farmers are showing an interest in growing fruits of Malaysian origin like mangosteen, rambutan, pulasan and durian. Growing conventional crops earns them very little money. There is also the high cost of labour. Some nurseries now specialise in marketing their own selections that promise better sized fruits. Osmo-dehydration, a process by which the fruit retains its original flavour, is also likely to catch on. For the first time in India, the PeePee Group, based in Chennai, is all set to launch dehydrated pineapple, papaya and amla. Osmo-dehydrated jackfruit standardized at IIHR shows promise for the domestic and export market. Says Dr Tiwari: “If we exploit this technology correctly, we can give fruits and vegetables a different dimension. These fruits can be eaten as snacks, for breakfast or at tea-time instead of junk food being served.” “If you take an unusual fruit and create a market for it and value added products, you become a leader in the industry. It requires more work in the beginning but the rewards are much greater than just trying to sell everything everyone is selling,” says Love. Farm to table: Though Hawaii and India are miles apart, there is learning that can be shared. Love advocates more interaction between farmers and chefs in India. “Food at Indian 5 Star hotels is very, very good and of ultra high quality. A large number of foreigners who stay at these hotels love Indian food and are keen to eat local. They don’t want to go to the Taj West end in Bangalore and be served the same food they get in London or Chicago. What impressed me most about the Taj was that they put chikoo, java plum and Indian figs on the breakfast buffet. People would try a piece of chikoo then go back and get more and more. It just requires some education. We did that in Hawaii with signboards.” “Whether they admit it or not, some chefs need education about unusual fruits. Similarly, some farmers need to increase the quality of their produce. The bottom line is to increase communication so that both farmers and chefs can win. Hotel visitors would then have a memorable dining experience,” says Love. “Farmers must learn to communicate better with each other. We should learn to work together so that we have less competition with the types of crops and the prices we sell them at. We need to delight in each others culture and history, not fear it. One of the best ways to achieve this is to share information about what we all have in common. We must continue to strengthen our agriculture worldwide by supporting our local farmers and refusing to buy many imported goods.“ __._,_.___ Reply to sender | Reply to group | Reply via web post | Start a New Topic Messages in this topic (1) Recent Activity: * New Members 2 Visit Your Group [][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][] Send news and updates to [email protected] Our website: http://bsg.goa-india.org/ If you like this list, please introduce it to more people. Free to join. 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