The vanilla orchid vines in Shelley and Brian Fehrenbacher’s greenhouse east of Tampa started out 20 months ago as just an inch long. Now, some of the vines stretch 10 feet on custom-made trellises. Give it another year — or two — and the Fehrenbachers will have the answer to the question they’ve posed themselves: Can they get vanilla orchids to bloom in their Florida greenhouse? Give it eight more months and they’ll know whether the orchids produce sizable vanilla beans. Follow that with months of curing the beans to find out whether the whole effort is justified financially.
Lots, obviously, remains to be seen. “I’m confident,” says Shelley Fehrenbacher. “They’re growing and doing well. It’s a matter of being patient.”
Patient farmers and researchers in Florida, ever in search of a new cash crop, look to vanilla, a flavor well known to consumers and potentially lucrative to growers. “I think it’s got a lot of potential,” says Xingbo Wu, a University of Florida scientist working on vanilla. “The economics are very important here. Agriculture in Florida is facing many challenges.”
Used in food, cosmetics and healing, vanilla is the second priciest spice after saffron. Wu says high-quality vanilla beans are selling at $350 per kilo. That’s $159 a pound. Pure vanilla extracted from the beans sometimes sells for five figures per kilo.
It’s expensive because the world is short of natural vanilla. Synthetic versions of vanillin — the operative molecule in vanilla — have been made since at least 1874 from trees, petrochemicals and other sources, but it’s not as good as naturally occurring vanilla. Also, food makers, beginning with Nestle in 2015, have committed to using natural vanilla in their products in the United States. Natural vanilla production can’t keep up with demand.
From Madagascar to Miami-Dade
The only orchid fruit that’s edible, the vanilla most of us encounter comes from vanilla planifolia, an orchid native to Mexico. Over the centuries, people took vanilla planifolia around the world to Madagascar and other hot, humid locales including Tahiti where a hybrid emerged — the only other vanilla variety recognized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Today, 85% of the world’s natural vanilla comes from Madagascar. The success of the crop there determines the world vanilla price, which fluctuates considerably year to year. The U.S. is the largest importer, buying 37.5% of the world’s natural vanilla in 2022, says trade data compiler OEC World.
Vanilla planifolia also made it to Hawaii, Puerto Rico — which had an industry for a time — and, in 1899, to Florida where it still can be found in nature. “I was kind of shocked. I had no idea vanilla was growing wild in South Florida,” says Stephanie Webb, a Florida-based herbalist, aromatherapist and consultant who formulates products for nutrition, supplement and scent companies. A few years ago, she needed to source a supply of vanilla.
Her search led her to Homestead in south Miami-Dade to the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Tropical Research and Education Center. There, scientist Alan Chambers had a collection of hundreds of vanilla orchid varieties of varying flavor profiles and characteristics. Under Chambers, the center studied their disease resistance, productivity and vanilla quality with an eye toward improving all. South Florida’s climate looked to be a good match for vanilla production. Also, orchid vines need something to climb, and the region’s tropical fruit tree industry seemed a fit.
Webb began building a business, Sunshine State Vanilla, supplying vanilla orchids to farmers. The Fehrenbachers, meanwhile, were looking for an interesting edible plant for their farm in Valrico. They too found their way to the Tropical Research Center and Chambers. North of Lake Okeechobee it’s too cold for the orchid, so the Fehrenbachers decided to prove it can thrive in a greenhouse and bought plants from Webb. “If it works, which we’re seeing it does, that’s something that can transfer all throughout the United States,” Shelley Fehrenbacher says.
Childhood sweethearts in their native Illinois — they’ve known each other since they were three — the Fehrenbachers came to Florida for college at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Shelley over time developed painful neuropathy diseases, Grave’s disease and Trigeminal neuralgia, that defied treatments grounded both in western medicine and — her words — in the “kooky.” Her life changed in 2015 when she and Brian purchased a nineacre farm in Valrico and acquired dwarf goats.
The farm sits astride a sinkhole that drops down 80 feet to the aquifer below. The farm living, dwarf goats and nature, Shelley says, healed her. The couple, parents of three daughters, made it their passion and the mission of their boutique farm to spread wellness. “I got my life back, I need to share that with people,” she says. They consult on running an agritourism business. Therapy goats, which they breed and sell, live in designer goat cottages. Instagram posts draw millions of viewers. “This isn’t what farm life used to look like,” she says. “We’ve got people coming from all over the world to see it.”
In 2020, they acquired an adjacent five acres on which they put German-built and Brian-reimagined greenhouses, hence their business name, the Tampa Greenhouses at Fallen Oak Farms. One greenhouse is a rental venue for corporate gatherings, retreats or weddings. The other holds the “Vanilla Lab.” They devised their own misting and water system. Wu has visited.
Wu, a 37-year-old plant breeder, took over the UF vanilla program after Chambers left. The Holy Grail for researchers the world over is getting the vanilla orchid to self-pollinate to produce its fruit — vanilla beans. To date, no one’s bred a way around a flap of flower tissue that prevents self-pollinating. In Mexico, a particular bee species does the job. In Florida, some creature — UF is working to discover which — pollinates vanilla orchids in the wild, but it’s too haphazard for farming purposes. Hand-pollinating has been around for more than a hundred years, but it’s labor-intensive and therefore costly. The work must be done fast. An individual vanilla planifolia flower blooms for only part of a day once a year in March or April in Florida.
As Wu works on the long-term self-pollinating goal, he says his near-term aim is to develop a unique vanilla that could be used in scents or cooking. Vanilla, it turns out, isn’t so plain — it can be variously described as smoky, spicy, pruney, woody, floral and so on. South Florida is home to four vanilla species other than planifolia. “We believe we can create new varieties that have a flavor that has never been seen before,” Wu says.
Vanilla horizon
For now, commercial vanilla farming in Florida is as experimental as Wu’s research. Farm groups say IFAS research, such as genetic breeding for virus-resistant crops, keeps the state’s farmers competitive globally. Growers regularly get presented with plant varieties and entire new categories of crops said to promise a boon. [See “The Cautionary Peach,” p. 84] Industrial hemp and hops, for example, have been touted in recent years as viable for Florida. Farmers, however, have to judge whether the next promising thing will yield sufficient profit to justify their investment in land, labor, fertilizer and pest control.
One vanilla effort that’s produced some cash is Southern Escape Vanillery in the Redlands, a farming area of Miami-Dade. Full-time attorney and part-time grower Abrahm Smith hosts, on about a third of one acre of his eight-acre hobby farm, shade houses where the vanillery’s vines grow. (Vanilla orchids can’t take direct sun.) The company leadership includes Chambers, the father of Florida vanilla. Smith says the vines don’t require a lot of labor — except in the six weeks when the vines begin popping out blooms and hand-pollinating is a daily job for a farmhand.
“It’s more or less an experimental endeavor to see if you can commercially produce vanilla,” Smith says. “Is this a commercially viable crop for Florida? We know it grows here. It’s producing. South Florida has the right climate. It is a valuable crop.”
The vanillery had an initial, small harvest in 2023 and a second this year that produced 20 pounds of cured vanilla beans, which sold for about $140 per pound. The third crop, at present, is green beans on the vine. Smith says the vanillery sold its entire 2024 crop to a flavoring company. To date, its annual harvest is too small to interest grocery chains and major food brokers.
One consideration: While the orchids do grow in South Florida, real estate there is expensive. On the plus side, Smith says, “You can put a lot of plants in a small area. Five acres and you’d have a really nice business. It would be a game-changer for the ag industry.”
The company founded by Webb, the flavor and scents formulator, pays a greenhouse to grow starter orchid vines that she sells, as of June, for $530 for a flat of 72 plants. She says most buyers are farmers in South Florida, though she has shipped to a Michigan customer who had a greenhouse. She’s looking for a way to supply backyard orchid growers and orchid-lover groups. “There’s a lot of them in Florida,” she says. The orchid itself produces a big yellow flower that’s “extremely aromatic,” and growing orchids lends itself to agritourism, she says.
Like the Feherbachers, she’s not been at it enough years to prove vanilla will produce for farmers. Says Webb, “Next year, we’ll see.”