5 Surprising Ways America’s Foods Are Farmed | Big Business Marathon | Insider Business

From Colombian farmers protecting the world’s bananas from a lethal fungus, to orange producers in Florida, we met farmers around the world using clever techniques to protect America’s favorite foods and drinks from disease and climate change.

0:00 Intro
0:25 Mezcal
15:32 Bananas
29:06 Limes
36:05 Oranges and Orange Juice
48:05 Oysters

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From Farmers protecting the world’s bananas from a lethal fungus to the company processing millions of limes using orange trees we travel the globe to learn about the innovative ways farmers are keeping our food species alive our first stop is Mexico where one mcal making family grows its Agave from seeds to protect against

Diseases while mcal and Tequila are both made from Agave plants mcal actually predates tequila and has a distinct Smoky flavor mcal gets its name from the Aztec word macali meaning Agave roasted in the oven but it’s nicknamed The Elixir of the Gods because as the legend goes in pre-

Colombian Mexico a lightning bolt hit in agave plant creating mascull for most of Mull’s history it was a drink of the lower class G’s family has made mcal in the town of Santa Katarina Minas since 1898 but unlike her ancestors she grows her Agave or M as it’s known locally from

Seeds while other companies may prefer root cuting to speed up the process uses this slower method so the Agave can stand up better to diseases after anywhere from 7 to 35 years the Agave is ready to be harvested all by Hand first they remove the leaves then they slice off the thorns on the tip inside of each Leaf because if those Thorns accidentally get under your skin graci’s brother says they can migrate which hurts a lot opponents the chemicals G leaves excrete can also be Dangerous but Edgar says the opponents don’t bother [Laughter] him what’s left is the Agave heart called the the p and it takes a ton of effort to unearth it penos can weigh hundreds of pounds so workers break them up to make it easier to carry then haul them onto an awaiting truck

Bed but it’s still weeks away from becoming mcal remember that Earth and oven while the Agave Hearts first have to get cooked building the oven is an art form passed down for Generations workers Place stones on top of firewood the rocks are exposed to a

2,000 Dee fire for up to 9 hours so they get red hot they load the Agave hearts on top big ones first and small ones to follow they kick and shove each paa into place next they shovel more fiber waste on top then two men toss a canvas over the whole thing and

Finally a layer of soil finishes up the oven trapping the heat inside a cross is placed on top to bless the batch what’s inside the oven smolders slowly giving mcal its distinct Smoky flavor for the next step we head to another Distillery called mes an hour East in San Bazar

Guava here dongyo has been making mcal for 40 years today his business pumps out 6,000 lers a year he and his team move the cooked Agave hearts into this Molino or grinder to crush the Agave a horse pulls the stone which weighs a whopping 1,000 lb Dango’s team uses pitchforks to move the crush aave fibers into fermentation tanks back at graas they add water to dissolve the sugar naturally occurring yeast gets to work eating the sugar and converting it into alcohol after it ferments for nearly a week Edgar comes in to check on It he first listens to make sure there’s no sound of escaping CO2 bubbles coming from the vat which could sound something like this then he submerges his tester tube when it’s ready to be distilled workers rake the fibers into the Stills and add more water from each Barrel they get about

100 L of Mescal the distilling area is known as the pelan as the Agave fibers heat up the alcohol Vapor Rises it travels through this tube condenses and drops into an awaiting jug they’ll distill it a second time to get four jugs the first is called the head and its alcohol

Content is really high the next jug is known as the body and has a little less alcohol the third is the tail with even less and finally the last jug is an acidic residue called andishe used to clean the floors gella’s team fills 8,000 bottles a year she sells her brand ra minetto

Within Mexico and exports to the US and Europe but it wasn’t until the 2010s that mcal began seeing interest outside Waka it popped up in try bars in the US and Beyond in response Mexico’s mol production jumped 400% in the six years leading up to 2020 by then the US overtook Mexico as

The biggest market for mcol was once a poorman’s drink had reached Global Fame to standardize and regulate the growing industry the Mexican Government got involved it started in 1994 when the government established a denom for mcal kind of like how champagne can only come from a specific region in France it was

To protect the traditional process of making mcol and the place where it’s made in 1997 the government appointed an organization now called comcom to oversee and enforce the rules for certification rules like mcal had to be made from 100% agave in only these nine states and it had to have a certain

Amount of alcohol by volume and methanol the do seems like a great idea to guarantee quality standards across Mexico and key production inside the country and at first even mcal producers advocated for it those new regulations eventually came with a catch today to get certified producers now have to have time and a

Lot of money Mexican lawyer Blanca Salvador says certification can cost anywhere from $375 to $2,500 which is a lot for a small Mescal letto like Don Goyo and the cost don’t stop there producers have to pay to get their mescall lab tested and buy all the required equipment and the whole certification

Process can take over a year for years going through comcom was the only way to get a certification in 2020 claims of corruption came to light and the Mexican Government finded the organization nearly $50,000 for deceptive and abusive practices like prioritizing big mull companies over small

Ones but now producers fear the do rules are putting Traditions at risk for one it’s really hard to get a consistent alcohol and methanol content in traditional distilling so a few large scale producers have turned to more modern equipment like steel Stills to guarantee alcohol and methanol another concern changing name

Standards for Agave despite generations of indigenous groups using native words for the plant when comam told graciella to drop the ancestral name of quiche on her labels for Mexicano it was her last straw so in 2021 she and her family decided to stop certifying their brand even though their distillation process didn’t change

Choosing family tradition over regulation gella labeled everything distilled agave and other distilleries followed suit but there’s another problem all that demand has drawn interest from International companies it’s created more competition on top of an already tough certification process of these popular brands none are Mexican owned a French company

Owns delmag a British company owns casamigos and a New York based company funded El silencio mcal even celebrities like George Clooney Adam Lavine and the stars of Breaking Bad have gotten in on the market because of the do’s protection American companies can’t make mcol in

The US but they are allowed to buy loads of it for Mexican producers repackage and resell it for a lot more than what they paid this system has left traditional producers even certified ones like dong Goyo with a dwindling piece of the blooming Global Industry so he sells his mcal in labeless plastic bottles to a middleman Dongo earns $15 to $40 per bottle Kasa Cortez one of the brands that eventually buys D goo’s mcal resells it for $ 38 to $100 a bottle but these ancestral Mescal haven’t given up hope in their

Craft nowadays the government has added more certifying agencies to lighten the load of comcom but Blanca thinks it should do more to help producers bottle their own mcol and streamline the certification Process on graciella’s side she believes the key lies in respecting the agave plant itself Mcos also hope to keep putting tradition First a tradition you can see here before taking a sip of a new bottle Dango pours a bit out thanking the land for its ancient gift of Mescal next we visit a farm in Colombia to learn how the protecting the world’s bananas from a lethal Fungus the world’s most popular banana may be on the verge of Extinction similar to humans bananas are also facing a pandemic 99% of bananas exported to developed countries are just one group called The Cavendish and the Cavendish is vulnerable to Tropical race 4 or Panama disease the fungus that’s

Now ravaging Banana Farms across the globe so now you can compare this is tropical race for in a having this banana then the plant looks very healthy one scientist recently developed a line of Cavendish that is resistant to TR4 but it was genetically modified in Europe the GMS are under regulation so

We cannot use it so scientists like Fernando had to start from scratch to find a solution and they’re working against the clock because if TR4 is not stopped it would wipe out cab and it’s already happening globally we’re facing the collapse of a25 billion Cavendish industry so how

Did we get here can we save one of the world’s most consumed fruits before it’s too late you probably know the Cavendish banana you can find this type of banana in every supermarket around the world they’re so popular because they’re yummy they look nice and they ripen as they

Transport it’s high yielding so it’s got quite a thick skin and so travels well and tastes pretty good comes in its own package but there’s a problem they are sterile they don’t have seeds No Seeds means Cavendish bananas are clones of each other so the only way to propagate

Them is in vitro or by taking new growths called suckers from the base of an older plant but since they’re all genetic copies Cavendish are really vulnerable to disease the domino effect if you have everything wrong with just one clone one disease can kill everything plant by plant that’s exactly

What’s happening with TR4 one of the deadliest plant diseases out there the fungus doesn’t spread to humans but it does eventually kill the banana plant so no more fruit grows scientists guess the fungus probably started somewhere in Southeast Asia in the ’90s and quickly spread across the globe then in 2019 it

Hit Latin America combined with the Caribbean that area grows 75% of the world’s bananas to make sure the fungus doesn’t spread Farms across Colombia have implemented biocurity measures evanor 2 was one of the first farms in the country to detect TR4 workers wash down and disinfect the

Underside of any car that comes in just in case there’s infected soil hiding in the treads Antonio’s team built cement paths throughout the farm so on their way to harvest workers aren’t walking on open Soil once they’ve reached the area ready to be harvested workers walk through a sanitizing foot bath made of ammonium out in the field workers measure the banana fingers to make sure they’re ready to harvest they’re usually ready about 12 to 13 weeks after the fruit stem shows

Up one worker cuts down a 65 lb bu bundle while the other catches it and carries it to the cable way that cable we system brings all those banana bunches to the packaging plant first workers sanitize the bunches with chlorine then they check the bananas for quality and any signs of ferium

Damage they cut off and throw bush into a huge tank that bath not only preserves the bananas but washes off any of the latex that naturally occurs on the peel the bananas get cut into smaller Bunches of five to seven next Come Those famous stickers workers wrap the banana

Carefully so they don’t bruise that wrapping has holes in it so the bananas can ripen as they travel no more than 4 hours after the bananas are harvested those boxes end up on pallets floated on trucks the bananas are trucked to the nearby Port where they’re moved onto

Ships this shipment is headed to the US with equipment bananas and people moving along this Global Supply Chain it’s easy to see how the fungus could spread if TR4 does sneak into a farm the Colombian government has laid out strict guidelines for containing the fungus that means they found symptoms

Like the yellowing of the leaves spitting of the once tier 4 is identified in a plant you can’t just kill that one plant the fungus goes about 10 10 ft deep into the soil once the pathogen is in the soil is almost impossible to eradicate so you have to

Kill off all the plants in that Area to keep operating the rest of the farm Evan Norte 2 Follow the government’s three Zone plan the injected herbicide kills all the plants in zone a that tarps so Birds won’t land on the fungus and spread it around there are also canals around the zone to keep any

Water away from the infected area in zone B called the buffer zone it finally in zone C plants are allowed to grow but they’re constantly monitored for signs of TR4 Jose estimates biocurity has cost this Farm as much as $5 million since 2019 so they’re pricey but the measures

Are working at keeping the fungus at Bay these biocurity measures have contained the fungus in Colombia and kept it from spreading to Ecuador the largest exporter of bananas in the world but fungus can wipe out an entire fruit variety if not stopped we know because it’s happened before in the early 1900s

A banana called gross Michelle was the most popular but by the 1950s one strain of the Panama disease wiped out the whole production of gross mishell luckily Cavendish was resistant to that first strain so it took over as the banana of choice the problem was banana companies built their entire Supply

Chains around this one Cavendish Variety in 2019 they exported 20 million bananas and supported millions of jobs globally but now the Cavendish is also vulnerable the history repeats itself now with the tropical race for and the Cav cooking bananas like plantains are also at risk for TR4 a risk for food security because

The plantains are staple food in Latin America in Africa and many other countries they are part of our daily diet so yeah the newest race of ferium is scary for both Cavendish and plantains but this time around we have advanced science researchers across the globe are working toward one

Goal this guy actually invented a banana that did just that back in 2019 Dr James Dale announced that his team had successfully injected the DNA from a resistant banana into a cend dish and it worked we found the solution we have a line of Cavendish which appears to be

Completely resistant to TR4 the thing we haven’t done yet is a taste test and that’s because the GM they look smell feel exactly the same as every other banana we’ve only changed one jean but no one would buy his Miracle banana because it was genetically modified in the EU most member countries have

Either partly or fully banned GMOs in the US they’re allowed but feared one argument against GMOs is that these modified plants would quickly spread their genes and kill out biodiversity but with bananas that’s not a problem the jeans don’t move because they are sterile you can grow a GM banana next to

A non Jam banana for 50 years and the Jee will not move from one to the other incredibly frustrating there’s the solution but it’s it’s a scientific solution but not a political solution so scientists had to go back to the drawing board using what they learned from James

To play the non- GMO game Fernando is a breeder for key genene a genetics company in the Netherlands and he thinks the best way to get around GMO regulations is through traditional breeding meaning you take two different types of bananas the Cavendish and one that is resistant and you essentially

Have the mate and their kid is hopefully resistant to Panama disease but still tastes good like Cavendish cross breeding or traditional breeding is something that happens every day in nature so the bees are pollinating the different flowers with other flowers so that’s what we are doing here we are

Acting as bees Fernando has found a few resistant bananas to cross with Cavendish but most of them are not even edible bananas are the bananas that are full of seeds like this ones and to cross those with a Cavendish is hard they are sterile very difficult to

Breath is not impossible so you can try to cross that you need to do it many many many times to get only a few seats for James to make that first GMO banana it took him nearly 10 years since our first field TR for those future bananas that are traditionally bred it’ll take

Just as long it will take lots of years because the life cycle of the banana is quite slow but the longer it takes to traditionally breed a resistant Cavendish the more the disease spreads and the more strains of ferium could be released fernandoo says there’s a bigger picture way to attack this problem

Diversity take tomatoes for example you go to the grocery store and there may be 10 or more different types of tomatoes Cherry Vine beef Roma that’s diversity so if one tomato gets in trouble it won’t be a huge loss Fernando and his colleagues have the same vision for

Bananas we have red ban bananas pink bananas why not try to incorporate that into the market so that you can go to the supermarket and have a complete bench of different options of bananas that you can choose there are hundreds of different banana varieties around the

World a friend of mine collected one up in par that he said if you didn’t know it you think you’d eating a strawberry yeah so amazingly different flavors and diversity would also help Farms but if you have different types of bananas grown together probably one banana will

Be more resistant at the next one so that one can stop the spreading of the disease to the next Plant so why haven’t companies Diversified because it’s too expensive and complicated to change a $25 billion industry built around a monoculture so until a solution is found these biocurity measures will have to be

The short-term fix for keeping the big business of bananas alive back in Mexico we learned how farmers use orange seeds to grow and harvest millions of limes about 45 lime producers are spread across Martinez de Tor Vera Cruz they grow Persian limes the seedless kind Persian limes love the wet climate

Here but in recent years the area has faced increasingly extreme weather so how then do they grow strong enough lime trees even without seeds well believe it or not they start with orange seeds they take a mature orange stock and a Bud from a lime plant and use a grafting technique to combine

Them while it grows workers cut away any leaves that aren’t lime basically convincing this orange plant that it’s a lime one orange root stocks like this are heartier so when it’s mature the fusion lime plant will better stand up to diseases and climate change after about a

Year but the hard work doesn’t stop there in 2014 lime Farms across Mexico saw a huge drop in production because of a plant killing disease called hlb or Citrus Greening insects transmit a type of bacteria that starves the Trees of nutrients causing it to produce less fruit so how did they keep producing

Millions of limes with these insects on the loose well teams here discovered they could control hlb and a disease called wood pocket using mesh netting and insecticide it takes about four years for the tree to bear fruit one tree can produce about 150 lbs of limes per year this picker has been harvesting

Here for 2 years like him most everyone working on the farm is from the state but in The Last 5 Years limes haven’t always looked like this that Cruz Farmers have faced a growing number of floods freezes and high winds in very dry conditions the lime

Skin is too smooth and may turn yellow if conditions are too wet the tree will drown causing the fruits peel to split when it’s really windy branches hit the fruit this extreme weather was part of what caused a lime shortage that began in 2021 driving prices up 300% by January 2022

Still Veta Cruz has been spared the worst of these shifting weather patterns Farmers here hope that grafting will be their trees’s Lifeline if that time does come in the fields workers tug off ripe limes and drop them into these traditional aate bags woven from Agave leaves workers can Harvest about 2 2,000

Limes in a day they load them onto trucks headed to the packaging Facility this machine dumps limes onto the processing line each one gets washed with a detergent disinfectant and hit with a spray of palm wax it’s not just to make the limes look [Laughter] shiny throughout their journey in the factory the limes will get sorted multiple times some stations do it by

Hand others with fancy Tech using those pictures the machine separated them based on their size ones that aren’t the right size will go directly to Mexico’s juicing industry the perfectly sized ones will head on to get exported but first there’s quality control after they pass this final test the

Limes are ready for packaging and shipping the majority of the limes produced in this region end up in the United States demand for limes has been increasing for decades as Latin American and Asian Cuisines became more popular but in 1994 after a new Free Trade Agreement went into effect the

Floodgates for Mexican limes opened now the US is the biggest importer of limes globally doubling the amount it purchased from Mexico in the last 10 years to keep up with demand Mexico increased its production 50% in the same decade workers here say that demand is a double EDG sword on one

Hand but the downside extreme weather is making it hard to keep up the farm can also lean on that grafting technique to help grow trees faster so they can keep up with booming us interest but while they wait for what might come they’ll keep picking away hoping for steady weather and a strong

Harvest next we go to Florida where Farmers have figured out how to keep growing edible oranges while battling a disease called Citrus Greening in 2021 Florida had its worst orange crops since World War II that’s because this insect is waging a war on the state’s valuable citrus trees so

This tree is infected with Citrus Greening it produces small mapen fruit just see the difference this disease can be a tree killer the insect spreads a disease called hlb or Citrus Greening and it’s infected nearly every Citrus Grove in the state less canopy you can see there’s just less foliage on the

Tree you can see through the tree the oranges are still edible the real problem is that Citrus Greening has slashed Florida’s production by 78% it’s cost the state nearly 8 billion and driven many Growers out of the industry you should go back in your mind

15 years to to what this place once was as a collection of varieties this was full of beautiful green trees we’ve had freezes hurricanes but Citrus Greening has definitely been the most challenging issue we faced in my career this group of scientists is racing to find a cure armed with some

Unique weapons this is about the size that we’re going to put on most new trees now the researchers have helped Growers produce oranges on the infected trees but they haven’t found a long-term solution yet will have to live with the infected trees and just make the most

Out of them so can they keep this disease at Bay before it wipes out the state’s orange industry we head to Florida to find out Larry’s a fifth generation farmer in Fort me Florida we’ve been growing citrus in my family since the 1850s when I first started in the industry Citrus

Occupied over 900,000 acres in the State of Florida in fact some years we had too much fruit and market prices were depressed just 15 years ago his family packed a million orange cartons a year mostly Valencia oranges the big sweet juicy kind you planted a Grove expecting that to last for multiple Generations

The first case of citrus scening was reported in China back in 1919 it quickly spread across the continent devastating Citrus Groves in India and Saudi Arabia as well no one knows exactly how the Asian citrus CID made it to Florida but in 1998 it showed up on

An orange jasmine plant in a backyard in Palm Beach County and it quickly spread throughout the state on Infected root stocks but it would take another 7 years before Florida’s orange tree showed signs of Greening it spreads throughout the state before you even know it’s present and in 2005 Larry found his

First infected tree it was a real Challenge and an eye opening for us we knew what a threat it could be to our operation and we were fearful there were more infected trees that just had not been detected at first Larry tried removing all the sick trees but the

Insect moved faster soon infecting too many to control when a CID munches on a citrus tree it leaves behind the bacteria that causes Greening here in the vascular tissue the bacteria replicates and blocks this important Highway for moving nutrients underground the root systems thin and die out above ground you notice

The yellow pattern the dark green spot if you can see me through the canopy of this tree that means this tree is really really sick while the trees do keep bearing oranges for a few years the fruit essentially never ripens you see it’s small in size it remains green and

When I cut this fruit you see an odd shape you can still eat the fruit it’s just not as sweet the orange juice from this fruit uh has lower sugar content or bricks than normal fruit but there’s nothing wrong with the juice it’s awful and 40% of those

Oranges fall off the tree sooner than usual the bacteria is actually starving and kills the tree over time today researchers estimate 90% of all orange trees in the state have the bacteria no longer do you see citrus trees abundant in the landscape Larry has kept his trees alive and producing for 15 years

Using a combination of Horticultural techniques developed by scientists at the University of Florida some of our work that is going on right now is finding ways to keep those trees that do have the disease still producing fruit that are usable you guys want to see what some pids look like yes all right

So they’re very small oh there’s an escapee actually they’re small they kind of jump around a little bit so we use this thing called a an aspirator or the more fun term we use with children is pter we just suck them up it’s basically a little vacuum in my hand here Lauren

Deep and Brock can study the Sid’s movement to learn what might keep them off a citrus treat using the aspirator is actually a really efficient way to collect cids she’s figured out a few things that detract cids first this pink clay it’s sprayed on the trees to hide

The leaves from the insect which uses light wavelengths to see one study showed the clay was more effective than insecticides the second thing Lauren is researching is these 8ft wide sheets of plastic called reflective mulch the idea is that it should make it where the Sid

Can’t find the host plant it could be that it blinds them or causes a visual deterrent how’s it work uh somewhat we do get SIDS we do get them but we do get them at a reduced rate a few years ago Farmers discovered that putting plastic bags around baby trees

Could help them grow stronger before infection Lauren’s now studying how effective these individual protective covers or ipcs actually can be so this is IPC mesh and as you can see there’s little holes in it you can see my hand very clearly wind Sun rain it all gets

Through here the goal is to really keep that Asian citrus CID off the tree and then if you look underneath this is our irrigation the baby trees will grow in the ipcs for 2 years so you can see the trees aren’t perfect we’re still going

To have some stuff on them we do have some pest issues in here but you know they look really good compared to what’s in the open field and this will actually give our trees a Fighting Chance once they’re out in the environment and they could potentially get infected with Seas

Scientist trip G vashish thinks the key is in the soil we have been learning that the trees need uh these nutrients to fight infection the citrus trees because of this disease have very small roots or fewer Roots so they are not very efficient in picking up the

Nutrients it’s like a job of 10 people needs to be done by one person same with the roots she figured out that giving smaller doses of fertilizer and water more frequently helps the sick Roots absorb nutrients better and it’s similar like us six small meals each day rather

Than three big meals are better same is with the fertilizer and irrigation smaller doses are better than big does Larry uses fertilizer custom designed for his trees he’s also planting more young ones one of our strategies for dealing with Greening is to plant uh The Groves at higher

Densities we’re planting 300 trees per acre compared to 140 to 150 trees per acre before we were dealing with the disease so if he knows all the trees will get infected with more planted hopefully some Will Survive Growers have also tried releasing Predator wasps and spraying insecticides while there’s no Silver

Bullet in combination these short-term Solutions have sort of worked you can slow down the decline we’ve been battling Citrus Greening for 15 years and while the industry is not thriving we’re definitely surviving but the problem is all these approaches tack on an extra 600 $ per acre onto production

Costs for Growers our revenues are down by more than half on an individual growth basis Growers are losing money and many couldn’t swallow the losses by early 2022 half of Florida’s orange growers had left the industry so while he waits for a long-term solution Larry’s taking the hit so he can keep

Harvesting the same way his family always has workers quickly pick the oranges and drop them into bags once they’ve got a good batch Pickers dump them into Bag baskets in the Grove workers then truck the oranges to the packing facility just down the road we have eight digital cameras that

Takes a picture of each piece of fruit as it travels through the packing line we use an electronic sorder to divide the crop by color if they’re orange enough the fruit gets cleaned and hit with a layer of natural wax it preserves the fruit uh extends its shelf life

Today because of hlb Larry packs half as many boxes as he did 17 years ago if the oranges are a bit too green Larry knows they’ll be hard to sell on the Fresh side so he sends them to get Juiced at the Florida’s natural plant in Lake

Wales Larry owns the juicing plant along with other local Growers as part of the company’s Cooperative about 90% of the fruit grown in the steak goes to orange juice but just like Growers the factory has been getting fewer oranges so less efficiency in the plant with a lower

Fruit volume the factory had to shut down one of its three processing lines nowadays 60,000 boxes of oranges arriv the plant from Cooperative Farms across central Florida that’s about 30,000 fewer than before hlb within 24 hours of harvesting the we juice the fruit this machine squeezes the juice out of every

Orange we pull out any seeds and we also collect the pulp where we can add that back to whatever degree we want to do that the juice gets pasteurized and then pumped into cartons but remember Greening affects oranges natural sugar content so Florida’s natural has to blend infected oranges with sweeter ones

From different regions or even Seasons it still tastes like orange juice it’s just not quite as sweet today the factory pumps out about a third less than preg Greening they need a home for their fruit where they can get maximum value that hopefully can sustain their operations until a solution to Greening

Is found many scientists believe the long-term solution lies with re-engineering nature either genetically changing the bug itself or naturally breeding citrus trees ultimately a tree that’s resistant or tolerant to the disease will be key that’s the project Fred gitter and his team are working on at the University of Florida they’re

Trying to breed for an hlb resistant orange variety meaning even if the disease shows up the tree won’t get sick to do that he takes two different types of trees maybe one with yummy oranges and one that’s resistant and essentially has the mate and their kid will

Hopefully still taste good but won’t get hlb that’s really the Holy Grail of of citrus scening research but that’s not easy easy finding a resistant orange is like looking for a genetic needle in a hay stack it’s extremely difficult to breed new oranges we know of some kinds

Of trees related to oranges that are resistant and we’re trying to access the genetics of those resistant types by making crosses Fred says it could take more than a decade so it’s long term there’s always an element of serendipity in this but armed with that Miracle resistant tree they could be better

Prepared to tackle future diseases it’s a global interconnected world we live in people and plant diseases move about pretty freely and so there will be another problem another disease come along I believe science will continue to deliver new tools that will make growing citrus easier over time I look forward

To those days I’m sure we’ll have other challenges that we’ll face in time but today Citrus Greening is here to stay wild oyster populations around the world world are plummeting we head to Virginia to see how the ward Oyster Company uses algae tanks to farm 3.5 million oysters every year this is John

Vigata he began his career on the water when he was 13 years old I started putting oysters in cages in 1995 this Aquaculture farm sprawls over 884 Acres the size of over 147 Roman coliseums it includes a hatchery nursery and part of Virginia’s mobjack Bay farming an oyster begins in the Hatchery

Here biologist Chris Smith puts 3,000 adult oysters into a shallow tank called a spawning table then he artificially creates the conditions that cause oysters to spawn we’re controlling the temperature in the tank specifically it’s the all you can eat buffet getting them ready to to spawn when the oysters

Spawn they release their eggs and sperm directly into the water the eggs and sperm are put into tanks where they turn into oyster larv 1 billion oyster babies are produced in these tanks every year they remain there for about 3 weeks feeding on algae and growing shells we

Grow about seven different species of alery uh to create a menu for our oysters and clams it’s amazing to see the algae kind of Bloom and then to watch the oysters and clams grow in our facility it’s very gratifying when the oysters get to be about a/4 in long they

Are placed outside in upweller tanks and it’s a system which allows a large quantity of water to be flown past the oysters giving them a super abundant amount of food after about 2 months of feeding staff check on the size of the oysters we’ll take these oysters here

That are larger and they’ll go in a cage to go overboard and then these oysters here will go back into the system for a further grow out to where they can get to be this size and eventually go in a cage the cages full of oysters are then

Tossed into the mobjack bay we have about 2500 to 3,000 cages contained in all all the cages that we have out in mobjack Bay you probably have somewhere around 30 million oysters that is a lot of oysters if all of them were harvested at once and put into your freezer you

Could eat over 800 oysters every day for 100 years and you would still have leftovers nicely done Farmers monitor the weather closely excessive rainfall can dilute the salt in the water which could kill the oysters and water temperature is also a factor oysters grow rest between 60° F and 80° if you

Go above that it just gets so hot that they will stop growing or slow down significantly if it goes below that they go dormant if all goes well after 6 months the cages are removed from the water and the oysters are brought to a separator this machine sorts them by

Size if they are not big enough to sell they go back in the water oysters can take around 1 to 2 years to go from Hatchery to market after separation Market sized oysters are washed tagged with order information and boxed once the oysters come out of the bay the

Clock starts ticking the team has to harvest the oysters transport them to the shop add ice package them and place them in the cooler within 2 hours to meet FDA guidelines the boxes are put into a refrigerated truck and shipped to Distributors across the US who pay

Around 40 cents per oyster in Virginia wild cut oysters actually sell for Less around 30 cents we probably sell our Market oysters to 10 or 15 different states in the country but our oysters end up everywhere and occasionally for local orders John delivers himself and then you have the tag here all right

Thank you very much okay all right customers say that they’re fresh they’re delicious since 1996 they’ve gone from farming 100,000 oysters per year to 3.5 million in 2019 besides selling oysters to eat the company also sells around 70 million baby oysters each year to Farmers up and down the East

Coast aquaculture is one of the fastest growing food production sectors in the world while the amount of seafood caught in the wild has not increased by much since the 1980s demand is up nearly 150% aquaculture is filling the Gap it is predicted that by 2030 60% of the fish available for human consumption

Will come from aquaculture Virginia has made a big bet and doubled down on farming oysters today the state is the largest oyster producer on the East Coast but the pandemic has hurt business like no natural disaster that we’ve ever had oysters market value and restaurant orders plummeted so we’re getting hit

Both with reduced orders and a reduced price for the product that we do sell and on top of that after a stellar 2019 John stocked the the bay hoping for an abundant future we have a record amount of product in the water and our sales are off almost 50% while 20120 was a

Roller coaster ride for Ward Oyster Company sales have finally started to pick up John is optimistic about the Future No Matter What Happens he plans to be on the water I love being out on the water my office is on the water you can’t get it much better than that and

Salt water is in my veins M