Early in 2019, I started spending time at our coffee plantation in Coorg, a hill station in South India. My family had tied up with an organization called Indian Vanilla Initiative (IVI) which offered farmers support for setting up and maintaining the Vanilla plantation. However, pollination was a delicate manual task for Vanilla cultivation and is the deciding factor for a good crop. I carried out the pollination myself and took notes about the flowering every day. Later I decided to use Python to clean and analyze the data and see what was not immediately apparent. Check out my Github link for a more detailed view of the analysis.
Planting and maintaining the Vanilla
The vanilla vines are grown in a grid of different trees. The vine needs to be planted close to the tree so that it can get a grip and start climbing it. The flowering usually starts about 3 years after the vine cuttings have been planted. Unlike a typical vine, these are not buried into the ground. The base needs to be placed on a pile of ‘mulch’ which consists of the fallen leaves of Arecanut and Silver oak trees mixed with other weed remains from the surrounding bush which periodically needs to be de-weeded.
We believe in moving towards a completely natural way of growing and so avoid using chemical weedicides. The main maintenance processes of the vanilla plantation include:
- Preparing the planting location by “mulching” the base. The process involves making a heap of the fallen leaves and cut weeds, around the base of the tree that the vine will be planted beside.
- Planting the vines. The base of the vine is placed a little inside the pile of mulch. The vine is tied to the tree with a piece of string. Typically planting is done in spring (Feb-April) before the onset of the rainy season. A couple of ‘baskets’ of these cuttings can be planted on each tree to ensure the survival of at least 1 of them.
- Every couple of weeks or months check that the vines are gripping the tree and climbing up. The vines will climb straight up the tree.
- Every year the vine has to be carefully detached away from the tree starting from the top till about 6 ft above the ground. The remaining part of the vine (which is detached) must be “coiled” within the 6 ft height. The vine is not coiled around the tree but is supported on top (by a pipe tied to the tree) and the rest of it just hangs freely and coils back up to the support. The growing tip is made to touch the tree again so that it can climb again.
- Pollination. Manual activity of pollinating the flowers which bloom from March to May.
- Harvest. Typically 9 months after pollination. In the month of December.
How many new flowers on a given day?
Each dot represents the number of new flowers at a location on a given day, based on the number of flowering points at that location.
Let us consider that a particular “type” of vine, is distinguished by the number of flowering points. And each location is one of these different “types”. From the above swarm plot, we can get an idea about the probable number of new flowers at a location for a given day based on the type of vine it is. For example, if the vine has between 1 to 3 points, then on most flowering days it should produce only 1 flower.
How many days does a particular type of vine flower?
By the time I got around to consistently pollinating the flowers, some vines were already flowering, while others started in the middle. As seen above the most number of days a vine blossomed was 13 days but this number should be more because the vine was already flowering. Also, these 13 days do not necessarily indicate 13 consecutive days.
How many vines are flowering on a particular day?
I think its fair to assume that the above curve should be symmetric about the peak. That is to say that there should be an almost equal number of days before the peak, as there are after. My data collection for last year started sometime near the peak and hence it appears to decline steadily. If you consider the peak day to be 16th April and the end of the peak as 28th April, we have 12 days. So across the entire season, we can assume about 24-25 days. And the number of flowering locations appear to be correlated with the number of new flowers, as seen below.
Also, we can observe that fewer of the top-performing locations are responsible for most of the new flowers as shown in the Pareto chart below.
As seen above, the top 3 locations contribute about 50% of the new flowers. There were a total of over 20 vines. So in a large plantation, a good pollinator can be assigned to pollinate the top performing locations for that day. The challenge then is to identify the top performing locations in an automated way perhaps.
Conclusion
So from the above visualizations, we know that the peak days and the top flowering locations are important. If we start populating the data (automatically) we could compute the best route for a pollinator (human) to go about his shift such that he can be assigned to pollinate the top 20-40% of the vines on each day which should carry the maximum 80% of the new flowers. That is a reduction of 60%-80% in the shift duration.
I think there is potential for creating an app based solution which can implement this sort of thing and also identify the skill level of the pollinators. Since Vanilla is a highly priced crop, I believe one would be more open to such a data driven optimisation.
Of course, this could eventually be carried out by pollinating drones for which the optimized paths would be an important consideration in cost-effectiveness and ROI. These pollinating drones can then be adapted to carry out other plantation activities, one small step at a time. At least if it’s purchase by the farmer has been justified by the immediate ROI of a crop like Vanilla, the farming community could see and eventual shift into much more intelligent farming practices which could promote a sustainable and secure future!
Check out this Vlog where I have tried to document my daily process. Since these videos were shot impromptu using Instagram stories, uploading them to Youtube has resulted in a quality loss. Nonetheless you can follow my personal account @mpappanna on Instagram to view a high video quality documentation of plantation life across several days 🙂
