There isn't enough people growing vanilla
in the world.
In between us and the farmer, are a lot of
middlemen that are driving the price of everything
up.
Our company cares about people; the farmer
doesn't get very much money, and i pay really
high prices.
If i can pay more to the farmer, the farmer
gives me a better price, and we get rid of
that middleman, everybody wins.
I just want to find the people that want to
grow it.
We just got here last night after about 19
hours of flight time, 24 hour day, and the
first place we went was to M's farm.
How big is this farm?
A half acre.
And How many beans will you get in kilos?
For one thousand plants, we can get 500kg
of dry vanilla.
For one tree, we'll get atleast three bunches
of flowers.
Per bunch, we can get 10-20 flowers.
One bean per flower?
One vanilla bean per flower.
It's not easy to grow this plant.
Orchids don't like heat, but they like high
humidity, they like a little bit of heat,
and then they like a cool night.
Because we don't have the pollen beetle, every
flower needs manual pollination.
A flower will appear after three or four years.
When you go for three years without any flowers,
did you get discouraged?
For three years, I gave up.
It was too complicated.
After four years, the first flower came out.
After that, atleast 50-60 flowers came out
every day.
Can you tell which one is going to have flowers
right now?
There's no sign.
You come out in the morning there's flowers
one day?
Yes.
How many days will the flowers bloom?
You get one chance for one flower.
Pollinate immediately.
It takes eight months from the pollination
process to harvest.
After harvest, we need another month until
the drying process.
Everyday, we need to rinse the beans.
And dry them under direct sunlight for two
hours.
Just the beans?
Everyday.
Everyday, for one month.
Get to 23% or 24%?
Yes, 23% moisture.
And then, then you have a process after that
where you lay out the beans, they're now fully
developed, they look like vanilla beans now,
now you have to decide which is grade A, which
is grade B. Yes.
This is grade A vanilla.
Dried vanilla beans.
So 18cm-20cm is grade A. That's the best.
The best.
So you don't throw any of the beans away,
everything gets graded and the extraction
grade is usually gonna be the B's and C's
and the cuts right?
The boxy splits.
Yes.
These are for extracts; grade B or C. So i
have to ask you, how many, if you know, do
you get a lot of grade A?
70% of our vanilla is grade A. Wow.
Because when we do the pollination process,
we pick which beans to manually pollinate.
So did you just finish then, the process for
last years crop?
Is it all done?
It's already been sold?
There isn't anything left, so you're looking
forward to the flowers now.
It's time.
Everything here has got to be halal; they
don't use alcohol for any processes.
I just use vegetable glycerin and vanilla
beans for vanilla syrup.
Yeah and it smells really good, it just lacks
that aromatic alcohol, that lift that you
get from alcohol but when you smell it, you
can still smell the vanilla, you can still
smell the vanillin coming out.
I would still, as a flavor chemist, I would
still call this extract, it just doesn't have
the alcohol in it.
And it tastes really good, yeah.
Sorry, can't try it.
That's good.
Do you plan to expand?
Of course, of course.
Yes.
Yeah, you want to.
What is, what's stopping you from growing
more right now?
I don't have capital.
No support from government.
The government don't know what is vanilla.
Local people also don't know about vanilla.
It's a good crop.
Better than growing rice or sugar cane.
Yeah.
This is a really good thing for the Malaysian
farmers, or Cambodian farmers, or Vietnamese
farmers to start looking at, because this
is a good growing environment for vanilla
and yet there's not a lot of it going on.
In the world there's such a demand for vanilla,
so if we can get more farmers like M in other
countries like Cambodia, and Vietnam, and
Malaysia, this whole region is ready and ripe
for growing vanilla.
So, hopefully we bring that awareness to the
rest of the world.
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