This initiative marks a vital shift from commercial monocultures to genetic resilience, which is essential for the industry's survival in a changing climate. It effectively bridges the gap between botanical research and global agricultural sustainability.
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The 2026 Mango Conference !
Added:testing. Oh, testing. Hey, good morning everyone. We're going to get started in about 5 10 minutes. We're just 5 10 minutes. Bruce, you can keep talking.
We're just waiting for uh audio visual to get hooked up. So, grab a coffee. We got 5 10 minutes to start.
Testing. Testing. All right.
I'm not a rock star. I don't need that.
Uh, everyone, if you can have your seats, we're going to get started.
Sorry, we're a little delayed. You know, this is South Florida. 9 really means like 9:15, 9:30. So, we're on time here.
And by the way, this is going to be live stream, so be careful what you say. It's going to be picked up by uh people worldwide. So, the National Mango Board was so kind to blast this to their whole list serve. So, there's going to be people in Guatemala, people in Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Brazil watching this feed. So, um first of all, I wanted to thank you all for being here. My name is Nick Bernal. I'm going to be moderating today's fun events. Um my company's called Seasons Farm Fresh, and I've been working very intimately with Fairchild Tropical Botanical Gardens over the last couple years. I saw the need for this event because Fairchild did put on this event for some years leading up to the pandemic and then as you know the world kind of reset the event was lost and I came to Bruce and Nette and said hey it would be great for people in the industry growers nursery people we have people from the university we have people from USDA people from the mango board to get all in a room and just talk about what's going on in the industry especially given what's going to be happening the next two days here at Fairchild the world famous world best national uh mango festival So the goal here is kind of to foster a sense of collaboration between government agencies like the National Mango Board and the USDA, universities like University of Florida, nonprofits like Fairchild Tropical Botanical Gardens, and a lot of you guys who are importers, exporters, growers, nursery people to see what we can do to really continue pushing mango as the most popular fruit in the world, which it is here in the United States. Um, with that being said, I'd like to invite the director of Fairchild, Dr. Carl Lewis, to say a few words.
>> All right. Thank you so much, Nick. Um, and good morning, everybody. I'm so glad that you're here today. Thank you for joining us. Um, hello to our online audience. I understand we have some people joining us from Hawaii where it is 3:00 in the morning. So, welcome. And it's going to be a lively, lively event.
So, I'm glad you're here. Um, we're so proud to be able to host this here at the garden. Just want to give a few quick thank yous. Um, at first I want to start by thanking the National Mango Board for sponsoring this event. So, a big round of applause for the Mango Board.
Um, we're just so proud to be aligned with the Mango Board and as much as Fairchild Garden, our mango program, our public event can align with national mango priorities. Um, our namesake Dr. David Fairchild would be very proud. So, thank you for for doing this. Um, huge thanks to Nick Bernell, who you just met. Um, I'm sure you already know Nick.
If you get one phone call from Nick, you get a thousand. Um he has been setting this thing up for uh starting last year.
Uh we had the first the first sort of uh um uh re refresh of this event and then this is our second year and Nick has just had uh so much put so much energy into this so much enthusiasm. So big round of applause for Nick Bernell.
And so why do we have this event? Why do we, you know, historically, why do we have this event? Why do we have a mango collection? Why do we have a mango festival? Uh, this all goes back to the incredible vision, the creativity, the energy, the enthusiasm uh of Dr. Richard Campbell. So, Dr. Richard Campbell is really the the genesis. his his uh his time as curator of tropical fruit saw the birth of of everything mango here at Fairchild to what we have here today. So, I don't know if he's still in the room. Dr. There he is. Dr. Campbell, thank you so so much.
None of this would be here without you.
So, you get all the all the credit and all the blame. And don't and please don't deflect the the credit as you as you usually do. Um, so before I turn the microphone back to Nick, I want to invite the president of the board of trustees, Bruce Greer, to uh to welcome you all. So, thank you.
>> Thank you, Carl.
I just would like to thank you all also for being here, but I'd like to put it in a context that I think is very important for us. when we drive down to South Dade now where we used to see mango farms and avocado farms and farmers and I consider myself a farmer.
Um now you see multif family housing and to be honest and I I think we have some multif family housing developers as supporters for Fairchild. So they have to be supporters regardless of what they do I hope. But we have a duty to rescue this country from overdevelopment.
That's not a popular thing to say in Miami, but something that Fairchild really, really has to do. We have, and just to show you the gravity of what can happen, we have that small grove that you're all aware of. I think a lot of you were there yesterday, 20 acres, which has great potential to be even a better grove. But 20 acres, as Dr. Crane was saying uh last year we the acorage in mangoes went way down and now it's coming back up. But those 20 acres are basically an island uh that needs to be thought through and really thoughtfully producing from your help. Why do I say that? Where where's the enthusiasm for it? So we just started this year and you all are probably familiar with it. Um the mango club.
Mango Club is where we're going to send boxes of fresh mangoes of the best varieties. We have about 400 cultivars.
We're going to send them out to our members and the public and they can subscribe to it for a season. Let me tell you how much how important what you're doing is and how the mango forum is so important. The mango board is so important. In I think in the first 11 hours that we opened the mango club, we sold 900 boxes of mangoes retail to our members and the public. We have there's a crying need here to know what you're doing. And we we all and I put it on you also. You haven't let people really know how special this is. Yes, you're in Whole Foods. Yes, you're in wherever else you're in Walmart. But we haven't made it Tiffany's.
And what you're growing, believe me, for our members is Tiffany's. It's not Whole Foods. And Whole Foods is high-end. So what our goal is for the next few years is to take our Mango Club and to sell thousands and thousands of boxes, but not just the boxes. That's going to help Fairchild. Fairchild runs on donations and on this is earned income. What it's going to do is open people's eyes to what the world of tropical fruit really is and be then they're going to have greater demand for what you're doing and you're going to be at the pinnacle of what life should be. When I was growing up, everybody went to a a mango roadside stand, a luchy roadside stand in Miami.
Those have disappeared. Okay? So now it's really up to us to revive it. The reason I wanted to come here and say a few words this morning is it's really not up to me. Fairchild's going to do everything it can do. It's up to you.
It's up to you to push forward with this with your marketing, with your production, and with your excitement.
Not just ship mangoes in, but create the excitement. So, thanks for coming today.
I want to be part of the excitement that you all are going to generate because this is going to change everything in Miami. It's going to change a little bit back to where we were because now we have so many multif family housing, but it's also going to push it beyond where it ever was because every one of these people that are in a small apartment, they want those mangoes. They want those mangoes and especially they want them from the countries that from where they came. So, it's very important that you came to the farm and you saw what's possible because it's not with all due respect to Richard, it's not just champagne mangoes, okay? There's a world of mangoes out there that have got our mang get get our uh our members excited.
So, thank you. I'm looking forward to being your partner and we really are looking forward to hosting you again and again. Best regards to all.
>> Thank you, Bruce. Great words as always.
He's a hell of a fundraiser. Um just quick before we get into Dr. Ukraine's wonderful talk. I'd like to introduce you guys to Ramonoa, who's the president of the National Mango Board. For those of you who don't know what the National Mango Board is, is one of, I believe, 16 boards, 21, sorry, 21 boards that's under the USDA with the focus of promoting mangoes regardless of country of origin, regardless of variety to the US market. Uh, they collect a duty from every box that's sold domestically and internationally. So they have a I don't want to call it a slush fund but they have a robust budget which they use aggressively in retail marketing and helping growers doing investigation. Um we have people from a few members four or five of them from the mango board here. So Rammon you want to give a few words they are sponsoring the event. So, >> thank you, Nate. Appreciate it. And just uh wanted it to take a couple couple a few seconds just to um be grateful and and thankful for being here today and then being able to support and sponsor this event. Uh what a great day it is to interact with you as mango growers and mango industry members. Um um all we do in research and promotion, it's just to improve mango consumption. By the way, special recognition to one of our board members here, Luis Cron, uh, National Mango Board member. And, um, online, I believe we have our um, uh, chairman of the board, Mr. Rod Chamberlain, who is a domestic producer in California. And we also, I believe, since you mentioned it, some people in Hawaii, I hope uh, our other board member, um, Martin in Hawaii, is uh, watching this uh, live stream. So very briefly um our just wanted to show our gratitude to for allow us thank you neat for doing this and for allow us to support and sponsor this event. I don't know about you guys but I'm very much looking forward to learn a lot today and more importantly tomorrow at the festival to eat a lot of mangoes. Thank you. Thank you and I hope this is it turns out to be a great uh uh networking and learning event. Thank you.
Thank you, Rammon. Uh, without any further ado, I'd like to bring up Dr. Crane, who's going to be presenting the Florida Mango Industry and Mango Cold Tolerance Protection Information.
Thanks very much. First, I want to thank the Mango Board and Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden and the organizing committee for inviting me to come and speak today. I appreciate it.
So, I'm going to talk a little bit about the Florida mango industry. Um, I'll start out with some similar uh information from uh last year, but we're going to move into some other areas as well.
So, I showed this last year. Uh, this is the acreage of commercial mango production. And you'll see a question mark uh after the 2022 and that's because of the recent freezing events that we had. So hard to tell. Uh and you'll see the top counties in um over there on the map in Florida with mangoes. And again, some question marks because we have had significant freezing events this past winter. Uh so this is definitely going to change somewhat.
And of course the three major production areas, Homestead, West Palm Beach, and Pine Island. But there has been significant acreage planted in central Florida. Again, that that's certainly in flux because of the weather last year earlier this year.
Just a little bit about some of the basic environmental parameters that relate to what I'm going to talk about.
So, you know, optimum growing temperatures for mangoes, freeze damage for mature trees, you're looking at somewhere between 24 25 degrees. younger trees, it's even less, you know, 30 degrees, 28 degrees, things like that.
So, as you know, freeze damage depends on what type of freeze it is. Is it a windy freeze or an advective freeze or is it a radiation freeze? Also, how many times does it freeze? How frequently does it freeze? Um, how close together are the these number of freezing events and how cold does it get and how long does it stay that cold? So there's a lot of different uh parameters that play into that. And even temperatures in the 40s can affect the bloom and fruit set.
And so that's another consideration even if we don't have freezing weather.
So some of the factors that have enhanced and changed uh the industry and one factor that may decrease the expansion potential of the industry. I'm not I'm not a uh negative person, but there has to be some concern with this recent weather event that we weather events that we had this earlier this year and uh New Year's Eve in 2025.
So, some of the enhancements is this great demand for a diversity of superior aromatic and flavored mangoes, the promotion of mango consumption. You're looking at the National Mango Board, Florida Department of A, festivals, nurseries, individuals in the industry.
There's been a lot of promotion uh for mangoes uh mango diversity and mango production in Florida. And then also the marketing strategies, the direct marketing, the online sales is is just incredible. And then also if we were talking about last year, you the climate change which has enabled this expansion of the industry into South Central Florida. And again I have a question mark. Last year I didn't have a question mark there. This year I have a question mark just because of what has happened.
But I'll give you a little example. From about 1940 to about 1957, Central Florida had a warm period about 17 years with no significant freeze events. And then in the winter uh December of of 1957 and January of 1958, there were four freezes.
And so at one time we had about 600 acres of lyche at that time. And it went from 600 acres to 100 acres in Miami date county after those four events. So there are long stretches of relatively warm weather. So my hope is that uh we enter another stretch and a long stretch.
And again, part of the reason why uh we see such a surge in mango uh consumption and ma and interest in mangoes is that the US population is is diverse and diversifying and continuing to diversify. And that's just what this is supposed to illustrate because there's many people in the world that know mangoes and are used to mangoes. And so that's to our benefit.
And also mango consumption, it continues to increase the per capita consumption in the US which is another benefit.
and then taking advantage. So advantages to locally grown mangoes, I'm talking specifically about Florida now, is this superior freshness and quality. The wonderful diversity of varieties, the relatively long season that we don't have quarantine treatments, so we don't have to hot water treat, we don't have to irdiate our fruit. Uh and then also it supports local agriculture and family farms, family nurseries, supports the local industries, the egg industry.
And these are just some examples of, you know, older varieties. Uh, Florida has a huge history in selecting and growing a diversity of varieties and some old varieties that are being marketed actively now. And this is just an example. Uh and then of course the new varieties and and Gary Zilla is here today and his efforts over 30 years of developing and selecting superior new varieties has really put a huge amount of enthusiasm into the industry and there are others that have introduced varieties as well. Richard Campbell others that have also made selections.
Maurice Kong has brought in varieties.
So this influx of new varieties uh and developed varieties has has been a great boom for our industry.
So the climate issue so over the past 100 years and especially the past 40 years if you look at the data the average nighttime temperatures in Florida have significantly increased.
It's not the daytime temperatures, it's the nighttime temperatures that have significantly increased.
Um, and then of course until this was up until December of 25, January, February 26, um, the number and frequency of freeze events had declined when you look at the data.
Uh, and especially over the past 10 20 years, there's been an increase, however, in extreme weather events. So events that were sort of unexpected that would come out. And so this recent uh influx of cold weather December and February is a testament to this fact that all of a sudden out of not out of middle of nowhere but all of a sudden we get these freezing events which were somewhat unexpected. And so that's really becoming more common. Not the freezing events necessarily. I'm talking about all weather, extreme weather events, whether it's a hurricane, excessive rainfall, flooding, or cold weather.
This is just from the recent as I and I'm sorry to be harping on this, but this is just I went up and looked at some of the weather data and it's a little fuzzy because it it depends on where you're located whether you had freeze or not, right? Even if you're within, you know, Bvard County, in one part of the Bvard County, you didn't have a freeze. Other parts you had a freeze. But this is just to illustrate the number of freeze events in these counties. And this is just a low estimate of how many times it froze.
And this is just more showing you the Southeast Regional Climate Data Center, some of their data. Um, and you can see through that map there, the color-coded map, how cold it got. Uh, the one day minimum temperature, this was uh the January 1st um anyway that that uh cold weather and you'll see it the cold really dipped down into the state from that. And so we had strong winds. For instance, in January 18th, we had strong winds across central Florida. We had rapid temperature drops of 20 degrees or more. And I think this advective freeze or windy freeze, that's the one that really caused a lot of damage. You irrigation, especially micro irrigation, does not work to protect the trees during an advective freeze if it's a strong one. If it's not too strong, you might get away with it. But with a very strong one, it's evaporative cooling.
And it's better not to turn on the irrigation system because then you really get evaporative cooling. So it's it's sort of a no- wind situation.
And this is just uh this is some data from uh a group at at UF and it's just talking about this freezing events from January 26th to February 4th. And you can see how it moved down the state. uh these cold temperatures and we're all familiar unfortunately with what freeze damage looks like whether it's just leaf damage or whether ends up you know killing up to 4 in wood or killing small trees.
So really when you go back and you look at what is the documentation uh and information on the freeze tolerance I get that question I've gotten it in the past you know are there any freeze tolerant or cold tolerant mango trees there is very very little in the literature documented evidence of diff big differences in cold tolerance among mango cultivars and as I mentioned before the cold tolerance of a of a plant depends upon you know the site selection Where did you locate your plants? Are you at the south south uh east side of a lake like Lake Okachchobee? Um which is warmer than let's say you're out in the middle of nowhere. Um and also the size of the tree. Larger trees in general are can take more cold than smaller trees because of their volume, fact that they're covering more land area, the fact that there's more heat being trapped in the large canopy than a small tree. Also, did the trees undergo previous stress? Was there flooding stress, drought stress, something like that plays into it? And then I already mentioned how cold does it get? What is the duration of that cold? How frequently does it get cold? And then of course, what plant stage is the tree when you get cold? So, a freezing event during bloom is going to be much more detrimental than if the tree is is quiescent or dormant. And so that's also important. And then of course the genetics of the trees. Um, and your pract cultural practices. Did you mistakenly apply an excessive amount of nitrogen going into the fall and now your trees have been flushing all winter? Much more susceptible to cold and freeze damage than if you had let the tree go dormant without that excessive vegetative growth. And then on the right, I'm just showing you some of the sources that I found of any observational information um on cold tolerance of mangoes that have been documented. And I and I didn't just look at Florida. I just didn't find anything else really uh that was done here or other places.
And this is just a summary of what these reports gave. Um, and they were talking about, you know, most to least cold damage after 10 hours at 21 to 28 degrees. And you can see the list there.
Kit was more uh least less damage than Palmer, then Lipins, then Springfelds, then Brooks. Um, and then another highest to lowest freeze tolerance, Kent Sensation on um and then the most rapid freeze recover. Now, these are observations that were made after freezing events. Um and then Lynch he, you know, leaves and bloom of Hayden and Muloba was less damaged than brooks and Saigon after exposure to 29 to 30 degrees for six hours. And then McKeler looked at do mango trees acclimate? In other words, citrus acclimates? So if they are exposed to cold non-freezing temperatures, it sets up their metabolism and their physiology to be more tolerant of even colder temperatures.
and he did not really find any evidence of that. And then uh Miner and Zil, they demonstrated that during the bloom and fruit set period, exposure to temperatures at or below about 45 degrees, especially 40, reduced fruit set. And that's because those temperatures cause what we call chilling injury. And actually what you're doing is you are chilling and physiologically damaging the embryo of the fruit. And once that happens, then it sets off a whole chain of events. Either the fruit drops or it looks like it sets fruit. People call them nubbins. And then you go out one day and there's all this fruit on the ground. And it's because it just slowly but surely triggered this obsision event.
Um however there is some more recent research which did report some genetic differences and this is work that was done in 2024 23 25 that showed some genetic differences and expression of mango uh mango cultivars to exposure to cold temperatures. The temperatures though that they were talking about were 40 degrees not 32. So it does show that there is some genetic differences in tolerance to cold weather. They just it didn't go down to 32 when but it does give hope that there may be some genetic variability that could be used for more cold hearty mango cultivars as we understand it more and more molecularly.
So Okay. Uh, I wonder why that's not Well, I don't know if somebody can uh turn this thing back on. Um, I don't know what I inadvertently touched.
Yeah. Thank you. Thanks.
>> Yeah. Okay, thank you Jar.
Okay, so what are some commercial cold protection strategies?
Um, and of course, site selection is a key one. In other words, nearness to coasts, lakes, rivers tend to be warmer than if you're farther away from those bodies of water because water holds a lot of heat. So the cold air and freezing temperatures going over Lake Okachchobee from northn northwest to southsoutheast it warms that w that air as it moves over the lake. So that's why it's warmer in those. So sight selection can be very important. If you're down at the bottom of the hill it's going to be colder than if you're up on the hill.
High volume irrigation systems where they're permitted. And high volume irrigation I'm talking about putting out a quarter inch of water per acre per hour at least. That's not permitted in all the water management districts in all the counties in Florida. It depends on where you are. Miami Dade, yes, you can use all the water you want, but if you're over in Lee County or some of the other counties, you may not even get a permit to have that much water.
Um, there's also things called high volume micro sprinklers. So, there's two types of more than two, but two basic types of micro sprinklers or microjets.
those that put out maybe 10 to 20 gallons per hour per microjet. And then there's those that put out 20 to 40 gallons per hour per microjet. They're both called micro sprinklers. So people think, "Oh, it's not using much water."
Well, it depends on the system that you've installed, right? And more water is better than less, right? Also, tree trunk covers, but you want covers that have high insulation value. That's the key. Uh back in the 80s, UF did a lot of work on freeze protection, mostly for citrus, and they found that if it ha if the if the wrap the tree wrap has a high insulation value, it delays the time that that trunk ex experiences freezing temperatures much much more than if you have one of these egg carton type wraps which do nothing. It's actually colder under those. So, it really depends on the insulation value. Um, also back a quite a while ago, people would in sandy soils, they would mound the soil around the trunk of the tree and it would be anywhere from 3 to six degrees warmer under that sand than it was on the air temperatures. So, very effective, labor intensive.
And then fiberglass insulation, I already mentioned very good insulation material. you know the batting the fiberglass batting you put in the attic very you can buy material very good insulation value anyway tree covers have been tried frost cloth also uh flooding I've been to a few groves in central Florida where they had flood uh flood irrigation um and they could fill those swailes with water just prior to the freeze key is you need to have pumping capacity to get the water on and you need pumping capacity to get that water off of the planting right after the freeze.
So, some of the issues with commercial is that you need access to high volumes of good water. You also need a pump and engine that can do the entire planting at one time. We've gotten several calls people they had 20 acres, let's say, but their irrigation system could only do 10 acres at a time.
Well, I know in one case where they rotated, say, okay, we'll put this we'll put 10 acres on for an hour and then we'll turn that one off and put the other one on. You get evaporative cooling, you kill the plants. So, it has to be it has to be put together properly that it can do the entire planting at the same time.
So also planning ahead of time. So you want to, you know, putting in the infrastructure. You can't call up five days before the freeze, hey, I need an irrigation system that can put out, you know, 40 gallons per plant. It's not going to happen. The tree wraps and the covers need to be on site. You need to have the labor and you need the labor during the night to make sure the irrigation lines don't freeze. And then also uh proper irrigation management before and during the freeze. There's something called a preereeze irrigation to warm up the soil, help the soil uh get more heat and then knowing if and when to turn on the irrigation system. So cold protection is is not only a science, it's somewhat of an art as to do you do I turn this on or do I not and when do I turn it off?
Anyway, this is just some examples of high volume undertree irrigation. That's guava. That's high volume overhead irrigation, which is really is not used uh or people put in anymore, but it's on the right hand side up there. That's on sugar apples. Leaches on the bottom is high volume under tree and again high volume uh over tree on the at the bottom.
This is the uh soil mounding on the citrus. So that small citrus tree there up on the left, it may kill the top, but if the bud union is saved underneath that sand, it will grow back and you'll have that same scan.
That's the idea. And here's a a lyche tree with a microjet with the idea that it's facing has a 90 degree uh sprinkler head that would shoot up and protect this part of the tree encasing it in ice. Theoretically on the lower side there, there's a citrus tree with a microjet and a tree wrap. And then up on the right, those are citrus trees with tree wraps and and a micro sprinkler.
This is a high volume irrigation system in a mango grove on the left, both for the mature trees. And that's a young tree. It's hard to see, but that's covered in ice. This tree here is totally covered in ice.
And uh those are mango leaves again covered in ice. Covered in ice. This is it. This was in 2010 if I remember.
Yeah, 2010. Um, a mango in fluoresence covered in ice.
Uh, and then up on the right though there is can be a downside to using water.
If the ice loading gets large enough and heavy enough, it can break limbs. And so that is one thing that can happen. But you'll, you know, you can probably save that tree.
This is microjets. and we don't have much experience with them on tropical fruits or mangoes. This happens to be sapadilla. This is the 2010 freeze that we had. And the grower put a microjet up on a a pole attached to the tree with a 360 head on it. And he used fiberglass insulation around the trunks and they came through the freeze fine. So there is a potential I think in using the micro sprinkler and and I believe that was putting out probably 30 40 gallons per micro sprinkler per hour and then there's you know you read about people putting covers um frost covers in central Florida I was at an avocado grove and they had um a wind turb turbine those are effective but only for radiation freezes not for advect ive freezes. They won't work in a they don't do anything in a windy freeze. If you have a radiation freeze, they can be effective by mixing the warm air that's above with the cold air down below and bring that temperature up. And then and some people actually use helicopters to do the same thing as that wind turbine.
But, you know, you have to make plans.
You can't call the helicopter company the afternoon before the freeze and say, "Hey, can you fly over my grove?" that's probably not going to happen.
So, some potential methods for cold protection um is looking at salicylic acid and also brass steroid applications. And there's been quite a bit of research looking at improved cold tolerance by using these materials. It's not been tried on mangoes, but this is something and what it does is it upregulates the tree for cold protection for its its physiological systems so they can recover. So, it's something that should be looked at um that may be helpful uh for mangoes especially in coldprone areas.
Um, and there's more information. I h I actually have some videos on cold protection for fruit crops in Miami Dade, but also on fruit crops outside of Miami Dade. So, if you go up and you want to fall asleep, just go ahead get one of those. You can look at that. Um, and Jeff and I have another video on it.
And then there's also um some publications on EDIs or ask ifus where you type in cold protection where you can get more information.
And I think that's it. Thank you.
>> Thank you, Dr. Crane. Does anybody have any questions? Uh oh, we got questions.
Maybe you want to answer a few questions. Um, I'm not aware of gypson really being effective. Maybe there's something to that. I've never heard of it being an effective cold protection.
Is this being sprayed on the tree or underground? On the ground? I' I'd have to look it up, but I've I've never encountered any information on that, Chris. Yeah. Yep. Yes. Turkey.
Do I think drones could be used like helicopters for a radiation freeze to mix the cold and and the warmer air layers? I I don't I don't know. I think you could do an individual tree, but if you're doing, you know, a grove, I think you really need a bigger machine than that. But it I mean it's worth the shot for sure. Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. The helicopters are flying over the the whole grove like Yeah.
systematically mixing up that air. Yeah.
But it's expensive.
Yeah.
Yes.
Right. So yes. So for radiation freezes the helicopters and the wind turbines can be effective in mixing that. The problem with the with the windy or the u advective freezes is the wind dis well two things. One is the stronger the winds, the more water you need to use.
But part of the problem is if it distorts the pattern of the water. So you're not evenly distributing that water around the tree. And so you end up with parts of the tree um evaporative cooling and other parts not. And that's especially a problem with the micro jets with the high volume under tree. If you're in a mature grove, full canopy, you might get away with using the high volume under tree irrigation because of some of the protection, the wind protection inside the grove. But if it's a younger grove and you don't have that wind protection, you're probably going to get some damage or evaporative cooling.
Yeah, that that's the main thing that that wind just distorts the pattern and and you have to have more water and greater volume and you have to have better distribution and and your irrigation system may not be um set up to go beyond that. Yes, Gary.
Interesting.
>> Oh man.
So yeah, so Gary was talking about there was a freeze event two nights or two events where the Tommy Atkins tree were came through well and then the other time and the kits came through well and the Tommy Atson didn't do well and then it was just the opposite on the second.
Absolutely. I don't remember. Um yeah, you remember it very well. Yeah.
So those are, you know, any of those observations are valuable. I guess what I would ask is, you know, where were the trees placed? What was near them? Were there wind breaks near one set and not another? Was one closer to buildings or structures and one not? There'd be a lot of questions to try to weed out what might have might have happened. Yes.
Sorry. I Yeah. Yes.
Yeah. So, so the idea with the preereeze irrigation is that of course water holds a lot of heat. So, if you irrigate your grove, the entire grove and get it wet and you get the soil wet, three, four, five days is better ahead of a predicted freezing event. and you have good you're warming up that soil because the sunlight exposure so that during the freeze that heat that's been stored in that water in the soil can reraiate back into the trees. But it's got to be um you know you want to soak the ground like I said and and it's better to do it five days ahead or three days ahead. I know that's hard to predict when a freeze is actually going to happen all the time but we do have pretty good prediction that you know cold weather is on the way. So, you know, even if it turns out it doesn't come, it's probably a no beat it it Yeah. Yeah. Because it needs time for that water that's in the soil to heat up. So, it needs it's a time factor. The longer it's ex the farther ahead of the freeze, the more time there is to heat that soil up.
Well, so what happen? Yeah. So it drains off of course, right? And goes back to field capacity, but still that the whole grove is moist. It's soaking up that heat and then it will reraiate up into the trees after. Yes.
So your question is what besides irrigation? practices do you need to change postfreeze for freeze recovery?
Right. Yeah.
I actually have like a whole hour and a half presentation on that, but I won't go into that just to say that if 40% of the canopy is killed, you want to reduce uh your irrigation frequency or if it has no leaves, there's really no need to really irrigate. Once it begins to recover and you see where it's recovering, then you can start irrigating again. Right? With the fertilizer, again, if you've lost 40% of your canopy, you should reduce your fertilizer by 40%. Small in small frequent amounts are better than, oh, I'm going to put the regular amount on because the tree is not going to see it.
It can't take it up.
Thank you.
We're going to do a quick computer change and then we're going to get into our next segment. So, two minutes presentation.
>> Thank you, sir.
You just want to talk?
>> We can put on your website.
>> Yeah, we're gonna just have all all of these guys. Everybody, if you want to just give a talk, we'll put on your website.
>> Yeah, everybody's here.
>> I can talk.
>> Okay. Yeah. Well, hold on. Well, we'll have you go. We'll have you go at the end. We're gonna All right.
>> Is everything on the USB drive or Next turn.
All right, everyone. Sorry about the technical delay. Uh this part of the symposium, we're going to be inviting some of the top nursery people in the state of Florida to kind of talk about what they're doing in their worlds. You know, in the mango world, we we tend to think that everybody's on the same page, but depending on where you are, depending on what your interests are, people are working on different varieties, different techniques. So, it's good for everybody to to kind of have an opportunity to give their 15 minutes to say what they're working on, what they're interested in. I'm sure a lot of people have comments on the cold uh snap that we had earlier in the year.
So, without further ado, I'd like to invite uh Chris Wetzel from Truly Tropical.
>> Let's see. Um you might uh do you want to give me a quick uh rundown on on this >> right here? Okay.
Okay. Wonderful.
>> Okay. Um well, yeah, this is going to be of course different from Jonathan because no one can stop Jonathan uh on uh whatever he's Oops. We're not Oh, okay. Sorry about that. It's a learning curve for me. Okay. So, uh my presentation is not going to be anything like Jonathan's. uh and uh that's a good thing because he did a complete uh uh you know conversation about all sorts of things. Uh what I wanted to talk about is uh what I do at uh my farm truly tropical and uh basically it's always a process uh you know we plant all sorts of varieties of uh you know mango especially 90% of what I grow are mangoes and so when we have them for a few years we sort of decide on our favorites and the ones that don't quite make the grade. Uh so the varieties that we've increased lately uh orange sherbet uh made an entire different uh you know extra tree of that large tree. I I tend to top work things because once you have something in the ground established it's easy just to convert the variety. Uh so orange sherbet fruit punch has been a great variety for us. Uh the fruit are large. Uh they're easy to pick and uh they uh are just very popular, very delicious. Uh pineapple pleasure, another one of those varieties that is also extremely good. Uh both of those, well actually all three of those uh varieties uh were uh developed by Gary Zil. Uh but Pineapple Pleasure is actually a Gary uh Springfell's Cross. a very nice fruit and large also. Uh, pina colad is a great fruit. Um, but it is small. Uh, so a lot of people just prefer the larger fruit. Uh, and um, but you know, pina colada is a a very tasty one. Kaylee K is uh actually named after my younger daughter. Uh, and uh, it is a um, variety that occurred on our farm.
Uh it's extremely sweet and fiberless and it um is just very popular. Uh lemones ash is another variety that occurred on our farm. Uh it's in the lemon family. Uh you know there's of course uh lemon zest and lemon mering.
Uh lemonsh um doesn't seem to have any problems with disease and so that's a big plus but also has a nice lemon flavor.
Uh, tangerine dream is one another one that occurred on our farm. Uh, I tasted a well years ago when I first got the property there was basically um it's about four acres total and uh the front of the property uh was mostly uh unplanted. uh there was like half of the front was citrus and at that time they were uh recommending to eradicate that.
Uh so uh we took it all out and planted mangoes. Uh and uh so that was a a area that got you know uh sort of doubled our mango uh production. Uh and uh uh then there was uh a few plants that I I put along the back fence and uh basically the back fence was a real question mark because of uh the location and uh just the it it was a rough environment. So what I did in a lot of cases was I just put seeds in the ground and I figured eventually they're going to fruit and if I don't like the fruit I'll just top work them. And so, uh, tangerine dream was one of those, um, fruits that, uh, it was a very, the first fruit was extremely small, but it had a very, uh, interesting flavor. So, I grafted it onto an established tree, and it has turned out to be one of our most popular varieties.
Uh, apricot. Um, that is a variety, uh, that, you know, it's a small fruit, but it's very tasty. Uh it was a variety that actually Walter Zil had saved. He uh had gone to a place in Del Rey and said something about having the best mangoes and the there was a group of ladies there and said no uh I know where the best ma mango is and so he had to go over there and start grafting it and that is the apricot um mango. And uh so you know that is a variety that we've actually uh put on two different trees.
And then you know everybody tastes things differently, have different preferences and such. And so your list might be completely different uh from mine as far as varieties that I've decreased. Uh I'm not a Duncan fan. Uh I have a son who is a big Duncan fan, so it's not um a genetic thing. uh but uh I have uh decreased the Duncan population.
I still have one uh very productive uh tree. Floriggon again I am not a fan of that variety and so uh we have a CAC where once there was a floragon I top worked that tree also. Uh Fairchild is a lovely mango. Um but it happened to be on a tree that I needed for uh grafting a few other things. I didn't have any place to put them. And so it is uh it has uh less of a presence in our uh grove because of having to add uh some other varieties to that tree. Uh Rosa uh as you might know uh is uh is named because uh I think in in Equatorial Brazil, it was the only mango that had a bl a blush to it. Everything else was green skin. So they called it Rosa and uh that's one of Har's favorite mangoes, but I think it's because he it's what he grew up with. Um it's has fiber, has a very nice flavor, but it does have fiber. And so I've actually kept the rosa tree, but added some other varieties to it.
Uh so um then Kent is a variety that we just have a fair amount of trees of Kent. And so that's also looking to top work some of those. And uh Valencia Pride, very nice mango, but we had a lot of trees. So one of our Valencia Pride trees that was very productive is an Alen orange sherbet tree. I just top worked it. And um and another one actually is a second fruit punch tree.
Uh so there's definitely opportunities to change your mind on uh you know around the grove. uh the um the elephant mango uh you know we don't have much of a uh customer base for that. So I haven't really um you know like encouraged that particular variety. We still have a very small area of one tree that is elephant. uh Nam Dakmai my uh we have like a huge uh audience for Nam Dakmai, huge uh customer base, but we had a lot of Namakai trees and so uh we have a little bit fewer of those now just because you know we had tons and for everybody that I've ever met from Thailand that is their number one variety and you know people like to taste what they grow up with I think and um and so that's u the variety that they grew up with you know for the most part uh then there are some varieties that we just took out completely uh it's Tommy Atkins you know I got recommendation years ago that I should plant Tommy Atkins and I'm like h you know and and they said no really and so I did and uh after a couple years I decided it was time to say goodbye to that uh same to for Kensington Pride There's so many wonderful varieties of mango out there and everybody has their own list of what they like. Uh so, you know, don't not taste things because, you know, I happen not to be a fan. Uh because you might be, you know, it might just hit your pallet perfectly. Uh but yeah, this um particular um variety, you know, list of varieties is just sort of a personal one uh as far as what I'm not fond of.
So, here are a couple uh real pictures of the farm. Uh you know, this right here is uh our our front gate is up at here. And uh the uh the property goes back uh quite a bit. Uh you know, you can see there's lots of mango trees planted and we do have a shade house.
Uh, and then there's this hill and the circle here. Oopsie. What? Uh, I wiggled a wire. I'm not sure what happened. I might need some assistance on wire land.
Okay. Uh, >> there we go.
>> Oh, see, all you need to do is be within two feet and Yeah. Perfect. So anyway, uh this is a aerial shot of course in 2017. Uh there is this hill uh that is you know in the circle there and uh uh 20 26 we had a rain and uh it flooded this entire area. And if you sort of look carefully right here, this is like a tree on an island that was just a little bit higher than the surrounding um what was then a lake. And it um uh you know, everything survived, but it was astounding to see like standing water at the bottom of the hill for days. uh you know, all the rest of the ground was higher up. Uh but uh the the one tree that was really soaked uh made it through.
Uh this uh you know, the the hill uh that we just saw the the picture of uh we didn't plant on for a while because it was just sand. uh we didn't have uh irrigation going down there and so it sort of seemed like a death sentence to whatever you planted. Uh but then uh just recently we started planting things. Uh we're able to uh water them more consistently and when you'll notice that we put mulch around each of the trees just to cool the root zone uh and uh help retain some of the moisture. uh you know all of our property is uh you know like sand and that uh you know sand actually that was formed from uh the erosion of the Appalachian Mountains uh is what has made it to to um Florida. Uh it's sort of um weird concept but anyway this is has turned into a really good area for the mango trees. Uh the sort of the main problem with the area uh is sometimes the neighbors tree uh well trees uh which they really don't believe in pruning at all um get huge and uh can shade out a lot of this area uh depending on the time of year.
Uh just another shot of the same area.
Uh yeah, that shows the the big neighbor tree. It's uh uh it definitely is um not ideal for most varieties to have that much shade. And it also concerns me if we ever have a a hurricane uh coming across because that is one thing about fast growing trees is that they're generally very brittle. And so if uh something is um it has sprung up quickly, it is more vulnerable to uh strong winds.
And then we have uh sort of a list of things that we've developed at uh Truly Tropical. Uh some new varieties. Uh you know, Best was the first one. And I don't believe in a best mango. So, it's sort of weird that I have a mango called best, but that was just uh in the beginning of, you know, when we first moved to that property, uh there was just, you know, so much area that we would like trees and so we just put seeds down and uh that was the best was the best of the first group of seeds that we put down and that had fruited and uh the other ones we top worked. Um but then uh other varieties, you know, the big gym is actually one that came with a property. It's a uh most probably a uh seedling of Muloba. Uh but you would never guess that because it doesn't look anything like Mula. Uh but uh by its location, that seems to be what it was. Uh, Carpedium uh is uh a variety that u is just a real classic flavor. Uh divine uh that's uh actually a a Mulova seedling. Uh but you would never guess it. It's very sweet, fiberless, and um you know, much uh sweeter than than Mulova actually. Uh then uh we have Kaylee K, named after my younger daughter. And uh it's um yeah, so you can't really tell from this picture, but it's pretty flat. Uh it's it's sort of like your hand. It's a little bit thicker than, you know, like the sideways hand, but it it is very flat, very sweet, fiberless, and then Marco was named after my brother. And uh it has cotton candy. Um one of its parents is cotton candy. You can taste that, but it has other flavors. And uh finally, yuzu uh is the uh the most recent one out of the bunch. And uh yuzu um there's a citrus uh that was uh originally grown in China. Uh it's where it first occurred and uh then the the Japanese sort of fell in love with it and uh that mima that fruit was yuzu.
And uh so when we had this one tree that uh had some citrus flavors to it, I had a couple people taste the fruit and they said that tastes like yuzu. So that's how we got the name is that it has the citrus component flavors that are similar to the fruit yuzu. Uh so um yeah uh it's one of those things that if you want to uh try for a a new variety um planting seeds is uh is my go-to method.
Uh but uh you definitely want to choose the seeds that you think are from interesting fruit. Uh you know for instance you don't want to plant a tarpentine seed unless you need a lot of rootstock down the line or something.
you know, you want to to uh plant things that you or your customers really like.
And for us, this is uh you know, like a good good example of of u what uh has done well not only at the farm but also the customers like.
And then we have some ones that we're still um uh like figuring out if this is uh you know like a something to stress going forward or not. I happen to like a lot of these varieties a lot. Uh this chair mango thing always gets people a little bit uh well it uh spurns a lot of um or encourages a lot of questions. And uh there was one plant that was next to a chair in the grove. And we don't know what the seed was, but the fruit are good. And so it just started being called the chair mango. And so that it's not a very uh exciting story, but that's how we got there. Uh the steak mango uh we had uh a seedling fruit that developed a very uh nice uh mango. It was fairly up high and then I found it.
There was a potted plant underneath and and it had impaled itself on the stake where the of the potted mango and so it became known as stake mango. Um so sort of crazy things like that. And then uh along the uh the fence we just numbered a lot of the trees because of not knowing what the varieties were going to be. And uh like 33 uh is uh actually a very popular variety. Uh all of these are, but the 33 was the first one that people went nuts over uh because it and it does have some fiber, but it was just people were really uh crazy about the the flavor. Uh but then we have some uh of the you know 36 and 63 more citrusy and uh you know the 65 is also a citrusy kind of mango. So basically uh you know we haven't gotten around to naming some of these numbered uh varieties because people are now asking for the number you know and so uh you know it would have been nice had we figured out what to name it instead of putting numbers on it but uh that's not how it worked out. So uh it gets a little bit confusing I suppose and it uh yeah looks like that's the end. Uh, >> I think we have time for one or two questions. Uh, Bruce, I saw you were there first.
What does that like it? Oh, I'm sorry.
>> I thought I had a big mouth. No.
>> Uh so anyway, um that uh you know it's you know that's sort of its its only downside is that you have to pick it a little bit earlier than you think you would need to. They do ripen off the tree very nicely, but you can't uh you know expect to have a salailable fruit if you're not uh you know watching that every couple days once it gets mature.
birds. Yeah. Did I say say something else?
>> Uh yes, they defin >> Well, yeah, he's not here, so we can we can blame him if he's not here, right?
Okay. Um any uh Oh, here we go.
>> Okay. Well, I want to applaud your dedication to the brands. I like the the hat. It's very It's you. But um my first question was what's the largest tree that you'll do a full swap on the variety?
>> Well, you know the the Valencia Prides that I I uh converted to Fruit Punch. Um those were big trees and yeah, I I've also converted Yeah, we had a lot of Valencia Pride. It's a nice variety. Uh but we just had a lot of it. Uh and another Valencia Pride I converted uh almost completely to orange sherbet. Uh and the good thing about uh putting those varieties on um Valencia Pride is both of the varieties are very easy to distinguish between um you know that what it is and and Valencia Pride. Uh because a lot of times when you top work uh you know the first round of top working uh there can be some branches that uh are the original variety and so you just have to go back and top work those. But, uh, it's really easy to tell the difference between, uh, Valencia Pride and just about anything.
>> Yes.
>> Well, well, number one is flavor. Uh, because you're not going anywhere uh without the flavor. Um, you know, I uh I'm okay with a small amount of fiber, but not a lot of fiber. Uh unless the the taste is amazing, in which case I'll put up with it. Um but uh yeah, it's uh and I like to grow things that don't drop too easily. Uh because you know, like a lot of times if a fruit drops, it's not sailable. It's bruised. And so uh you know, if it's just dropping crazy, uh I will um first my my first line of defense is checking the the tree frequently. And if that uh is not working for some reason, like I've got too many other things to do, uh then uh you know, I'll just try, you know, I have in the past uh sort of hung a net underneath to collect them as they're dropped off the tree. I haven't done it recently because I'm lazy.
>> All right, we have time for uh one more question. I saw we had one more in the audience.
>> Yes. How many?
>> Uh we have about four acres of land and I believe we're at about 400 trees.
>> Yeah.
>> All right. Thank you very much.
>> Thanks for coming down.
So, with that, we'll segue into our next speaker, a well-known nursery man here from South Dade, Julian Lara. I'm sure he's got a lot of interesting things to tell us. Going with him on his golf cart around the farm is like a a trip through time, all the cool collections he's done. So, give it up for Julian Lara.
>> All right. Thank you. Well, my name is Julian. I'm from Larara Farms. I have a small tropical fruit tree nursery in the Redlands, Florida, which is uh southwest of Miami Day County. Uh very close to Homestead. and we've been there well my dad first bought the property in 1980 and it started out as a mame farm and uh became pretty popular because there was so few Mameay available in South Florida back then and it quickly became very popular and we established a good clientele and we expanded to other things pretty much everything mango um anonas, chimeito, avocado amongst many other things. So anyways, um I was uh going to talk about something that I call the honey zone.
The honey zone in South Florida.
Everything east of this red line is what I call the honey zone. Now, why is it the honey zone? It's the best place to grow mangoes.
Why is that? It's because we're very close to the ocean over here.
David Fairchild had it really good. He had no idea he was in the honey zone because basically everything east of this red line was farmland.
It was mango, avocado, and citrus.
And pretty much everything east of this red line is fertile land. You can grow vegetables this side of the red line. Um sandy sandy um black soil or just sand because in general fruit trees love sand and they love sandy black dirt.
Um, this was pretty much all farmland and it got developed little by little. People started selling their farms and uh it got turned into single family homes. Pretty much what's what's happening now west of the honey zone. Now, west of the honey zone, all the farmers got pushed out west. And over here, we got solid rock for soil. You need a backhoe or augur to plant your trees. It's it's solid rock. You got this much vegetative uh soil and below that solid rock. But if you break up that rock, it's actually pretty good stuff. Um as long as you break it up, they have a nice deep hole.
Drainage is an important factor.
If you don't have good drainage, you're going to have uh a lot of root rot. So, the deeper you dig, the better. Make sure you fill it in with the same stuff you dig out. Some people like to put potting soil uh as a supplement, but that's a bad idea. That's the number one mistake people make is putting implementing potting soil when they plant their trees. And what that does, it retains too much uh moisture. And if that moisture doesn't go away, it's going to rot the roots. And then you're going to have a dead branch here, a dead branch there. And eventually it's a slow death.
It takes months and months for it to die. Um, and I get a lot of phone go, "Oh, my tree is dying. Uh, what should I do?"
The first thing I asked them, "Did you put black dirt in the hole?" Yes, I put some really good quality dirt. Put it in the hole and I don't know what I don't know what's going on. Well, that's the problem. You put black dirt in the hole.
You should have put the same stuff you dug out. I feel like a broken record.
I'm over and over again telling people same stuff you dug out, rock, dirt, sand, where whatever it is you got, put it right back in.
And if you want to feed if you think you're not feeding the the plant by putting the same stuff back in, that's where fertilizer comes in. So So anyways, east of here, east of the honey zone, you get less disease because you're so close to the ocean and that ocean breeze blows all the spores from let's say anthrachnos for example. All the sports get blown west or they they uh propagate very well here in the west. There's uh over here it's still it's not very aid.
It's kind of stagnant. While over here it's very breezy and it's cooler in the summer. And over here it's warmer in the summer. It's really hot over here, much cooler over here in the summer.
And also in the winter it's much warmer because of the ocean and much colder because it's more inland.
So many of you guys like uh Mr. Gary Zil, Miss Chris are east of the zone and they have one hell of an advantage um over west honey zone growers because they have drier air, less fungus. So growing mangoes and growing anonas is much easier. At least you have to do less spraying and you get beautiful mangoes.
kind of like what I do. Just tap and just go down.
How do I go to the next frame?
Okay, let's blow it up.
You get beautiful mangoes that look like that when you're east of the honey zone.
All right. So, I use the mouse or the up and down.
Click it. Click it. Where does it work like that? No. Oh, okay.
Okay.
Okay. So, you get mangoes that look like this when you're in the honey zone.
um just less than thros, but um you still get something called powdery mildew. Powdery mildew doesn't care if you're in the honey zone.
Um it's basically a problem that we have with the flowers.
It affects the flowers.
um you'll get less fruit and it it spreads pretty pretty fast like like wildfire. Now, what can we do to prevent powdery mildew?
Something called sulfur, liquid sulfur.
Um pretty much two tablespoons per gallon of water. And you spray your blooms.
Uh, I like to spray at least once a month. You can do it every two weeks. Sometimes I do it every two weeks because I'm a little bit paranoid about it popping up because it can pop up really, really quickly. And sulfur does a really good job and it's a natural element.
Okay, this is what it looks like when you're not in the honey zone and you don't spray for enthrachnos. This is anthrachnos on mango skin. Um, it's very hard to sell mangoes that look like this.
It's a common problem. You can get it in the honey zone, but not as much west of the honey zone.
Uh, now the solution to that here, you also get enthrachnos on the flower. You know, I didn't know we got in that flowers can get enthrachnos until few years ago. So now I'm incorporating copper, which is a fungicide.
Um, I'm mixing two tablespoons of sulfur and two tablespoons of copper side into a gallon of water.
So I'm hitting, you know, hitting a bird with with two birds with with one stone.
So, I'm mixing both together and spraying them on a monthly basis or on a or a couple every every two weeks and it gives me great results. Let me tell you, I'm in the worst place to grow mangoes.
I'm like on I'm west of Chrome Avenue.
I'm like 10 blocks from what from Chrome Avenue on 200 Street and it is just a real challenge to grow all these really popular really nice mangoes that most of them are susceptible to disease like enthrachnos and to powdery mildew and this really does the job. If you really do the work you'll get great results.
Okay. Another fungicide that's very effective is a bound. And this one you can uh you can uh um drench if you want to drench if you have a young tree that's not going to produce mangoes anytime soon. You can drench the roots with this and spray. Okay, either or. And this will help the tree avoid any root disease um and anthrachnos and abounds is a really good product. Another one.
This is the generic version of Abound and it's much cheaper because Abound is very expensive, but this is a a very good generic version of it's called Quadras.
Another one, this is a a more fancy fungicide, and I like to use this on sour sap as well as mango, and it's very very good. It's very expensive, but it is one hell of a of a fungicide. Now, the elite of all fungicides, it's Empress or one of the best ones. Very good stuff for sugar apples, guanavana, um, and mangoes.
Okay, so next up we have my archeneemy, Thris, and they really love my farm.
They are loving the climate. They love the humidity. They love the stagnant air.
They reproduce like crazy. And it's hard to stop them. And they're so small.
They're smaller than an ant. They can fly sometimes, but mostly what they do is run around. They're running all over the place. You can see them running around on the pod, on the tree trunk, on the leaf. And they basically turn the tips of your mango branches into pork grinds. Turns them black and they look like a a chicharó.
Okay, this is their handiwork on mango fruit, on baby fruit. Basically, what they do is they suck the sap and uh I guess from their saliva or something, infect the tree, give them some kind of allergic reaction.
This is their handywork on mango leaves.
And this could also can be this picture in particular could be a combination of fertilizer burn and thris. But this is pretty much what it looks like. Um here's another example of their handiwork. Crinkled up leaves and on the top you see the tip of the of the mango branch. You can't really see the very tip, but it all the leaves are all the new baby leaves you're so proud of. They fall off.
So, what can we do to combat this enemy? Okay, this is not labeled for fruit trees, but it works really good. I've tried it and I think it's very very effective for thris. A metaclorids is what's recommended for thris, but uh I like this product.
Here's another archeneemy. This one is called the Sri Lankan weevil and it's a beetle that that eats the leaf. Pretty much there's two kinds of insects.
There's leaf eating insects and there's uh leaf sucking insects and thris is the leaf sucking and this is the leaf eating which are beetles, calipers and such. Um they're all over the place. They love eating mangoes, mango leaves. They love eating luchi. They love eating leuchi leaves, especially when it's a tender leaf. And that's their handiwork right there. It's uh it's a big mess. And you see them, you try to catch them to to kill them, and they just drop on the floor before you can even grasp them.
And this is what kills them. It's pretty much seven. Um uh seven is spelled s v i n. And this is the um the generic version of it. And basically you apply two tablespoons in a gallon of water and you spray the tree, you bathe the tree with it. And uh when they eat the leaf, they get poisoned and die. And that's what we want.
Here's another problem we have with mangoes called whitefly.
And whitefly is very difficult to kill because they're so tiny and they come back really fast. You can spray them and then a few days later they're back.
and you're like, I don't know, I give up. You can spray mineral oil that can suffocate them.
But this stuff, Ardent, that will kill them.
Especially if you mix it with something like this Zenith, which is pretty much merit.
Uh, a tablespoon of each in a gallon of water. That will do the job and it does the job very well.
Um, there is another product for white, but I forgot what it was. It just escaped me. Now, fertilizer.
Mangoes don't like nitrogen. I learned this a long time ago from my good friend Richard Campbell. No nitrogen for mangoes. They're very efficient at finding nutrition on nitrogen on their own and nutrition in general. So, basically, mangoes I don't really fertilize. I give them zero fertilizer.
They're they thrive. They're very efficient on their own at finding nutrition and especially nitrogen.
So this um you can find is they call it Kmag.
There's many versions of Kmag. Um the formula is zero nitrogen, zero phosphorus, and 22% potassium. And then the rest are trace elements.
And uh I like to apply a tablespoon every foot of height the tree has. So, if the trees 10 feet tall, 10 tablespoons sprinkled around the root area.
Okay? And this is really good stuff.
I've seen trees come back to life. I've seen trees that look like crap and you sprinkle some of some of this stuff on it and it comes back to life. I've seen customers like cry because they're so happy that their tree came back because they didn't want to lose their tree. So, yeah. Uh 0022, guys. That's the one for mangoes. And for other fruit trees that don't like nitrogen, maybe like pimmens.
Now, we're going to talk about my favorite mangoes. This is like towards the end of the show. Um, my number one favorite, it's named after is Gary mango, and that's pretty much the parent of mo most of these new varieties that came from Gary's breeding program. But I love the flavor of this mango. It really blows me away every single year. Um, I had one recently and I always try to share it with my customers when they come visit and they want to try mangoes.
The first thing I do is look under the Gary tree to see if there's any on the floor. And when I find one, I look at them and I say, "It's your lucky day."
Bite into it like if it was an apple.
Skin and everything. The toxicity level of the skin is almost zero. You can chew it and it won't pucker up your lips. It will You won't even feel it. You can chew it up, swallow it if you want to, spit it out if you want to, but you can chew up and absorb all the juice that's underneath the skin, which is which is amazing. And the whole mango is just perfect. This perfection, mango perfection, Gary mango. Okay. And that's the parent of most of these new varieties that we have out that Gary has out right now and that we've been um we've been talking about. Okay. My second favorite I was introduced to by by Richard Richard Campbell maybe 25 years ago, maybe even 30 years ago.
Uh he had it in his collection I think at Montgomery Research Center and it was you know a tree with a cool name alor Benesan. I'm like, "What the heck is Alan Poor Benesan, Richard?" He was, "Oh man, that's a great mango. That's an Indian dessert mango. That's a mango that almost has white, completely white flesh." Like, completely white flesh.
That sounds like something I'm interested in. Anything that's weird and different, I want that. And uh I took it home, took some butterwood home, grafted it, and uh let me tell you, you want to talk about a mango that's susceptible to disease, that's it. Super suscept, especially where I'm at. Over here, you got a better chance. But this is a super susceptible uh mango to anthrachnos.
They even can split open on you and uh you can only eat a sliver of it. And boy is that sliver worth it. It is totally worth it going through all the trouble.
I I'm springing now more than ever, so I do get to have a complete mango and be able to enjoy this mango the way I should. But man, is it an amazing mango.
It's like eating.
If you want to call a mango fruit punch, this is the one you should call fruit punch. That one tastes like a fruit punch with some coconut.
Similar to ice cream mango. If you guys know ice cream mango, but this is like times 10. It is a phenomenal mango and it's very productive. Despite being in the worst area, it's a very productive mango and delicious. I love this mango.
The reason why you don't see this mango, we probably never heard of it because it's so disease-ridden and that's the downside unfortunately.
All right, my number three favorite time. Now, there's a lot of debate. Is this the real time war? We don't know if this is the real time war, Julian. This doesn't look like Tymore. Let me tell you, it came from Egypt. This was brought back from Egypt, I think, from by Bob Knight, Dr. Bob Knight, maybe 20, 40 years ago.
Um, they gave my dad the budwood. My dad grafted them and uh it's over there in Trek and I don't know if Tymore did you where's Jonathan? Did you plant the time yet?
I'm gonna I'm gonna find out. I'm going to find cuz you guys I gave you a 15 gallon. So anyways, this right here is like opening up a can of peaches and drinking the syrup with a little bit of mango. Blew me blows me away every year. I love this mango. Thymore. Now they say I had some Egyptians, you know, comment on my Facebook say, "No, this is not the real time. This does not look like taur." It came from Egypt.
It came from Egypt. And the taste is phenomenal. I mean this this flavor it which is reminiscent to me um of Jakarta and um some other mangoes that taste like peach but wow it is just fantastic peach syrup with mango ty now there's I recently obtained from a friend Dr. Muhammad I don't know if you many of you know Dr. from Muhammad a new well not new but the I asked him look can you get the taur for him I want the real taur people keep telling me it's not the real one so he brought back some budwood called blue taimore and the blue taimore um I don't know if it's looks like this if it's going to look like that if the flavor is going to be the same but I got it I top worked it on a mango and it's just a matter of time till I get some fruit and when I do I will report back to you guys, as soon as they have the information and the pictures.
All right, so time war, guys. Probably never heard of none of these mangoes, but let me tell you, I look far and wide for for flavor and quality.
Okay, number four, the mango. Um, this is the only mango from California that is uh popular or was popular down here.
You want to talk about rich classic regular mango flavor? Rich. I mean super rich like a Gary mango.
This is it. It's like I call it the improved Hayden.
It's has that classic South Florida mango flavor, but man, behind that skin right there is one of the richest mango flavors you'll ever have in your life. It is amazing.
My dad loved this mango and I can and I understand why more and more every year.
It is phenomenal. It's very productive but highly susceptible to disease. It gets a lot of anthrachnos. That's why living in the honey zone is so so awesome. David Fairchild had it so good.
He didn't even know it. He didn't know he lived in the honey zone. This was all he knew. East of the honey zone, which is pretty much east of US1, east of 95.
If you live by the turnpike, if you're east of the turnpike, yeah, you you may be able to get away with like almost no spraying. But if you go east of the Palmetto, which is pretty much, you know, it's 77th Avenue, you go to places like Hyleia, there's no disease.
You go look at some kit mangoes in Hyia, no disease. And that's a susceptible mango right there to enthrachnos. No spraying, no fertilizer, sandy soil, sugar sand. Actually, nobody fertilizes, nobody sprays, and everybody's growing kits because it's a big mango and there's no disease on it. You go to the Redlands, full of disease.
Okay, but other than that, mangoes phenomenal mango. Phenomenal.
All right. Now, my one of my favorite stringy mangoes, starch. This one's from Trinidad.
Um, I tasted it a few years ago and I was blown away. It's worth the strings in your teeth.
I'm spoiled. I've been eating fiberless mangoes for the past 20 years, 30 years, and I'm spoiled. I don't want to eat tarpentine.
I don't want to eat stringless peach. I want to eat fiberless mangoes. But man, when I tried this starch mango, some uh uh Trinidadian customer brought me some starch mangoes from his tree and I tried it. I was blown away.
Like the the amount of sugar, the bricks must be through the roof.
So rich and it's like a a a really good um almost like a mango preserve. a fresh but in a fresh fruit um starch mango.
Another mango that really surprised me this year for being I'm talking about stringy mangoes now is the Asukar mango.
Theukar mango I had a friend uh test it on his bricks meter. I think it was like 22 and that's let me tell you I loved it.
Aukad really. I I had it for the first time this year and it was phenomenal for being a stringy mango and I can see why they use it for juicing because that'll make one hell of a mango juice. This one too. And um I remember Chris mentioning Rosa mango from Brazil. I can see why Har likes it. I have a tree makes fruit.
Beautiful mango. So rich in flavor. has that classic mango flavor and um it is worth the strings in your teeth.
Okay, starch rosa and uh what was the other one? Asuka.
Perfection. Definitely worth the strings. I hate stringy mangoes, but it's these threes that I'm mentioning.
Phenomenal. Phenomenal mango. Okay, so what's next here? What's coming up next?
All right. Basically, just to give you guys an idea, the three different types of mangoes. Okay. The classic flavor mango, which is, you know, the Indian type. It's uh, you know, regular tasting mango, right? So, that's one type of the mango. The second type is the Indo-Chinese type mangoes. Nan, Nandak, Mai, Pimp, Stain, Mun, Filipino or Carabal, um, Bram Kaimon, Kiosavoi, um, even Floron. Floron is is a hybrid between Florida, a Florida type mango, regular classic mango, and Saigon, which is Indo-Chinese.
And Floron tastes like it looks like a nice round Indian mango, but it has Indo-Chinese flavor. And then there's the unique flavors. And there's a whole bunch of different categories of unique flavor, but basically when I say unique flavor, they have coconut flavor, orange flavor, lemon flavor, peach flavor. I know I'm missing one flavor. Guava flavor. Got five different flavors.
Those are unique flavors for mangoes.
And that's a whole category right there.
Unique flavor mangoes. So, what's next?
in the future. What the heck is this?
Now, this is something I'm trying to acquire to get brought in from uh from Bangladesh.
They're calling it the chili mango. It looks like a chili pepper. Now, is it worth, you know, going crazy with? Not really. But look at this seed, guys.
Look at that. It's a toothpick.
It's just cool to have it. Probably it's nothing, you know, nothing to to dance about, but something to write home about. Hey, check out the seat on this mango. This is cool. But so for a collector, this will be a nice addition to anybody's collection. Now, you know, how soon am I going to get this? I don't know. I'm trying my best, but um I have a friend coming from Bangladesh in a few months, and hopefully he can bring budwood of this. If not, he'll bring budwood of other stuff that's good over there. And what's next? So hopefully next year we're going to have an avocado festival or avocado summit and we can talk about avocados. Look at this lady's smile. This is a a big avocado. Almost looks like a papaya. But uh by the way, the name of this one is Don Ramon. Like Don Corleó. It's Don Ramon. It's from Puerto Rico. And uh it's one hell of a one hell of a size. I have one in the ground at my farm. I'm still waiting to get fruit and uh so I can confirm this picture because this is just too much.
It's too much to believe. All right, and that's it, guys. Thank you very much.
>> Thank you. Thank you. Uh we have time for one or two questions. Does anybody have questions? Quick one or two?
>> Yes, sir.
>> You got to handpollinate it.
You got to hand pollinate. The more seeds inside the fruit, the bigger the fruit. So, if you learn how to hand pollinate, handpollinate that, you'll get a big fruit. But I have a variety called Miami that I named Miami that I found in Northwest Miami that self-pollinates and it makes a decent sized fruit. I I harvested one that was five pounds with no hand with no hand pollination. I have pictures of that on my Instagram and Facebook if you want to check it out.
>> All right.
phone. Um everything is so great. So did you see any kind of alternate bearing pattern on the trees and do you practice like what is the maximum height that the trees can attain and do you often perform the pruning practices?
>> Yeah. Well, every time you prune you're going to lose performance.
>> So what you can do is cut the heaviest thickest branch and leave the rest so the tree can continue to function because if you cut everything you're going to lose performance. You cut one thick heavy branch, maybe the rest will continue to perform the following year.
Alternate bearing mangoes. Yeah. When a mango bears a lot of fruit one year, they tend to take a year vacation to recover and to balance themselves out again. That's a normal thing. Some mangoes are very reliable, like Tommy Atkins, for example. That's why it's the most commercially grown mango in the world. That one doesn't take vacations.
That one can bear to the maximum level and then do it again the next year. But most mango tend to take vacations to recover.
>> All right. Thank you very much.
Wonderful. Wonderful. Great seeing all these varieties of mangoes. I guess the question, you know, we talked with the National Mango Board, you know, what's next? What's the next big commercial?
the Ramon variety.
>> I mean, that's part of the the beauty of this conference and working with all the producers and nursery people. You know, we're the Tomies, the Haydens, the the Kits, the Kents, the Atulos are here, you know, and they're million Mexico shipped, I think, 90 million boxes last year, maybe even more. Well, we do 95 million. Um, you know, what's next? The growers are asking us, we're local growers here. We're international growers. And they're saying, "Okay, we have our grower in Mexico, in Mitraan, our partner. He grows three million boxes of tomies and 2 million ato." He's like, "What's going on next?" You know, we've got him planting Cusavoy. We've got him planting other varieties. And there's just a huge demand on newer, better quality mangoes. Yes, there's always going to be a place for the tomies. God bless them. You know, those things are like bricks. You can leave them outside for two weeks and nothing happens. But as you see, these nursery people are working on new and improved cultivars, and we're trying to work with the mango board and work with Trek and work with Chapman Field and on Fairchild's Farm and with all the partners that we have to find what's next. So, uh, with that being said, we'd like to invite one of the godfathers of the mango industry, amazing propagator, nursery person, uh, Mr. Gary Zil to come and give a few words of a discussion group. So, I didn't come prepared for a presentation, but I do have some things to say. First, a couple of comments. Um, Chris Winsel's talk was uh interesting. I do want to caution you. She said to plant out seedlings, it takes about 10 years. Believe me, I know you plant a seed for a mango in Florida, it's going to take you 10 years to get fruit. So, if you're real patient, you're going to get some new varieties.
Uh, I planted out a total of 10,000 seeds.
Uh, I selected them when they were really young from the aroma of the leaves. Planted out about a thousand trees and ended up with Well, you saw the picture. I was very surprised, Jonathan. I don't know where you uh put that together. That's kind of cool. I appreciate that. But it kind of I don't know. I'm not used to trying to be out in the spotlight, but I've kind of made myself that way. People want pictures of me standing next to them. But that's kind of strange, too. Anyway, um I wanted to start with a comment. uh uh Bruce Greer started out with of new varieties. A book I read a number of years ago called hybrid. It was about the development of hybrid uh corn and other uh aggro uh other vegetable crops.
And the one line that stood out in that whole book was that once a variety becomes dominant in the market, it's very difficult to change.
people want to stick to the same thing that works for them. And uh that has definitely happened with mangoes and I feel very sad about that because you still see Tommy Atkins, Kent and Kit as the main varieties people are growing.
Now what Chris's talk also showed was that there are other people other changes. Now let me tell you uh my business we grow about 100,000 trees a year maybe more or less. Yeah, at least that. And we've seen some big big changes in the demand for mangoes. Um I would say probably half the varieties we grow now are some selections that I made. Some we grow maybe 10,000 or more trees up. Uh some a few hundred, but people ask for them. The uh effect of the internet has had a huge huge um influence on my business and on mangoes in general. There are different clubs for people that uh will have a little tasting and I have to watch what's going on around on the internet because uh I think it was last year a guy asked tasted a mango that I I had uh never really propagated. I didn't think that much of it. We've grown a few one year.
I think in fact I think my brother who thought a lot of it grew it and that's how the tree got sold and people said one guy say tasted it and said oh that's the most spectacular mango I ever ate.
Well, I couldn't agree with them. I never even wanted to propagate it. But now we've got to start growing some of those because we know people will be calling up and want some of those trees.
So, the market has changed a lot. Uh, how many of you in the room here? I know I think we're being broadcast on the internet. How many of you here have an actual grove of mangoes? Raise your hands.
Okay. Uh and how many of you have a grove of mangoes outside say in I would say Mexico uh Peru, Ecuador, very few in the uh here. Um so I think for the group here to be most would be addressing to uh the local local growers. And my only only um I should say my only message is there's really there are really a lot of extremely good mango varieties that people go by the flavor and you might check some of the comments you hear on the internet of different varieties that uh are being much I'll put it this way.
We wholesale by volume what future fruit we get from our our my backyard 5 acres.
It's uh and we wholesale them at $6 a pound.
Now I don't know a bushel of mangoes. I think a bushel of anything's 55 pounds.
So you figure out what that is a bushel.
I don't know what you're getting for Tommy Atkins and kit. I don't think it's that much.
uh as far as the growers that are shipping into the United States, you have a big barrier of heat treatment or whatever. I don't know how much um research the the mango board is putting into just testing out a broad variety of mangoes for what can tolerate the heat treatment because that's your biggest obstacle.
that and also the handling of the fruit from the time they're picked until they get on the shelf because most people don't know much about mangoes. In fact, I got to tell you a joke. This is a true story happened in Costa Rica about uh 35 years ago. A guy that was uh working for a these are both American guys.
He was planning out a he was working for the owner and had ordered a tree a truckload of mangoes to go on his the uh property and uh he was there with the owner as I started unloading the trees and Chris the guy who worked for the uh for the owner he said um you know don't you think we ought to find out what the name of this what variety of mango this is and the owner The guy was paying for the land, paying for the trees. Said, "Do you mean there's more? There's different kinds of mangoes."
And um that's uh that's an extreme case, but I think that when you see all the different types of mangoes available, you're aware that there's some very very different flavors available. And you know, you see examples, you've seen on these talks, different varieties that people have have uh preferences for. And um a lot of that I have to admit I I would like to I wouldn't want to have to limit my collection of mangas to only uh 10 or 15 varieties, especially not the two or three. My whole message is that there's just a huge huge number of mango varieties, different flavors. The biggest problem um well there's disease problems and the other problem is that how many of you got have you people here or anywhere have a chance to go and taste five or six or 10 different varieties of mangoes? It's not that easy. Uh, I did a mango tasting at my excuse me at my uh house in Costa Rica couple. It was interesting that down there I was a whole month ahead. I've already been through the mango season down there. Anyway, we had uh I only was able to have available about five different varieties because it's hard to get a whole lot of people's attention. And I was very surprised that the the mango that they like the most, believe it or not, is the mango they eat green because everybody in Costa Rica likes green mangoes. Their favorite mango. Of the ripe mangoes, they like the one I call Jacel. Named it after my wife.
It's a a colorful mango that is a little watery. But what I mean is if you slice it, you want to do it over a table or over I mean over a plate because it's going to drip a little. But you can also eat it as a juice mango. Either way, the flavor is spectacular. That was second most popular. The one everybody really liked was the one we call super alonso.
Happens to be my favorite mango. One of my favorite mangoes. I can't can't narrow it down. um for a backyard mango.
Um Carrie still accidental discover of my father and it still is one of the favorite mangoes of the Indian ethnic Indian people. Uh we sell we used to sell a few every year among you know I grew up with in a mango grove uh and we we were uh raising mango since I was a kid and selling retail whatever and but it's only been in the last five or six years that all of a sudden the u Indian people I believe you all are from India or or Bangladesh or somewhere in that area um and They they all of a sudden discovered the Cary manga and we've been selling tens of thousands of trees. Well, over a few years, but I mean literally thousands of of ma of that particular variety because it's so much like some of the mangoes are used to eating in India. Uh the one I call we call super alonso. I I'm not that crazy about that name. I um I really actually should have called it India. That was a that was what came to my mind as the name of that mango would be when I first tasted the fruit that came off that tree etc. I picked it green. I wanted to make sure it didn't lose it to animals and it had been 10 days and it was just starting to get ripe and I almost threw it away. I said, "Well, it won't be any good if it's been sitting around that long." It was the best mango I tasted that season. And I remember I said and that particular mango is one that you can pick green in.
If you get it at the right stage, it'll take two weeks to get ripe at room temperature. higher than temperatures.
So, so that's one that kind of stands out in my mind. There's some others. U I don't know. I feel kind of strange trying to or hesitant to recommend mangoes to people because there's so many people have different flavor uh types that they like. Uh orange sherbet, excellent mango, very different. But um I think I've run out of things to talk to to talk about. Question Bruce, >> we're going to have a lot of questions.
>> Let me let me ask the first question, Bruce. How many over your tenure, over your decades of doing this, how many different varieties have you guys pioneered? How many different new cultivars have you brought to market?
>> New cultivars?
Well, um the the ones that I selected was about I think about 22 something like that. I have a list here, but it doesn't include them all. Um but as far, you know, the Carrie was one that my my uh father named after my grandmother. Um it's what we call 76. It's a lot like um uh like a zil only a little bit bigger and um it's about it. I think some of the other ones uh dot that was uh those are ones that were selected by uh I guess the zil family. We used to keep um a lot of seedlings to wait to get them to fruit before we cut them out of, you know, in the middle of a grove. People eat mangoes and throw them down when they're picking them or or not or the animals and you let them just get up and grow and try to keep um mow around them if you could. We had a few, but uh most of them are those later ones. And I got to say this, it's interesting. And it's been kind of gratifying to me that um a lot of these varieties, almost all of them, I was very hesitant to start grafting as I figured, well, they're going to have my name on it. But we started selling the trees and it wasn't until years later that actually people started eating more of the fruit that all of a sudden people started asking for. It wasn't because I never ever tried to promote any particular variety and I don't but uh the new aromatic aromas I mean mangoes have got mangoes have got so much there's no other fruit in the world comes close to mangoes I have three questions >> three okay >> first of all we used to hear that fruit was best tree ripened Now, we seem to hear that you need to pick the mangoes early. When do you pick them? How do you know?
>> That's a a very very good uh question that could use a good explanation.
Um most of the early mango varieties selected in Florida were were selected to be picked right uh fully mature um or even ripe. Um, I remember we used to spot pickade mangoes to go go and look at the ones uh that were just turning yellow on the bottoms. I hated doing it because it was so slow. But whenever the All right, I It's an embarrassment.
We don't know.
That's what my father she always called it. She always called it Jakarta. I don't know how she got pahary seedlings to Jakarta. And finally I said, "Well, I guess we'll just call it Jakarta." Which was a big mistake because it has Indonesia has nothing to do with that mango. It's an Indian type that tastes a lot like the one grown commercially. Well known in some parts of India as pahari or pari. Uh in Jamaica they call it Bombay. And we call it Bombay here because there's so many people and it's one of my favorite flavors of mangoes. um of the seedlings we s that was a chance seedling that came up in our nursery in our grove uh back I think I was in just out of high school when that one first started fruiting um a little bit later. The uh couple of seedlings that I selected from seeds of the Jakarta were um Sunrise and also the one we call um 015 um which is um they're both have a similar flavor. Jakarta is really good.
It's not as productive as I'd like it to be.
Um where was I? Was there I think I covered that enough. Hopefully, >> most popular >> carry believe it or not. Um now these are these are big volume uh orders you might say. Um also one uh an Indian type uh one called um Kesar.
Uh those are two that uh there's a lot of interest in for and also the um um supro fans that we grow a lot of as far as a commercial interest also uh orange sherbet and um and then of course in their Southeast Asian types um mahashuk it's a very productive um Southeast Asian uh mango I think that's one of the reasons it's so popular. It just really fruits heavily and it's pretty clean.
>> Would you argue that market demand has more of an impact than if you're talking on a large commercial scale for uh barriers to bringing in fruit? Because you had mentioned the heat treatment that you know that's probably the barrier and looking at evaluating different varieties. But if you're planting on a large commercial scale and you don't have a market to put those fruit, then can you really sell those?
>> Um, I'm not sure I understand the question.
Uh you talking about a local person like Chris or >> Well, I'm talking like on a large scale because you were mentioning that on a large scale that uh people aren't planting more varieties and that it's kind of centered down to just a few. But is that is that dictated by the growers or is that more of the market demand because they are at some degree to the mercy of >> where they're going to be able to sell >> the anything that's imported into the in that crosses the border. Uh you have the restrictions of insect pests fruit flies and they are we definitely don't don't want them here in in Florida. We have the luxury of not having to worry about uh fruit flies. Um but apart from that I I I've really been puzzled by um people that are experts on mango varieties. Uh a number of years ago I was in Israel. Uh they had a huge tables and tables of mangoes with their breeding program and um they said they had people come in from Europe that uh would sample them and they'd say, "Oh, that's too that's too strong flavor."
This that and the other. Oh, no. We want something really mild and plain. And um I don't know where these guys came from because um I've never had people come to my nursery and on our office and sample uh some of the really good mango varieties that I like and say, "Oh, that's too strong. That's got too that's too aromatic."
So, uh, but that's not to say I mean, um, Julian mentioned a, um, a mango he said had an extremely good just plain like Florida mango variety flavor, but was really concentrated. We have one we call ugly Betty, which is one of those types. I selected it because it it just tasted like a real good Hayden or Kent mango. Really strong aroma and flavor of that type. So, there's nothing bad about mangoes that are like that. But I will say this. Uh um I've had people ask about Irwin mangoes recently. My um the guys at work um my son and and um Marcelo and uh s another guy does most of our videos wanted me to do something talking about Irwin mango. So people are asking about it's the most expensive mango in the world. Uh they grow it in Japan. Well, they grow it in Japan under a greenhouse and it's a gift mango and they have crazy cost input to grow it. It has to be perfect. But I want to eat them. I mean, if I'm going to eat a mango, I'll eat a good mango. It's just doesn't have much flavors. It's a beautiful fruit.
It's productive. And people, we grow a few trees of it every year. And everybody's got their own taste. By the way, we grow about 40 different varieties. Uh I say keep it on the shelf for that many. And some years we don't grow one variety. somewhere years we'll grow a few or something. So, we I don't have any particular horse in the race as far as what what variety of mango you want to grow. I just kind of like I was taking some notes. Maybe there's a couple we should try growing more of this year because uh if it goes out on the internet, people and it's recommended people will sometimes ask for it. We like to try to keep up with that, but it's not easy.
>> Here, I'll run it.
>> Thank you.
If you had to pick one of your fancies to uh No, no, to grow commercially or attempt to grow commercially, which would you pick? So, not just flavor, but you know, hardiness and production and all that.
>> Well, I don't know. After the freeze this year, we had some varieties that um all of the all the embryos uh aborted.
Um the orange sherbet held a really good crop.
Uh, and it's a it's a kind of a compact tree and can be quite productive. Um, it doesn't have a lot of color, but I would I would pick that as one I would grow grow. And the other one I would grow would be um the super alonso or uh just because I think it has a lot of potential. It's a pretty mango. It can be reasonably productive and um it has an unusually long shelf life when you pick it uh at the right time, but you have to I have to caution you that that particular variety you want to be sure to make uh to know when to pick it. Pick it green. Make sure you got enough calcium in the soil and boron.
Um that's that's and that's a drawback with a number of magnets. one we call sugar loaf which I don't recommend growing commercially but that mango can be very poor if it's under not in the right conditions but if it's got everything perfect a good vintage year and by the way mangoes I think are the closest thing to wines I can think of where you have vintages some years they're better than others but if the rain's not too hasn't rained too much and they've gotten enough calcium and boron to get the the tree to ripen e the fruit to ripen evenly It's a It's a really good mango to eat, but I don't recommend it commercially. Uh other varieties, I I'd have to look at the list and we get those questions a lot at at the business. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you.
Excellent.
We got a leading pler here. Um it's a good question. Thanks, Jack, for that question. Jack's actually part of the team working on the Fairshaw Farm. So, we're going to be hitting up a lot of you nursery men and women for uh interesting cultivars to put at the farm as we kind of expand what we're doing with the uh the mango program, the fruit program. So, our next speaker needs no introduction, uh worldrenown Dr. Richard Campbell. He comes from a very interesting place. The fact that he's a grower here in South Florida, he works with a large Mexican grower as well. So he has a very good knowledge of both the commercial home production. He's got an all-around knowledge of mangoes. So Dr. Campbell, >> do you have a presentation?
>> There is a presentation.
>> Okay. If not Oh, you got So, as they start getting this ready, as they're setting it up. So, um, yeah, I'm Richard Campbell and as I'd like to address the question that Gary got asked about, uh, specialty varieties and commercial, um, there's only one way to, uh, there's only one secret to introducing new varieties onto a US consumer basis in a that kind of scale, and it's right there. The problem is figuring out exactly what that is. Okay? Because that is I work for the the mango company that imports more we import more mangoes from Mexico than anybody now. And we also grow in Ecuador, Peru, u Guatemala, everywhere else. Okay? And the problem is it's not what I care about. It's not what I say.
Makes no difference what I say. What it is is what can the person that we want to sell it to, are they going to buy it?
Because otherwise, you're always going to be going into wholesale markets basically. So the biggest importer of specialty varieties to the United States is Cerui Brothers.
But yet you don't ever see that because we don't market any of our specialty varieties through any chain store. They go through wholesalers in LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, New York, uh, um, in Maryland, Baltimore. Baltimore, thank you. Um, and, um, and Atlanta and also Chicago. And that is and and those areas we send you can send one two containers a week container can has about 25 tons of mangoes 5,544 boxes, right? You can put two of those into a wholesaler before he's where he'll pay you real money and after that he's going to pay you the same price as a Tommy.
So that's what limits how many you grow because until until the consumer tells Whole Foods um everywhere like you were talking about Tiffany's until that becomes a real option for marketing and in the United States you're talking about Walmart, Sam's Club, Costco and Kroger.
That's it. All right. They do not market chaos.
All right. I have tried. I assure you.
They don't know what to do with a chaos.
And they pay you the same price as a Tommy.
So, I'm not going to send any Kaos Seavoy to them. Okay. Perfect. Thank you, Chiago. So, by the way, um Chiago is an author on this talk, by the way.
And that's uh that's my son, my youngest son, and he now works in the Washington state tree industry. He's extension agent in the Yakama Valley and apples, peaches, and cherries. I'm proud of that. But what it is is I'm hoping to that he's being trained in an industry that does things really right to replace me and I can finally retire. All right, so that's my whole plan. All right.
Because he's much smarter than me and better trained and younger and all that stuff. All right. So, what I what we're going to talk about here is future cultivars for the Florida boutique mango industry. So, we've already heard about it. Basically, if you can grow it and you can produce it in numbers, you can make a lot of money growing mangoes in a boutique industry here in Florida. Now, part of the thing is, can you grow it? Can you grow it north of Palm Beach? Well, this winter just showed the problem with that. Okay, so we there are many things that need to be solved, but if we're going to talk about varieties, say, "Does this work, Chug, or no?"
Point it at the laptop, man.
I don't know what I did. Technical difficulties.
>> Okay. All right. Very good. Very good.
Okay. So, I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about So, we all know we grew up with Hayden, Tommy, Kit, Kent, all of those things, right? That's what we all grew up with. That was the mangoes of my father's generation. That was the mangoes of Gary's father's generation. Then Gary um came along and was making all of the new things like um you know sweet tarts and and Venuses and all of those varieties. Um we were I that was what I was working with Gary back in those days and we started working on those. Then what we do, so we have a small operation in Homestead called Mango Men Homestead.
And the idea there was we wanted to grow things that um had flavor production and were innovative. And innovative I can innovative in any way. All right. Just don't want to be I never want to be boring. That is the worst thing you can do for a mango is be boring because we got that. Okay, Tommy Atkins is boring.
It doesn't insult anyone. That is why Tommy Atkins is the number one mango put in markets because it doesn't scare anybody. It doesn't excite anybody. It's just there. It's a piece of fruit you can put there and a retailer can say, "I have a mango." But that's not what we do here in Florida. All right. So we started making mangoes also. So um some of them we find some of them we started to breed. So we have Angie, Kioa, Sassy Love which is one of Gary's, Damos, Diamond, Gem, King Lion, Magma, Nebula, Sunny, the list goes on and on and on.
And just like Chris said, just like Gary said, just like Julian said, it doesn't matter. If you like it and you can grow it, you can sell it. All right? And if and there are people people love good mangoes and if you can make a good mango that you can sell it here in Florida. So we weren't worried as much about that. We wanted again to have things that were unique, different things we liked, things people liked, but we wanted to have things that were productive and again fit our niche for what we were doing. And by the way, none of this I don't care about producing the next mango for or I didn't care about producing the next mango for the commercial mango industry. That's not why we were doing this. I did this to put them through school, my children through school, and to give them the idea that no matter where you are in the United States, you can grow specialty, you can do a specialty fruit business to augment your your income and live and increase your quality of life. That's really why we did it. And by the way, it's worked.
It's it's a very effective thing to do.
And uh so I did I do have a conscience however and so when I was worried about what has happened in the world right there's you're always going to have a plague you have citrus greening it's wiped out citrus industry you have laurel wilt in avocados whenever you have a narrowing of genetics which is what happened with the Florida mango industry that went around the world and produced all of these export mangoes. So, it narrowed this down and you're opening yourself up for destruction. So, in one of those moments laying in bed in in a fever, I came up with the I had this idea that you know what we need to do is reshuffle this deck and come up with a new genetic combination that is not the same old thing. So that when we get the next disease, because by the way I was a mango expert working all over the world and there are diseases out there that will wipe out a mango industry sea and things like that. They are terrible and eventually if you are genetically narrow you will be wiped out.
And by the way, for those of you guys who are in the commercial mango industry in their thing, you know that as the world's climate has changed, which is happening, uh there are problems with having being genetically narrowed.
Big problems. Okay, very big problems.
So, uh we're all living in one right now with the Mexican mango industry. And so there where you will lose thousands and thousands and thousands of productive acres of mangoes due to being genetically narrow and not adapted. So you have to keep up this thing this idea. So the infusion of genes where are they going to come from?
I will tell you I skipped didn't I? Yeah. So there are 70 edible species of mangifera in Asia.
Beyond mango these are unique fruit.
These are not they are not mangoes. They are wild relatives. You have castor you have uh uh asam asam. You have many many many species of these mangoes and they are as wild that's uh the white mango that we all set off and it was a great marketing thing when I was here at Fairchild to to tell everyone we were trying to bring back the white mango and because people rivet on something like that but what we were really doing was trying to bring these back for the genetic potential.
So after spending my uh career here at Fairchild, I ended up with um 20 clonal mangiferous species. So you could either say I was very successful or I wasted my entire career and got 20 trees. All right? So it's either way you can call it, but the bottom line is um no one else had ever done this. Okay?
So we brought in all these species. We characterized them. We did not sit around and say, "Well, we want to look at the international literature." No, no, no. We wanted to make living collections that are characterized. We backed them up in Puerto Rico. my friend uh Ya Ron sitting there. Uh we traveled around the world collecting these these fruits in Southeast Asia and we put them we had them growing and fruing here in Florida and Puerto Rico.
So then we took those trees, we caged them, we put bees in there, we did reciprocal crosses and we did that for over 15 years now.
I'm not a plantreeder. Yaire is a plantreeder and my son is much better trained than I am for plant breeding.
Okay. But me, I'm a horiculturist, but I'm a pretty good talker. Okay. So, what I was able to do was cage trees and I had planted those trees with a with a variety that I figured was going to be a good parent flanked by two different species.
Then I'm really good at manipulating honeybees and I would go and I would put uh pollen in the hives and I would time them and do the whole thing. And that's how we got reciprocal crosses of all of these kinds of crosses here. So you have uh kit by uh Castoui, you have Nam Dakmai by Castor, you have diamond by Rubra Pedala, you have Plutonic Pleasure by Lorina, you have Toadapuri by Quadrifida, Orange Sherbet by Laaji, and vice versa.
Okay, so we're planting what we did, we put them in there, got fruit, we planted seeds of both laos and orange sherbet and we grew them up and when we did that then we started selecting out of those.
We did this all blind. Okay, we did not know what we were going to get. We had no idea whether this was a pipe dream.
We did this again just to increase the biodiversity in mango at the time.
That's what we were trying to do.
Then lo and behold, oh, and by the way, they were planted out at 1 meter spacing. We have no induction. We had no crop protection. We didn't spray any fungicides, anything else. Didn't put any fertilizer, did nothing like that.
And they've been fruiting for the last 15 years now.
There's actually a video on YouTube with Thiago and I sitting at our kitchen table on the first time we tried one of our crosses. These inner specific hybrids are called Wangos. All right.
And Ted Nent, by the way, probably has the I think he has the the um intellectual property right on the name Wango, by the way. But don't don't turn me in that Ted Nent can come after us.
So anyway, he has lots of guns as you know. So anyway, um so these things started to fruit and we started tasting them and we were blown away. We were absolutely blown away. So we started to select these um these wangos. Our initial interest was for genetics, different products, uh, potential roottocks. That's what we were thinking of when we started. So, we were making kimchi from the green mangoes. We were making all sorts of things and trying to come up with new products for our little homeyard. Uh yeah, we we found out, by the way, some of these crosses we have are so strong when they're green that they'll almost move you to a hospital. Okay? I mean, you got to be I mean, these are real.
These are not an Irwin. Let's put it that way. There's plenty to insult in in these vi in these crosses. Um but when we started that again, we then started to look at now we go up to where we are in 2026 and we have 55 Wango selections. We they are all bloom naturally.
They have disease tolerance. They have graph compatibility with mango rootstocks.
They have incredible flavor potentials.
They taste like coconut, pineapple. They taste like Borneo. They taste like durian. They taste like dooku. They taste like all of those crazy fruit that we all love that we all collected in there. They are phenomenal flavor with an incredible potential. And they have this this genetic potential again when you're talking about no bloom induction.
All right. It is not going to be very long until Ecuador cannot induce mangoes into blooming. Peru will not be able to induce Kent into blooming this year because of El Nino. It's going to be a super El Nino. They're not blooming and they're not going to bloom probably. And again, this is because Kents were selected in Florida, not for Peru.
And all of our trees that we selected in Florida that they grow now in Ecuador were not selected for that. So we use chemicals in order to make mangoes bloom in in those. So again, commercially these wangos have an incredible potential in terms of that. Now, um, I eat a lot of mangoes.
A lot of mangoes. Okay. Every day I probably eat 15, 20 mangoes. More than that.
Probably. Probably a lot more than that.
right now. I will tell you that every day now when I cut up mangoes for after dinner to eat after dinner, I don't cut up mangoes anymore. I cut up wangos because the flavors are better than anything else I've been able to get out of our out of my mango varieties.
So, we actually has switched in 2026.
We do not differentiate between um wangos and mangoes anymore.
What I'm saying is we are going to c we're going by cult of ours. It's just like with all the genetic the whole genetic way of looking at everything nowadays. It's not about putting you into a box of what you are.
It's a gene position. It's a combination of genes. So we are going by cultivars and we have some incredibly flavored and different size and looks cultivars that we grow.
That's wildfire. This is so wild. So wild is a combin is a orange sherbet by Laaji and it tastes somewhere in between and it it and if you know Laaji Lao tastes like it tastes like Yeah. It tastes like La Jiu. It tastes like it's a mixture of honey and dooku and and all sorts of other real real tropical fruit. So, this is one of the ones we truly and Whoa, now I just hit that. What did I do there?
Oh, here we go. All right. Just another thing. Uh, while one wild thing, if you got the the idea is if it's a wild mang if it's a Wango, it has wild in the name. Although we now have so many we we we're violating our own rule and we we have all sorts of things. Um wild child long green mostly predominantly green or yellow colored but we do have red ones. Now, I want to do this here because for those of you that are um from the Florida State Heart Society who know the history of the Florida State Heart Society, it was 1910.
In 1910, David Fairchild, who was one of the earliest members of the uh Florida State Hard Society, and in 1910, he reached under the podium in Ocala and he held up what was going to be the future of the mango industry of Florida back in 1910. And it was a Hayden.
And it was a Hayden given to him by o uh by uh by Mrs. Hayden by Florence Hayden out of Coral Gables who was she was sitting in the audience and she had handed David Fairchild the Hayden to hold it up. So I'm going to hold up right now two wild and this one doesn't even have a name yet. These are not mangoes. These are wangos. And in 30 years, we're not going to be talking about mangoes anymore.
This is what we're going to be growing.
And it's going to be all over the world because again, the these again, they're not mangoes, but they came through the cold and they set.
And I had no coal protection on these.
Now, I was in Homestead, so it wasn't as bad as going up there, but I have trees that that aborted a lot of embryos, and these do not. They act. This is not from and these two are not from a mango seed.
These two are from are from one is from a manga rubra pedala seed and the other one is from a manga odora seed.
So neither one of these are are mangoes genetically at all. I mean they're half mango.
So and these are also I got to show these are unsprayed and you know what the weather that we've gone through this year right and I am not in my trees are not in the honey zone.
So these trees are are going through weather. They're producing like this.
This is what will happen to the industry. Now I know I was supposed to talk about uh cultivars for Florida and I apologize Cessor for uh going off subject for that but I wanted to talk about the Florida cultivars that we're going to be talking about in 30 years. 35 years. I'll be dead. But um you know other people will still be here that are in this room including hopefully my son. So and um we'll be growing things like this because these hold an incredible potential. Now another interesting thing about them they also the red color on many of our wangos is not a blush color. Those of us who grow mangoes know what is the actual ripening color of mango or any variety. What's the ripening color? Mangoes turn from green to yellow. That's their ground color. And the red is a blush color which is a different pathway than this red.
This red is a ripening color. So when this goes and it change and it becomes mature and ready to eat, it'll turn red.
So for those of you who are thinking about this about mangoes sitting in boxes and they don't have any light, these go from green to red inside a box. They don't need sunlight.
They don't turn yellow, they turn red.
And actually it's it's not even red.
It's kind of brownish red. Like if you've ever seen a mangro dora or a laaji and you let it ripen, it's ripe in color. It goes from green to brown.
And they don't taste good when they when they're like that, by the way. Now, um the flavors of these again, coconuts, pineapples, durian, everything you can think of. And some of them are a little too much for people.
Um, but I would rather heir on being too much for people than not enough for people because it's easier to tame it down. It's always easier. It's just like when you're selecting mango varieties.
If you start off with a mango variety that's too small, there's nowhere to go. It's very hard.
It's very expensive to make a mango bigger.
It's very cheap to make a mango smaller.
just put more fruit on the tree and it makes a mango smaller and that makes you more money anyway. So you always want to select mangoes in that pound pound and a half range when you're looking for new varieties. Now, that again, I violate my own rule a lot because we're looking at specialty stuff. And for specialty stuff, I'm perfectly fine selecting small mangoes for here in Florida and for any niche market that people are marketing, particularly if you're doing mail order. Small mangoes fit in the boxes and and arrive much better than big mangoes do.
People think it's because we're cheap, but it's not because it's because they actually arrive better because the mangoes don't get smashed as much. All right, so that's what I wanted to say. I didn't know if there were any questions.
I don't know if I have time for any questions.
Yes, Gary, we have all of these at our at our uh at our house.
Yeah. Oh, um you know what? I didn't finish, did I? I look at that. Thank you, Mr. Gary. You are my M. So, every weekend we sell off our porch. We also ship off our porch.
And every weekend we have our uh Wangos for sale.
Again, we don't differentiate. We used to call them wangos. We don't anymore.
We just call them so wild. go wild. Uh, we don't like to use numbers because people get angry with us when we use numbers. I understand why you still use I we get caught in that same thing and when you don't haven't selected it yet and the two things that that'll kill you when you're putting out new varieties for people is um numbers because people don't like it.
Number two is any any ambiguity in your naming people will seize upon it and use it against you. So um that's why I don't believe in naming things super alonso because then they're going to tell they they can use either term on it. You know they'll they they again it's just it's hard to explain to me. I don't like to explain that to people particularly online where people are fast to judge and unkind. Um so the other thing that what we used to do at Fairchild when I would release uh Jackfruit crosses I would put both cross name on the tag. So I'd say China buy black gold and then that was the worst idea because then people that would buy them would either call them China or black gold and and it's not no it's a hybrid. So we I quit doing that too. So you got to be very careful about that.
Um but yeah so these are now being commercial moved. Now we also have our friends from the National Mango Board here. And am I supposed to be able to mention what? Yeah, >> we have we have some uh some questions from the mango board when you're done with your presentation.
>> Okay. Well, I'll let I'll let I'll let him answer that. So, um but they are uh Oh, hold on. I think that's that. So, that's just like last weekend. Some of the ones we have, we now have eightball, crazy eight, snake eyes. Again, we have a lot of selections that have many, many different names.
And so, and and they again, what's incredible about them, Gary, is they're mangoike.
Yeah. They're not they're not species-like. They're mangoike in the way the tree grows and the way you propagate them and all that stuff. And they have I think they have very similar cold tolerance.
I and I don't know if they're going to be more cold tolerant. I have no idea.
But I know that they're at least as cold tolerant as a mango.
And and their bloom time is the same as mango and they go through the weather assignment. And again, none of the we don't use any crop protection on them.
So there is no spring. They have tolerance. They are. By the way, many of these varieties are we are characterizing and doing uh um plant breeders rights on the varieties now. But the um there are varieties that are resistant to mal formation for sure. We have resistance to anthrachnos.
We have um to very good tolerance of powdery mildew and they do get scab elsenoi.
They scab definitely goes after them but I I'll take elsoi. That's okay. It's all right. I still get fruit. All right.
Yes.
>> Curious to know about the rootstock effect. So u other than tarpentine can you recommend any other rootstock which is like suitable for Florida soils?
So I never did uh any variety work on rootstocks. Gary has done a lot of work.
What I do is I've I've used I use tarpentine. I use saber. I've used 13-1.
I've used other things. But I still always go back to um I I I collected a a a rootstock called pea which is a seedling of of um of saber from South Africa and I use that to dwarf my mango trees. The trouble is it takes eight years for me to make a tree this big and it's hard to make money when you're trying to do that.
Particularly again I my orchard is an acre. Okay. And so space is premium and time is money. And if you don't fruit and you don't earn your space, I'm going to cut you down. Okay? That's that simple. And I don't wait for anybody.
It's we got to move on. You got to do that. And so, um, now there are a lot of roottocks that people have worked with and I know Gary uses a lot of different rootstocks. Um, but again, for my operation, we propagate all of our own trees. So, I don't I've never bought an I used to I used to do nursery trees when I was here at Fairchild. I would get the trees for from Gary, but now I make all my own trees. But I hate being a nursery, by the way. You guys have a much harder job than me because it's just not as fun. I like growing fruit. I love growing fruit. I hate making I I hate being a nursery. I don't mind making trees for myself, >> but I don't want to make them for sale.
Yeah.
>> All right. We Hold on. We got time for two more questions. We'll take this gentleman and then we got Ramon and we'll go into lunch and we can chat all we want about mangoes.
So, uh, Yair has one of those. That's That was red, right? Skin color.
>> Yeah.
Right.
>> Right. So that's the thing and my crosses from them are again it was a combination of color. Um I I never actually liked the kit castory crosses for my they didn't work for me but that's just again for for our home scale or our small orchard. It didn't work very well because I didn't like the flavor of them. um they didn't have enough that you know that kind of flavor that they were a little too mild. But I I totally get what yay is saying. I'm not criticizing. I'm just saying that. Yeah.
>> Um thank you Dr. Campbell for such a um insightful I mean for giving us a glimpse of the future with what's uh what could come next to the mango industry. Um this is something that the national mango board we have been discussing for the past couple years three years and that is the future of mangoes and and how how to best support promotion in the industry for once these things become massified they become uh the next best thing in the industry. So, um I have uh uh our our board member here um um uh Luis Cron and also our chairperson is listening in in the online uh for in the in the live stream.
Uh one of the things that we're working with the USDA right now it's uh it's in expanding the definition of mangoes as as to include other species aside mangifa indica. And the reason that we're doing this is I know you're a pioneer in doing all these things. So there's other companies that are probably exploring this stuff as well on a larger commercial basis and and with your feedback and the one of Dr. Aron and the one of Dr. Victor Galan um C um Victor Galan Sauoko sorry um um and the conversations that we have had and so so there's this topic of uh of us and I want to take advantage Nick to use this forum just to get a little bit of feedback from you as members of the domestic mango industry in getting that feedback as of um when in terms of promotion When this happens, we the National Mango Board want to be ready to support and promote and educate the consumer on this market shift as far as supplies supply comes. And so with that, I would love to uh you know, I mean, as as we're doing this, I mean, obviously, we're going to reach out to other stakeholders and and the foreign mango organizations and the foreign producers, but this is an important forum. And then you guys are producing mangoes in Florida. um uh if there's any comments or or or or impressions on what's yet to come or could come to our industry, how could we or if there's any concerns that may we may be seeing as far as expanding this definition just so when it happens we are ready to support promotion of mangifa expanding that definition to support uh uh um the definition of mangifa lu I don't know if you want to add more to that I just said >> one second I mean we're using we've learned so much about magnifra indica and that the base of that research is what we're doing now moving forward and we realize that hybrids are the future disease resistant climate resistant whatever it may be but the research is really being done on magniferindica and now because of the findings we're now moving forward and selecting varieties and crossing them etc etc but we need to be able to protect the industry and control what's out there for the general, by the way, for the benefit of the final consumer.
That's the that's the we just want a better piece of fruit, a tastier fruit, a juicier fruit in the hands of everybody. That's the point. That's the goal. Um, and as volume grows, it's just harder and harder with how things currently are. We're going to need to Dr. Camp's right. The future of the industry is probably Magnifa. We don't even know yet, >> right? Um >> but but I was going to add u and this is my uh so Luis also spearheads the research committee at the national mango board. So I was just thinking right now when I share this with you on the promotional side of this but on the research side it also have an effect.
So, how can we best be prepared and take this experience and and the and the and the feedback from you guys as Florida growers to see how we can you I mean uh go out and and fully flesh this out with USDA and expanding this definition.
>> So, let me uh also grab Ramon will talk forever if you let Ramon talk forever.
But anyway, no, I'm just Ramon's my good friend, sir. Ramon's my good friend. But I just want to say that we did this the way we started working with with making inner specific hybrids. We specifically did that in the in national mango board under the opaces of the USDA and so we did that with with public money. So that means anyone around the world will be able to access the genetics in order to do crosses on their own. Now again as me as a as a plantreeder I can claim I can apply for uh protection and and uh breeders rights on specific varieties that I've made. But everyone else can make their own varieties. And that is the best. That is what I left when I'm dead. That will be the greatest thing that I left behind was the ability for people to make and basically make your own varieties of what you want to do.
Nobody should be stopped from making varieties. And there are commercial companies out there who that's their interest. I am not one of those commercial companies that want to tie up the process. The process must stay public so that it can be done. Now the other thing I want to say is I work for a big commercial company but I live in Homestead. I have mangoes on an acre. I actually have two acres, two and a half acres, something like that.
and we grow mangoes. It's our family business. It's what we do. That's why we did what we did and that's why we'll keep doing what we do.
And everything else that comes from this will be great and wonderful and all that. But I am first and for foremost a Florida mango girl. All right? That's what I am. And I can tell you, you can do things with the this is what I mean once you eat these inner specific hybrids, it shows you a potential that you never that I never knew was in mangoes. And it's it changes the way you look at it. And so I just think it's I I want to make that clear that uh you know I'm not on m I won't I I promised I wouldn't say that I've been thrown off a national mango board many times but I have been. But it's but for just because I talk a lot so that's why >> we got one more quick comment then we're going to go to lunch. Just just real quick, u if any of you would like to address this or or share your thoughts with me, I'll be around all day long.
And again, I I'm carrying your comments, your feedback to uh more conversation with USDA on this regard. You being an important part of our industry, I we certainly value your feedback on that.
So feel free to reach out. If not today in person, I mean, drop me a note and email. So, yeah, we So, right now, uh I know a lot of people have questions, but we're going to move to lunch because we want to keep the program going, so feel free to socialize and everything. We've got a beautiful spread here. All of the mangoes here are actually sourced from the Fairchild Farm. So, we'll uh we'll take a break until about 1:00 1:15. So, everybody feel free to get lunch, socialize, ask questions, get to know each other.
What do you guys think? Interesting.
All right, everyone. If we could have your seats, we're going to continue on with the show.
Did everyone enjoy lunch? Nice lunch.
Keep it light.
So, the mangoes that were used in all the dishes actually come from the Fairchild Farm. A lot of those trees were carefully selected and handplanted by Dr. Richard Campbell many moons ago.
I don't know how many years ago you planted a lot of those trees, but it was a while ago. Uh, and they're still there and they're still producing. So, thank you guys for staying around. This is the second half of our day. We're going to talk a little bit more about bigger production of mangoes. You know, in the morning, we got to hear from a lot of interesting nursery people, Dr. Crane, uh, Dr. Campbell about what's going on in Florida.
It's I always everywhere I travel around the world, it's especially visiting mango growers, it's always interesting to see that the varieties that they're growing millions of cases of all generated were originated within 10 miles of where we're standing right now.
You know, the Kent, the Kit, the Hayden, the Tommy, all of these things. So hopefully, who knows, the next five or six cultivars that'll be super varieties around the world might be standing, you know, five miles from us here. But we're going to start the presentations with Cesa Fo from the National Mango Board.
Uh just take it away.
>> Oh, it doesn't matter.
>> Thank you, Nick. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Savo. I am an industrial manager at the National board and today I will present overview about our organization. Okay.
Okay. The first slide. Let me see.
>> Okay, thank you. Our agenda, National board overview, mango imports to the US, impact of the National board on mango demand in the US, marketing program, research program and industrial relations program.
National board established in 2005. The National More is an agriculture promotion and research group under the USA Department of Agriculture, USDA. The National Mard is funded by industry assessments paid by mango importers and first handlers.
The board is composed of 18 members. All right. Eight importers, two domestic producers, se seven foreign producers, and one first hander of mangoes.
Here we can check the last picture during the our board meeting in 2025.
National board members the total 18 members. You recognize some somebody?
Yes.
It's good.
Our mission is increase the consumption of fresh mango in the US by working as united industry. Our vision for mango to become an integral part of every American diet based on its versatility, flavor and nutritional benefits, positioning mango as one of the top 10 whole foods sold in the western market by 2030. Right today to 2026, we composed the 10th position right with key strategic pillars. The first product quality, market position, consumer education, research and industrial relation.
One information here about the top mango importing countries, United States, the first one, the the the the source the fall in 2023 563 metric,000 metric stone, right? You can check the other countries here.
Evolution 2021, 2022 and 23 from United States.
Mong import volume the all countries for example Mexico the first one the participation 2025 62% Peru 17 Ecuador 8.6 Brazil 6.2 Guatemala 2.4% 4% Dominican Republic 1.4%.
This the six countries the main countries to export mangoes to us. But you can check the others countries here in the follow the follow table.
All right. The top five M import countries but by variety. You can check here in 2024 five the average Tommy Atkins represent 38%.
Atawufu 20%.
Kent 29%. And Kit 9%. Hayden to just 3% and other 2%.
Okay, this slide is very important because look the national award impact on market penetration.
What is this?
When we talk about market penetration, we can talk about the in the with the promotion when the national board promote for example here the market penetration with national board 25.4%.
without national board 22.7%. We have increased 2.7%.
What does that mean? 2.7% more with with market presentation when national board uh included the promotion included our programs in this slide. Promotion averess promotion impact in 2025.
The purchation versus promotion averess not of promotion the percent of not purchase 86%.
The person push pushes 40%.
41% when the consumer not pushes with aware of promotion. Look here 59% when the consumer knows our promotion.
US per capita availability pounds per person per year in 2005 1.9 pounds per person per year after 20 years 3.8 two times more with our promotions.
return on investment ROI.
When for every $1 invested in the national board programs, the industry has gained the benefit equal to 16. When national mong board invert 16 $1 return $16 in the royal.
How does the national board work to increase m consumption into the US right with programs marketing and communication program and research industation.
Market communication includes consumer, nutrition, health, retail, food service, communication and public public relations.
Research ind and and industrial relation includes nutrition health, crop forecast, production and post harvest, food safety, sustainability and industry relations marketing communication program.
Here we can see we can check our agenda our calendar to 2026 look January to December look whole promotions right we divided during the year right for example the nutrition health January to March Cinco de Mayo you know why Cinco de Mayo cin we change the cinco de mango okay the good promotion United States to change Cinco de Mayo to change we change to Cinco de mango Right. And back to school with a baby campaign. E-commerce holidays.
Look the word games. What is this? What this starts s yesterday the world cup right? The national board promote.
We we stay during this event. In this case the world cup during the world cup our promotion in this case here one example. The hour fly about the sinko the mango bring joy to every fiesta right look the dishes the receipts other examples about materials again our flyer about the world cup the m go what's happened because Sometimes the in the the Mexico for example in Brazil the the people asking to me oh Cesar why you can put the mong go with L here because remember the promotion we start here United States not not in Brazil in Mexico right okay our visibility and impact of our research for example here New York Post scientists surprised to discover for a simple enjoyable way to lower diabet risk. Right? We have a lot a lot studious research about diabetes. For example, in the our program the the nutritional health here insulin sens sensitivity benefits poss the the Here we can see our margo. Why we promote? Look at the colors. The vibrance colors, right?
For this you need starts learn to consumer mangoes, right?
Look at the promotion. Look into the picture.
What is this variety?
It's a mango, right? The creative strategy, right? To win our our audience with her of content that will diligent new parents. It's very very important for us, right? F joy the educational to kits incentive the mong trial regenerate opportunity reach a new audience through the new parents and babies into the lifelong mangoes fans by highlighting the powerful nutritional story of fresh mango it's a fun and healthing way it's correct right our programs with influencers Look, the young chef's academy. Look, the kids here prepared some dishes.
Put the mangoes this way. Maru and Tango, Mango Master.
This promotion starts maybe in August for this year.
Retailers and the whole sales segments.
Here we can check some photos, some pictures with our promotion. For example, cinco deco mango again the beans in the retail in supermarkets.
Look at the manager the choice the mangoes prepare the the space some apps some flyers right increase point of sales exposure provide key resource to incorporate in new retailers right it's our 20 26 retail level plan to this year now we talk about our research and in relation I start with nutritional health program in this case. Let me Okay. Diabetes, cardiovascular health, gastrointestinal health, cognitive health, obesity and management, immunction in the new areas, skin, eye, kin health and etc. Okay. Production and post-h harvest.
Roottocks, nutrition, fertilization, migration, pruning and flowering management with evaluation, growth regulators, effect of chimant use, effect of different pruning types, baby mango to pest and disease, untrain for example which broom is bruha fruit flies on and fruit flight cultivars and genetics potential cultivars for the USA market and genetic markets.
Research continues harvest determination of harvest and maturity stage storage temperature and measurement modified and controlled atmospheres dry matter accumulation quarantine treatments and hot water and radiation treatments. Post harvest and best practice manual. Two manuals fresh good mango with manual and strategies for president fresh good man and quality.
Here we can check the two manuals post har managed practice manual and fresh good for best practice.
Here we can check our website. For example, we can put the search this in this box. The search the year and the author and the type. We can file some research and documents. We produce it in program.
Here we can check our website.
The industrial relation program croper part updated weekly it's very important to us maybe our mango volume inventory system industry events import outreach meeting outreach workshops monthly webinars international publication and communication in this case our video podcast and tools food safety sustainability harvest manual fresh good manual packing house energy saving your ripening guide video series.
For example, in our website, we can check some videos about mango ripening benefits, rip in general procedures, right? In this case, we can put here ripening guide series and quality control series, right?
And here our monk food safety website this website and these materials in monk food safety we can check in English Spanish Portuguese and creole the the languages for example monk foods safety.org work.
We have some flyers with basic food safety training for new employees, right? It's very very important for us to uh a lot tools, a lot um apps to start for the safety food safety training for new employees. For example, in this case, one second here. I can share with you guys for new employees. For example, you know about the importance to training the new employees. Just share a few.
In this interactive program, we are going to learn some basic rules that we have to follow when working with mangoes to prevent their contamination. It is very important to always follow these rules at work. Please click on each icon and listen carefully to the lesson.
>> Let's start here. For example, let's wash the hand.
>> Hand washing. The single most important practice for minimizing the risk of mango contamination is handwashing.
It is very important that you wash your hands before starting to work and after taking a break or using the restroom.
Click on the video to view the correct hand washing procedure when working in the mango field.
>> Remember, I'm a new employee, right? New new employee.
These are the five steps for washing your hands correctly.
Step one, wet your hands with clean water. Step two, put on soap. Step three, scrub your hands and forearm. Do not forget to scrub the areas under your fingernails and between your fingers.
This step should take 10 to 15 seconds.
Step four, rinse thoroughly with water.
Step five, dry your hands with a paper towel or any other approved method. Some companies may require the use of hand sanitizer after washing your hands and before starting work. If this is the case, do not skip this step.
>> Okay. The new employee, watch this movie, this video. Next, >> handashing activity. On the screen, there are five photographs representing one of the handwashing steps. Drag and drop each step number over the corresponding image.
>> Could you help me guys? Number one, where here?
Yes or no?
No. Right.
>> Uh, yes. Let me see. Here.
>> Okay. Perfect. Number two.
Soap. Good.
Number three.
here.
>> Number four.
>> Number five.
Remember new employee at the contract to you. Ah, it's correct. Thank you guys.
It's approved to start the job.
Okay. It's just one example in our tools in our website. It's very simple, right?
simples but it's very important to the industry the the others uh those two for example the learning produce food safety mangos look here looks what's happened here it's incorrect right it's correct way the new employees can learn every every training okay about our member sustainability program Uh we have a three points sustainability manual to growers and pockers packers self assessment tool and action plan. It's very very easy to use.
A lot mango growers packing house use this tool.
Our web our video podcasts, right? We invite some industry members to talk about the the situation, the the volumes, the new challenges in the mango industry in each country.
our webinars, webinar library in our website. When we conclude some research, some investigation in the during the year, we invited the research to provide the update about the the the project, right? And we publish in our website.
Yes. In two language. Thank you. English in Spanish and sometimes in Portuguese too.
Thank you.
Here webinar in this case Her Venuela present evolate the impact of integral gradation and release model on established fruitfly free zone or areas in mango export region to the US. Dr. Sonetto practical guidance to implement good practice in small and medium mango or shirts. It's very very interesting.
Our M supplier database national m board can't provide a specific a specific company a specific or short a specific farm and we invited the industry members to to search in our database the companies to enter the contact and here our agenda for 2026 for example here fat tropical garden in We can check here. Puerto Valarta, Mexico, Mexico, Ecuador.
We went we we have to go to Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, right? Colombia and Guatemala. Last one.
>> Okay guys, Ram, please.
>> So many just a quick comment on the database uh supplier. supplier the mango supplier database. So many times uh folks reach out to us in the office. Uh we get phone calls asking for mango suppliers, you know, I mean large mango suppliers or or very specific mango suppliers. In example, domestically produced mango. And by by law, by by by our compliance uh um guidelines, we just cannot point a finger at any particular or specific, oh, you got to talk to Julian and their team or or No, we cannot do that. The most we can do is direct people to the database so they can research it and then pick their own or or you know, I mean, work with whomever they want to. So what I'm saying is that if uh if your name if you're a domestic grower and your name is not there take a moment to go into our website uh and you can um upload your data register. It takes less than a minute and then your name is out there and then multiple times like say when when we we don't do referrals but we refer people to go to that place. Thank you.
>> Thank you.
Now I will put the one video here.
Any other questions about the Mango board? Very critical organization for >> Thank you, Nick. Also, >> can I put the video, Grandma? What do you think?
>> Do you want to play the video?
>> Oh, I thought there were going to be some questions, but uh just real quick, um um this is a project. This is just a a promotion, right? A 30 second commercial. Uh we're doing something unique this summer. Uh I believe uh we're going to air this in late July or early August. Um three four years ago we did a series. It's called the origin series. And then um with our mission being increase the consumption of mango and then based on their flavor, their versatility, uh their nutritional value and their uh culture. Um one of the things that uh it's interesting to see is uh at least from some regions, I mean or the regions where we import mangoes the most, um there was this work out there uh looking at all these cultural at all these geographical places Peru or California, Puerto Rico, even Miami. And so with uh with that said, um this year we're because of that project never got to be aired uh by a streamliner, we were able finally, you know, to partner with a a a a TV station uh channel. It's called Discovering America and we'll we'll definitely promote this, but uh turns out that all eight episodes are going to be aired. They're like 20 25 minute episodes and Dr. Richard Campbell has graciously served to be our our um presenter moderator for that. So, he was brought back to uh um kind of an introduce all these uh regions to us. Uh this is a 30 secondond commercial. I just wanted to put it out there. So, uh, whenever we're ready in the next 60 30 45 to 60 days, uh, you'll be able to, uh, hopefully catch this. It will air on Discover America. That is a platform from, uh, out of Warner Bros. uh, and then later after they all air, we'll definitely put them on YouTube as well on our own uh, domestic platforms. Go ahead.
One fruit can take you around the world.
From the deserts of California to the streets of Mexico to the coastlines, markets, and kitchens across the Americas, mango shows up in ways you'd never expect. In the hands that grow it, the meals that bring people together, and the cultures that shape it.
>> Welcome to >> Because behind every bite, there's a story to tell.
>> The Spirit of Mango. Saturday mornings at 8 only on Destination America.
>> Yes.
>> Looking forward to share that with all of you. Thank you.
>> Thank you so much.
>> Thank you. National Mango Board. Let's give him another round of applause.
Great job, Cesar.
>> Well, that was very interesting uh informative. Mango board is spending our as every time I meet with them, they said, "Don't forget it's your money because we're we also contribute to the mango board as growers and importers."
So, it's good to see that the money is getting spent promoting mangoes. Um, all of us know, love, we eat mangoes, but there's a lot of people in the states who are learning to appreciate mangoes for the first time. So, part of our job as marketers of mangoes is kind of getting people to have a great first experience because I remember Cesar was at the farm yesterday and he was eating mangoes. He ate 25 mangoes in about two hours. I don't know how he's still here and doesn't have diabetes, but you know, we take it for granted because we're from South Florida or Brazil or India or Puerto Rico where we're from and we grew up with mangoes. But a lot of people trying mangoes for the first time in Iowa and Kansas really, you know, the the bread basket of America, we want to make sure that those mangoes are the best quality they can they can get. I mean, I wish everybody could get lemon zest and orange sherbets and those things, but you know, it's the National Mango Board is out there promoting the research, promoting the development, promoting the marketing. So, we really appreciate you guys as a title sponsor of this event. And for now, we will segue into the USDA mango germ plasm resources by Dr. Shad. Um, for those of you who don't know, Chapman Field has been a resource for the USDA for over 100 years. It's right down the street.
So, they're always doing interesting things there. Dr. Shad will fill us in.
All right. Thank you very much. Um, sorry.
>> Can you hear me?
>> Yes. I thought I'm pretty loud so I can just talk with All right. So, uh, thank you very much, Nick, for inviting and Carl and the rest of the group for inviting me and uh, it's a pleasure. So today in this afternoon I'll be giving you an overview of the USDA mango germ plasm uh collection focusing primarily um on our efforts to conserve and to characterize the the germ plasm and then the USDA's efforts in genomics uh tissue culture and metabolomics and other efforts that are going to improve and um uh accelerate the improvement of uh mangoes.
So our um collection it is in Miami. It is part of the USDA national uh plant geroplasm system uh which is crucial for national food security.
The NPGs it operates 22 gene banks all across the country. Um it manages 200 plus crops and it maintains more than 600,000 unique kind of plunger plasm uh excessions and it distributes every year more than 200,000 research samples to all around the world.
our u work here in Miami.
It is uh part of the NPGS 10ear strategic plan which is to strengthen the national planer plasm system to conserve and to utilize and many of you spoke. It's not just about conservation but also about the utilization of the crab germplasm that is important not only for our generation but also for the future generations too including mangoes.
The station that we have here, it is the national germplasm repository. We host several uh other tropical and subtropical food crops primarily mangoes and avocados, but also others such as lychi, seapodia and so on and so forth.
So all these genetic resources that we conserve here at the station, we not only conserve them but we are to characterize them and they can serve as valuable genetic resources for developing uh varieties for other specialty crops too.
Our overall vision at the USDA ars is to find solutions to agricultural problems that affects American everyday from field to table and uh within the mango program. So our purpose is to support our stakeholders by uh providing well- characterized and improved gerlasm so that they can be used for developing neutron enriched disease resistance and um other varieties that are adapted to abiotic stresses.
So here is an overview our of our project. So our objectives it spends the whole gym plasm management pipeline.
Primarily it consists of maintenance, acquisition, distribution and we have started the tissue culture of our germplasm too including mangoes.
Genotyping developing molecular markers to speed up the breeding of cultivars.
That's also one of our major objectives.
Evaluating marketability and nutritional traits that is uh vitamins, minerals and metabolites and sugar contents. These are also some of our objectives too. We also develop pre-breeding populations and we have started integrating artificial intelligence and hyperspectral imaging and other high-tech technology to characterize our germ plasm and to bring value to our germ plasm.
So now to the to the collection. So the USDA um collection currently we have 278 expressions. There is substantial um diversity both uh in phenotypes as well as in genetics and uh these collections that we conserve here as I mentioned in the beginning it not only serves as a source for uh traits and for genes for solving current problems that our growers face but also for the future generations too.
So where did our germplasm originate from? um most of our collection it originated in the USA but also from other countries too primarily in South Asian uh countries.
Now here is the interesting thing that many of our geroplasm mangoes they date back to more than 100 years. So these geroplasm resources they are not only historically important but also genetically important too.
uh and I'm glad that Richard and others spoke about uh this uh this slide. They took the information from me. But anyway, acquisition and safeguarding wild germplasm uh the crop relatives of mangoes. It is important um not only for uh especially for future because there are several traits and genes that have been lost during domestication.
So these wild um resources can provide those genes and traits that uh our growers need especially now and also in the future too. So what we are doing is that at the station we have acquired several almost 10 of these wild relatives and uh we have established them at the station. Now it is very hard to get these germplasm resources from their uh center of origins in Southeast Asia and I think uh Dr. Jer Aaron of the Martics farm for coordinating these efforts to safeguard these germplasm resources. Now here is an an important thing that I want to mention that we planted all these wild gerasm very strategically among the pladian cultivars because there is a chances of natural hybridization and hopefully one of the younger generation people they will be able to use these germplasm for identifying unique uh combination of the these different genetics.
In addition to conserving the major collection, we also develop and maintain pre-breeding populations. Currently, we have 13 polycross populations and seven open pollinated populations. These populations they can lead to new genetic uh combinations. For example, here this is a progyny that is the result of kit which is a pladian cultivar with nam dak mai which is an indo-chinese uh cultivar. Not only it is important for creating new genetic combinations but also these populations allow us to do genomics, breeding and genetic studies too.
uh tissue culture it is one of the most important uh aspect of our project that we have recently started. Our main purpose is to safeguard our germplasm and tissue culture. We know it that there are diseases, there are hurricanes and there are other issues. So in order to safeguard our germplasm, we have started tissue culture. uh all the key laboratory uh infrastructure everything is in place and uh we have started developing uh aseptic culture methods. Importantly we have tested embry rescue. Again it is important to develop an embryo rescue method especially for those grasses that are wild. If you are crossing a wild with a cultivated uh cultivar sometimes the embryo it will drop. uh so in order to capture that unique genetic combination it is important to have the embryo rescue uh method so I'm glad that again I'm going to be putting you on spot treasured that's very good that uh that that we are on the same track to develop methods where we can capture most of the genetic um alals and genes that are in the wild uh cultivars in the wild germ plasm uh breeding we Now it is challenging and slow just like any other tree uh because of a lot of reasons primarily long juvenile period which can span anywhere from 4 to 8 years and it requires more than I would say 20 years for a cultivar to develop. So it's a long time and in addition to that there is very high hrozygosity in mangoes and there is a very complex inheritance patterns for many of the traits including transgressive uh segre segregation. So then what is the solution? How do we reduce this breeding cycle? So to do that uh one of the way is to apply marker assisted uh breeding and genomic selection. These are some modern tools that can be used. So uh how does it help? It helps selecting those traits that we are looking for uh fruit for example fruit quality or resistant to anthropos or other diseases in the fruit. So we can select for those traits applying mass and use a genomic selection tools right at the seedling stage reducing the breeding cycle by almost four uh four to eight years.
So towards these goals um when I took over this job so it is not just a curator but I decided to apply all these different genomic tools in the collection. So what we did is that we um sequenced uh all 257 of our accessions using 25fold genomic coverage that is the reference genome of Alpano and uh based on that using a lot of different filters and everything we came up with a high density uh snip array there's 137 uh000 that are almost equally distributed throughout the genome of mangoes. Now this genomic infrastructure it provides a foundation for us to conduct genomewide association studies. What does that mean? Is to identify genetic markers that are linked to specific trait for example anthroposine resistance or polyriani or things like that. In addition to it also allows us to look at the genetic diversity of our collection. Uh I also want to mention that we have sequenced three of the wild cultivars too. One of them is casuri um alessimma and u uh there is another ones too. So of them we also sequence them too just to see that you know what is the genetic variation and lo and behold there's a lot of genetic variation almost they are you know completely different uh genre.
So we also uh use this information for conducting genetic studies and population structure analysis too. I don't have time to tell you that you know how much we have done but I will just talk about the polymbbriani which is an important uh trait for rootstock development and also for nursery propagation too. What it is that uh in the mono embriionic cultivars you have only one embryo it gives to one one seedling. In the polymbbriionic such as meendi and fiji you have multiple embryos and they give rise to multiple seedlings all but one of them they are exactly identical to the uh to to to the mother plant. So that means it captures the genetics of the mother plant and that is important for uh for not only breeding but also for uh developing uh root stocks. So using the snip data that I showed you and also um the phenotypic data that we have we know that which one of our expressions are mono embriionic which one of them are polybriionic. So we did uh genomide association studies and based on that we using different statistical models we were able to identify a single um very significant peak on um chromosome 17 and that's about 260 kilobases um linkage dise equilibrium block within this block there are a lot of genes but one of the one of the gene that's called putin rk4 like that is the strongest candidate for controlling polymbbriani.
Now, interestingly, this gene is the homologue or the relative of the same gene that is responsible for polymbbriani in uh in citruses. So, that means there is a the genetic mechanism for controlling polymbbriani. It is conserved evolutionarily among many different plants.
Now, what we do so that's a that's a basic research. But at USDA ars we are always working for something that has practical applications. So we took this information the GW was all these snips and converted them into molecular markers that are very um breeder friendly. Anyone can apply them with very little um resources invested in their labs to look for polyriani at the very early stage. So among these we converted five snip markers into CASP and pass SAS. We validated them on 380 individuals at our station including some of the breeding populations and we were able to um to predict polyani at the seedling stage very accurately with almost 100% accuracy.
Now this is something that's very uh interesting. our studies at um this especially this high uh uh high density snip data and the phenotypic data it allows us to expand the genetic the genetics of our breeding populations. So that's the that's the way it's not just for uh um developing molecular markers but also for identifying um you know which one are the best parents so that we can expand the genetic uh background.
I don't want to be too much technical but um it can help us reduce the genetic bottlenecks that the pluradian cultivars have gone through because we know it that a majority of them they originated from head and just one genetics. So in order to reduce those risk risks of genetic background uh genetic bottlenecks and also the monoculture which is not good uh we know that we need to expand the genetic background.
So this high density genetic genetics it allows us to burn to select the right parents with the right phenotype with the right disease resistance with the right fruit quality traits with the right food size.
Now we all know that nutrition is important. Everyone is paying attention to it. So we know that we always talk about this is flavorful mango, this is uh you know tasty and all these things but we often ignore that they are mangoes are loaded with different vitamins health promoting promoting compounds. So in order to find out that you know what is the variation in in addition to the genetic variation what is the variation in the nutritional profile of our collection. So so far we have conducted mineral analysis and unargeted metabolomic analysis of 42 excessions. This allows our breeders and other people to select the uh right accession with the right uh nutritional profiles.
And uh with that I have to um acknowledge our team members, our technical staff, our field crew whose expertise in different field operation in genomics, data analysis, in tissue culture they help us achieve our task and our goals.
And I would also al also like to take thank our collaborators in the academia, the University of Florida and University of Central Florida and a lot of scientists within USDA. Also I would like to take the to thank the national mango board by supporting our program and the fair child botanical garden. The history of the collaboration between fair child botanical garden and USDA it goes long long way back. many of our um mangoes that perhaps you're going to be testing tomorrow. They were donated by Fairchild Botanical Garden years. Also, I would like to thank our u uh our um industry partners uh several of them uh Jaron of Marti Spam in Puerto Rico. They have been very helpful because safeguarding these wild relatives, it is important. So, I'm very thankful to Jer.
He's here in the audience for uh donating these gerlasm to our collection.
And uh with that I know that I hurried up everything. Uh most of our information it is um is published and I would be glad to answer any questions that you have.
>> Wow, that was a fascinating talk. It's always good to do a deep dive into the science and for me it's good to know what our tax dollars really are at work uh with the USDA. Does anybody have any questions for Dr. There you go.
>> So, uh, majority of the studies in the literature are actually evaluating rootstock using biotic stress or abiotic stress like considering one factor at a time. Think about like a drought stress.
So, plant accumulate more optic acid.
Talking about disease or pest infestation, so plant accumulate more salicylic acid or jasmmonates.
But in the real world scenario it's a interaction nowadays what is happening there is a biotic and abiotic stress interaction. So is there a particular section from USDA like research area where they are focusing how the plant will respond when these both stresses combined because that will be more likely the real world scenario. So what do you think about that? So uh we not have an actor uh program and that's a very good question because we need to remember that abiotic speciotic stresses they go hand in hand there are several uh molecular mechanisms for example dismic acid salicylic acid they are interconnected uh thank you so um at the station we don't have any active program our goal our focus is on conservation that's a Good question and uh I did not what happened to my talk. I did not put the uh the slide because I removed it because of the for the time sake but we do screen our germ plasm for uh for biotic stresses for diseases for example for anthrachnos. So we did find a lot of variation. Now about the abiotic stresses so everyone knows that cold snaps it can really reduce yield. So we uh looked at the bloom damage of our entire collection. We did find there is a a lot of variation. Some of them were damaged, others were not. And I do not want to just jump ahead of myself, but using the G-W was analysis, we were able to identify certain peaks that are related to uh to cold to cold stress. So yeah, thank you. Any other questions?
All right, Dr. Sha, thank you very much.
Great presentation.
They um I believe USDA will be here at the Mango Festival on Saturday and Sunday. Are you guys going to have somebody here or >> uh hopefully >> hopefully hopefully government budget cuts.
We got to work with what we have. So now we're going to get on to the market opportunities segment of the program. Um our first speaker is Daniel Ibahra from Splendid by Poranid. Um, as we mentioned before, the big the heavy hitters in the mango industry are the Mexicans. They've since NAFTA, they've really been planting and pumping out mangoes, 95 million boxes last year. There's weeks, you can correct me if I'm wrong, I think the Mexicans cross four, five, six million boxes some weeks. So, there's a lot of mangoes coming out of Mexico.
They are the biggest mango trading partner. I think they represent 70 or 80% of the entire mango industry in the US. So Danielle will give us a great representation of what the Mexicans are doing new things and take it away.
>> Well, uh, thank you for the mango board for the invitation and thank you everyone.
Uh, first of all, uh, I would like to tell you that English is my second language, so any common mistakes are welcome to correct.
Uh, we are located in Noraloa. North Aloa. It's uh just below Sonora and we're in the northern part of Mexico. Uh that part in particular has uh a non uh non treatment for the fruit flies for the fruit flight. So we do not have to make any hot water treatment for any exports.
That's the protocol we have with the US market.
We have the main varieties which is what we already have uh adult for stomach, ks and kits. We do have a little bit of some other varieties which are Haydens Manila, Nambai, Crayol, Almer sensation, R2u and there's in the north of Sinaloa which is there's Calypso also as well.
Like I said, one of our advantage that we have there is a fruit fly free production zone which doesn't need any hot water treatment which that helps on the shelf life of of the fruit and primary our main customer is the US.
We are 11 hours from the border. So what we pack we can have it there for next next day and if we can do other secondary markets but where we are located we should usually we ship it by air because it's uh the logistics the ter the land logistics is very expensive so it's not very competitive where we are located so our strengths that we have there like I said we have a very in the Mexican market there's a very strong demand in the in the market however it gets uh filled very fast and we have some very some uh key cl key challenges which is the climate right now uh we have some lower yields this year because there is a climate going on and that's part of the particular the of the challenges that we have that we have to build we have to connect with genetics to make a stronger or adapt more adapt uh uh varieties for this uh climate change that is going on right now.
Uh I'm going to I'm going to like we said we have the our main varieties that we have in the US market but I'm going to try to get into in those niches which is is our opportunities that we have for the market right now. For example, in kids, there's a niche for green immature uh kids for some ethnic groups. So, that's one of the opportunities we have for for customers there.
This is uh more like for Vietnamese, Thailand, Philippines and Indians communities that they buy this this uh specifically when it's the fruit is in mature.
However, they buy it they buy it when the the fruit is ready to be harvest.
But this is for a niche market.
We do have also when the fruit in Kent's varieties when the fruit is ready to eat. That's another niche.
It does have a challenge also because making it ready to eat is not as easier as making an avocado. Mangoes are more difficult to make them ready to eat.
We have atulfus there is a high uh acceptance there. Um actually in in in in atos what what you really have to do is get in those niches in the big size fruit which is the the fruit that has a better value for the customers.
We have Haydens. Haydens is another variety that they are they want it ready to eat to also and that's also for a niche market.
What I'm what I'm saying niche market is that you can buy a box uh 9 pound box and when it's harvest just like anything with with like all the varieties you can buy it at $5 and when it's ready to eat and right from the from the fields you can buy it at 20. So it's a big difference but it's a big challenge to harvest from the fields directly.
Uh we have nomine also that's a another variety that we can have harvest and this variety is it's new in noraloa in Mexico has been for so many some for some years but in nursing law has come and there is a growing some growers are growing in their fields with these varieties because it has a good accept acceptance in customers also we have Palmer varieties which is another of the varieties that for some customers they want.
Calypso this uh variety it's um it's from Australia and it's a variety that they actually you have to pay uh um what's it royalties? Thank you. You have to pay royalties for that selling that variety.
There's another uh Israeli variety which is growing also it's R2E2 like Star Wars and also it has a very good acceptance in the market.
Now saying that another opportunity that we are seeing in customers are the special packings in in the mangoes especially when you are you're talking about three to four pieces. That's what um mango board says from customers are actually buying when they go to the to the re to the supermarket. So if you can help them having already the packing there and if you can make it easier for them to be picked will help them a lot and that will help also with uh with uh added value for the customer.
Uh especially when you're making organics and you you make a difference from conventional fruit. You can you do the packing and that will help the retail customer to be selling to their their main customers.
Well, uh what we're seeing here in opportunities for the niche markets are the difference in varieties. Um ethnic markets are getting bigger in a asking for special varieties like Dr. go was uh was uh presenting uh for example um the Alonso variety which is a big big deal in India. It's a big deal here in the US but it's it it does have a challenge how it's grown here in Mexico and how it's grown in the India. So that's one of the other the varieties for example that we could be checking if we could grow more for those special customers and also we have to be checking for uh some uh government goodmer uh markets that they want um a special pack fruit.
That's some of of the challenges that we could be trying to get uh to get those added value for our customers.
So what we are seeing for the future is that there's a climate adaptation and the next is a big deal here that we could be asking especially for you guys who are in this field which is the strength there's technology right now which I know you guys uh talk about crisp for example that some other commodities are already using that could help us Um, when you check on Google, which are the main things that they check for mangoes is how to cut a mango and you make a seatless mango. I know it sounds ridiculous, but they make seedless lemons, limes, and watermelon.
So, that's that could be something. And that's some of the the things that we should be trying to aim. What's the difficulty for the customer?
that what what is what they're looking for? They're trying to make a to try on a fiberless fruit which is something that we should be looking for.
diversification. Like I said, we have to find those uh niche markets in especially in Mexico where you have a lot of fruit, a lot of mango fields, you should try to be especially for new growers, you you should be aiming for those niche markets. that could help you not getting in between the big guys who are like growing a lot and that will help you a lot with your with your uh with your business. I mean for importing fruit and innovation and growth. Um well I think uh right now for for example technologies should be like I said Chris but uh also we should be using more drones fumigations for any fertilization all those irrigation systems that we have they have now you could be helping a lot um AI that's another part of the deal that we should be aiming to and well that's it that's what the future of the industry will not depend only in just growing mangoes. I mean we do know how to grow mangoes. Mangoes it's it making it relative to other fruits is relative fair easier to grow.
It does have a challenge but it is it is fairly easier to grow than our other commodities. But the thing is that right now it's getting more competitive also.
is getting um it's getting a lot of climate changes.
So that's something that we have should be aiming to try to make our difference from the other growers.
Thank you very much.
>> Great presentation.
I I as a a grower and importer of mangoes definitely hear what you're saying. I mean, we've the whole tree ripen Hayden thing has just blown up over the last couple years and the amount of mangoes coming out of Mexico, specialty varieties just keeps going up and up. So, you know, people are, you know, tomies, atos, they're always going to have their place, but you have to ready to eat. You've got to diversify to survive. You know, the I think what's happening now with the American public with mangoes is what's happened 10, 20 years ago with grapes and apples. You know, when I'm I'm 39 years old. When I was a kid, there was green grapes, red grapes, green grape, green apples, red apples. Now there's cotton candy co there's 25 varieties. And the interesting thing is that you go to Publix and they have regular grapes for $1.99, but then they have the cotton candy for $5.99 and people are buying more cotton candy than the regular grapes. So I think mangoes now that the American public is introduced to them, they said, "Okay, we've had a Tommy, we've had a Kent, we've had a Kat, we had Tufo is good. What can we pay a little bit more for that's better?" And that's kind of what the mango board working with importers, growers is trying to figure out, you know, what are the next varieties that are going to come and really take the market by storm because there's I mean if you go to some of the you know truly tropical or you go to Zil or you go to any of these farms I mean you eat some of these mangoes it'll blow your face off. Orange sherbet coconut cream I mean they're they're another level. They're not really commercial but out of the hundreds of varieties are there you know there is something that is out there and there's something that can really take the market. So, does anybody have any questions for Danielle?
Get my exercise in.
>> Thank you, Senor. Just a just a comment, Danielle. I think uh you hit the nail on the head with uh uh when you mentioned innovation as a as a part of the game here, you know, and uh uh interestingly enough, our retail marketing team this year, I've started uh working on on on something unique and special. Um you also mentioned uh um um um you know I mean that uh most people when they go online they are just looking at how to cut how to handle how to pick and choose a mango. I mean those are the basic questions. How do you handle a mango? How do you enjoy eating this fruit not as a food ingredient but as a you know I mean just cutting it and and processing it. So one of the things that we've done this year is in all the ad in the ads that we put together and Caesar mentioned it as well the importance of promotion you know I mean when you have promotion out there there's four times more likely the consumer is going to buy knowing that this thing it's out there. So just something little uh a little something that we have done and and that it's working very well is that in all the ads that uh we um negotiate with the retailers uh when the mango gets published now we're putting the little logo mango mango.org 4G and so people now have in the opportunity you know I mean to see that that is a website about mangoes and uh and hopefully you know I mean there is a we're trying to find a way to measure that but uh definitely an opportunity to go out and also in our website the most visited web page it's how to cut a mango and then there's all the recipes but that's a that's an opportunity I think once we educate the consumer enough on how to handle a mango uh whether it is having Then bridging from um fresh cut or uh mango as a part of a in food service as a part of a a dish going into then the consumer trying the real deal which is buying a whole fresh mango and then learn how to cut it, how to pick and how to eat it. I think we're on the right track to get more and more consumers to not only I mean try mangoes and then even jump into the more specialty uh varieties which are domestically produced and higher priced but them understanding and realizing how to handle those. I think we're in the right direction. So innovation is a good a good thing and I just wanted to uh comment on that as well. Thank and I will add another thing that at the end is that um also the young generations they would like to connect what they are buying from and just giving you a small commercial we sell a brand which is called Jaguar and that connects with people because we do um give to Jaguars we uh we sell uh boxes with of boxes of mangoes with the brand Jaguar we donate for Jawware conservation and so also there is another brand which is very strong here especially here in Florida which is water for all that's another brand that also has a very good connection because they go to other places and they try well they they do make actually themsel with their own hands with they go and try to go and bring water for communities where they don't have water portable So what I'm saying is that uh that's another niche that we we should be aiming to to try to connect with the community what that we sell.
>> Thank you very much.
>> One more one more just uh Daniel, excuse me. Um tell us a little bit about you're you're in a unique situation because you you're a grower in the in a fruit fly free zone.
Um and h how is what do you have to do to maintain that? What's different? But I know that you don't have to treat your mangoes, but what what goes into it year dayto day for you to maintain that kind of status in your area and what are what are a little bit of the challenges that you have if any?
>> Well, there is a there is a an association and there is a from from the government that it's uh monitoring there is no flight. They do put trams and they put uh different um like Yeah. So they they do this these tramps so they can they can uh trying to be checking how is it the song. Uh the main the main thing is that the winter is so is very cold for the fruitly. That's that's the main that's the main barrier.
Yeah. That but that's the main barrier.
That's that's why you do not have that thing here in the US. You can bring it because in the US you you have uh different climates.
But if the farther you go to the norer, it's it's more difficult for the fruitfly to to grow.
>> No, no. We are we are in the sea in the sea altitude.
Well, thank you very much, Danielle.
Appreciate it. Great presentation.
We've got our So, going from Mexico in the northern hemisphere, we're going to another big player in the southern hemisphere. We have Daniela Mononttoya from Composol.
Probably I would say the one of the biggest, if not the biggest export of mango from Peru. Um, most of it is Kent, correct?
Yes, >> most of the varieties can't u mangoes, you know, recently, not in the last couple decades. Now, mangoes you get 365 days a year. So, Mexico, Guatemala, the Caribbean, they go down to Ecuador, Peru, Brazil. So, we always have a good supply of mangoes. And looking forward to hearing what Daniela has to say about the Peruvian mangoes.
>> Thank you so much. Excited to be here.
Thank you, the mango or also congratulations to Mexico because you guys won yesterday. Of course, like a little acknowledgement All right, there we go.
>> Perfect. Thank you so much. I can still use this, right? Okay. Um, short and sweet. I I tried to do this the most dynamic possible. So, here we go. The agenda is basically a quick mango overview. Then we we jump into the Peruvian mangoes, some opportunities, of course, some challenges and then new genetics. New genetics and trials. Okay.
So, if we're going to talk super fast about mango worldwide producers, we know that there's Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala, Equator, like many other countries. But then there are also some origins that we do not necessarily get here in the US which is also Thailand, India, Cambodia, Dominic, well Israel and many others right now in the mango world we have so many varieties. There are like so many for us to choose at Kit Tommy and then so many others right the Palmer Hayden Edwards and many new genetics. So for example, I wanted to jump super fast and deep on everybody here, I'm sure, loves mango. Whoever goes to, for example, India and you want to see some, hey, I'm on the supermarket, I want to get some mangoes.
So many varieties, right? And it's we're talking about one particular fruit, different varieties, different shape, different size, different taste. So So how do you choose? Um, I'm sure most of us live here in the US and we know that when we go to the supermarket, we get it year round.
And here's like a quick quick overview on how how the US imported mango in 2025.
So we can see that there are many origins. Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Nik Nicarawa, Peru. But here's something very important. We have a key player. we have Mexico and in Mexico I would like to jump to a quick size curve. We can see that we have a bell basically dominating the market even when here in the US we have domestic supply. Now we we're talking about some weeks with 700 or or over 800 containers. Now I would like to see this curve and then complement a little bit with Peru. we had like a very short season but here you can see we have like a U shape so it's kind of like a perfect compliment here now let's say like enough about the US and then we can jump a little bit into Peru so Peru beautiful country you know 35 million people best ceviche but if we talk about and we also do an amazing mango ceviche so if we talk about the we have like a Big three for example 2025 we did over 250,000 metric tons which is over 11,000 uh containers to the world right and this is basically coming from from the big regions the big three we have Puda we have Lambayke and Anankash and if we jump super quick into these ones we start in the north in Puda warm weather and we have like the earliest window this is from October to Janu January, February and this supplies within 70 to 75%. So this is one of our basically our most important region. We then jump into a little bit south and we dip into Lambayek which here we get a window from January to March and this supplies within 10 and 50% of the market share and we finish with Anash which is a little bit southern. We have a late window from February to a April and we get a supply of approximately 50 15% um of our mangoes. Very important here. We have a cold weather which allow us to you know continue the the supply. Now out of these big three our friend was super you know accurate.
We have 90 95% on Kent variety. Now out of these 11,000 containers that we get per season, 90% is going to the US and Canada and Europe main markets and we have like a little niche there on Asia which is basically Japan and South Korea and some others but still you know there there's like not enough for us to achieve or or reach those marks. Now if we dive into the opportunities I'm going to be sharing three of them. It's how can we extend the season, how can we achieve new niches and markets and then we can also do some organics that we do not have so much. So if we want to extend the season, we can go ahead and and check again this you know the curve that I shared and we can do an early season which we have proven to be grown Edwards and Atulfo and it works and then we can have like a late season with the kids.
three varieties that that we mainly know in the market, no new genetics and we know that it works in our country.
So super fast, you know, we can do Edwards that they pick before the Kent.
So it's a perfect opportunity for us and also the atawulfo. I know that you know zero fiber, everybody loves it. And then we have the kit with a late window. If we focus a little bit on the early window, we can see a Peru. We can see a Peru that it's mainly alone. The main comp competitors, we do not even see Mexico. We have Ecuador and Brazil. If we dip a little bit into Brazil and Ecuador, we know they have, you know, the main supply or the main variety that they are bringing here to the US. It's basically Tommy at Atkins, which is like king of fiber. If we were able to get some Atawulo and Kent from Peru with less fiber, I'm pretty sure that most of the programs will shift to Peru and try to get this, you know, more sweet, less fiber commodity. And that's like a a little opportunity that I see for us there. Now, there are also some niches and and Daniel presented that from Mexico. we have like a like a jello market opportunity and this is perfect for the Asian for the Asian markets. But let's remember that we also here in the US we have little Asian communities. So there is an opportunity for us to bring this um bring these mangoes and then we do not need to to be shipping those you know by air more fright more cost etc. we could be bringing those to the US and there is a market for them. And finally like a third opportunity this was like a particular trial that Peru did. We you know we are very concentrated in Kent but we've been growing some ulfos organics and we did like a first ocean container and it was a big success in the UF in sorry in Europe. So in that sense we know that we can grow good at we know that we can have like a good organic quality but also we know that it allows like a it has good legs and it can achieve like a longer market. So we have like a very nice uh kind of niche there an opportunity to grow more at the Ulos. Now not everything is opportunities we also have some challenges and again I'm going to be sharing three challenges. First of all there are some the volume is kind of focused in small growers hand then we also have we also have weather challenges and the size curve. So number one for example if we are talking about small growers it is very difficult if we have too many hands in the product we're going to have inconsistent quality and we know how can that affect the market then we we have to be weekto week negotiating with the growers and if some other market is better believe me we're not going to be getting that volume and it's going somewhere else. And then finally we have um it's very challenging to be working you know a program if we we have not consistency on the volumes each season. Now if we jump super fast into the challenges of weather this is kind of like a a real picture of of what's coming right now. We have like a heat wave coming directly to Peru. But then we can also see that it's definitely going to affect South America and the growers. So right now what's happening between 2026 and 2027 we have El Nino phenomenon basically warm weather high temperatures and that's definitely going to affect our coming crop. Then we we have like 70 75% of our supply in Puda which is very warm and it's like a tropical weather. So we have some weeks during the season in which I'm so sorry we had rain we were unable to harvest and then once again we are failing on our programs and then finally this climate change may affect the size curve and at the end of the day it may not I mean sorry it's I use like may like being polite but it did affect Peru. So for example, this season what we saw for the Peruvian the Peruvian season it's basically we had an over supply on big sizes five six like seven and eights and the industry doesn't pull that much of those sizes. They prefer like a like a more steady size score from bigger to to smallers. So what happened is is what we had a lack of 9, 10 and 12. And at the end of the day, we know that there are particular markets that want this. They want the bad commodities. They want it in Canada. So we were unable to to basically comply with our programs. Now, very important.
I've I I've shown it before. Peru, we have a very particular window in which we after Mexico, we kind of dominate. So in that sense we had to make plenty of calls to the retailers and the supermarkets. Hey this is my reality. We do not have the sizes that you you need and very lucky the market was able to kind of make a a swift but but it's not always going to happen. Now I have like a little bonus opportunity here because we had bigger sizes. What did we do? Hey since COVID it's been growing. The IQF business is been growing and we can do chunks, dices, slices, pulp, everything is being exported like nothing is being left on the field and also hey we can do you know fresh cut food service. This was like a good opportunity for us and and and we can buy it in the supermarket nowadays.
Finally, my point number five is basically new genetics, right? Some trials and innovations. What we want to get from here, I'm of course no expert.
I'm no doctor, but we want to get more yield. We're going to get we want to get better sizing. We we want to have like crime climate um resistance and then also some tolerance posth harvest harvest. So this is very particular in Peru in the Per region. There are some trials done by SASa which is SASa is Lexi Miller at the Senasika you know in Mexico and we have less than 50 hectares but we have Israeli varieties between Omar Shelly or Tally and Noah and very particular the Shelly has been a success it gives you big sizes good color perfect for air shipments and it's also like a niche variety so if we're targeting special markets this Shelly And these other varieties are perfect.
Then this is no like it's commonly known and mission of course our competitor but at the end of the day this is mango. So um they have like a good partnership with sound world sound world. So basically they are working 50 new varieties. Two of them are ready to be on the market and these are late varieties. So again we try to play a little bit with the windows and again with the climate change they are you know warm weather tolerance they have like a higher tolerance to hot weather and that's perfect and how are they working that basically sun world brings the genetics and mission brings the the commercial part and that's a good good alliance now if I may resume and I may end my presentation how can we all collaborate together as growers is basically, hey, we need to get good projections because at the end of the day, we can plan ahead. We can make we can make promotions and then we can all be prepared and and work together. And that's it. Thank you so much.
>> Wonderful. Wonderful. Um, any questions?
We got one.
Ju just to clarify that uh Mission and uh Sunward did not create those varieties. They just bought everything from South Africa.
>> I know I did not include that in the presentation but I talked to mission and they told me they bought a genetic a genetic >> because the propaganda of sunword is ah we've been working on mango for many years. Yeah. You took your from your pocket.
>> True.
>> It was South Africa genetic.
>> Just to make things clear about the shortcut.
>> Yeah.
>> Because we are neighbors. I'm I'm working with Patchamama and you guys aren't.
>> Yes. I've heard Patchamama is doing special trials as well. Yes.
>> I was actually going to ask you about them. I'm trying to get them to ship me some stuff this year for radiation from Peru.
Yeah, is doing good stuff by air, so good quality.
>> Rammon, >> thank you, Nick. Just one comment. I think uh both you and Daniela, you both hit the the nail on the head again with uh how the how we have a steady supply of mangoes from different places, different varieties all year long. that is so critical for the consumers to uh get used to. There's always mango in the in on the shelf and then so whether it is domestically produced or coming from any any other country to educate them and to and to and to let them understand there's always mango available to them.
It's very important that so they when we looked at our vision statement where we were trying to say you know for 2030 have mangoes in every basket. uh if it's not in the if it's not in in right at the point of sale then you don't sell it, you don't consume it. So um the way Peru and Mexico, two of the largest uh uh mango producers or exporters of mangoes into the US, the way they work uh fits perfect and then how other countries or even the domestic production, how that complements that that that supply, it's it's super important. And then the last comment on mango projections. Yes, they are so critical. So critical because uh you guys in in central Florida of course with I mean in South Florida with such a great mango that you're able to produce all your production pretty much. I mean it's it's it's it's it sells and it sells on an amazing premium price. Uh when we get the larger volumes from other countries I mean they have the they endure a long a long trip. They also uh retailers have to plan ahead sometimes six eight weeks in advance.
And so when these volumes come, imagine the work we have to do. I mean at least uh well not just us, I mean everyone in the industry in matching that supply that is yet to come a few weeks ahead and the with the demand of uh of consumers which it gets activated by uh uh uh you mean exercising promotion.
all that if we don't count with good projections could really pretty much mess up the market. And so when you throw in uh uh world events like Nino as you explain it there it complicates things a little bit but uh great thank you for sharing that you and uh Nick as well.
>> Thank you very much.
>> Thank you all.
>> It's always good to get fresh perspectives from different countries. So now we'll go to our last presenter for the afternoon. Um actually a domestic presenter from Puerto Rico, Dr. Ya Aron. He's from Martex Farms. I believe the biggest growers of mangoes in Puerto Rico. Um even though they're considered a domestic, you know, it's domestic, they still have the hot water treat for the fruitly. So be interesting to hear what they have going on down there.
By the way, before I forget, I would encourage all of you because we're going to be wrapping it up pretty soon. We'll have a coffee break. We'll have time to chat. But if you want to go see the mango display, we have I don't know how many hundreds of varieties of mangoes.
It's going to be just down here at the garden house. So before tomorrow when there's thousands of people here, if you want to go look at the mango display, we have everything we picked from the Fairchild Farm. We have donations from USDA Chapman Field. We have donations from University of Florida track. So I think this is going to be one of the biggest mango displays ever. Um and that being said, we'll leave the floor to you sir.
>> Thank you.
>> Good afternoon everybody. Thank you for mango board. Um so everybody wants to have the best mango variety right but when we are saying best mango variety one variety can be very good in one place and not so good in another place. So we have to take all those things into consideration once we are once we start to work on on on mango varieties and u which mango variety is the best best for whom?
For the buyer.
The buyer wants a sweet mango. He wants a ma mango that won't be too expensive.
He wants a mango that when he buys it, uh, he knows when it's ready to eat. And he wants a mango that if he will leave it on the shelf for 3 days, he won't have black spots coming on the mango. So he wants to get worth his money out of of of what he's buying.
So, so the debate of what is the best mango has been forever and um unfortunately we in the mango industry has been a little bit uh behind and thanks to the mango board and and and all the efforts that are going nowadays all around the world um things are moving things are moving ahead and and I'm optimistic IC I'm optimistic uh that that pretty soon we will have a much much better mangoes because Dr. Richard Gamble was talking about the genetics.
So um you know we have a very dangerous battle genetic bottleneck.
So about 150 years ago, mango came to the US and and everybody it's not sure about what was happening there. But apparently everything started from one Indian variety that it's not sure what it is.
Richard left the room. He is much better.
>> Huh? Don't >> outside. I'm going to kill him later.
Don't worry.
But if we are talking you know the basic was a variety by the name of Mula. The Aiden came from the Muloba right. Palmer came from the Aiden.
Kit came from Mula.
I mean everything coming to the same very narrow genetic Whoops.
What's going on here?
>> Yeah, he brought me the bed last.
What? Wait, >> not coming.
>> There we >> go.
>> Oh, wait. Well, you want to extend it though, right?
>> You want this one? Yeah, >> there we go. Got it.
>> Yeah. So, so we said the the famous Mulgoba Kit came from Mulgoba. Thank you. Aiden came from Mulgoba. Palmer came from Aiden and so on and so on. So this is Mrs. Kit. In those days, everybody in Florida used to take their mango, put the seed in the ground and uh and something new came and uh you know uh if they were lucky like Mrs. Kit or Mrs. Kent and and I told you Dr. Campbell know much better than me the all the history of the mango from Florida. Uh but that was basically uh um everything that the industry was was built on. Okay. So um but when we look at the future we are really in the past then let me see. Okay. So we are sitting on a very narrow genetic base and as Dr. Campbell said before, we look to the right, we have the greeny in citrus. We look to the le left, we have the all the different problems with banana. Uh we have in cacao, in Africa, in Ghana and uh Ivory Coast, they have the swollen virus that is destroying their industry. So we need to diversify. We need to borden this bridge where that we are sitting on and we have enough problem as it is with the mango nowadays. Uh talking about abiotic stresses, talking about biotic stresses, all those stem and rot, antosis, all you pick, you you grow the mango, you ship it, uh it comes to the market and plop, all those black spots starts to coming out after all the work that you did. And the most famous lately is the global warming. No, none of us like when is three is coming vegetative growth and a few flowers.
We cannot sell leaves, you know. So uh it's a major major problem and and and it's really that means that we have every new variety that will come will have to be adapted to a certain climate area. Again if it's good here it's not necessarily good there.
A very good example that I would like to show you is the antagonis. So in the past everybody thought ah antnosis the the fungi glosperitis.
Nowadays we know that there are eight at least that we know in mango types of ktoium which it might be in some area of the world there's three types of them and in the other there's only one and in the other there's nothing. But you have to be aware of what you have in your country in your area and to know whether this variety is resistant tolerant to those uh fungus.
This is an experiment that uh as you know I did a a lot of crosses between kit and mangiferi and we uh Dr. Lucerato from the USDA in Mayagu did screening for all of them and we found uh we thought at the beginning that we have a resistant mango for antos and uh apparently is resistant for some of them. You can see to some of them but not to all of them. So a very big screening needs to be done on those new varieties. And when somebody said, "Well, I have the best variety."
Apparently is a seedling that he's been seen it for one year in some place and he he think that he has the the next uh Rolls-Royce, you know, it's not. So nowadays if you going to put a new plantation of mango and he's promising this variety where he does not have any real information on many traits.
It's very very dangerous and as well if you're going to change your variety you going to regraft to a new variety that cost a lot of money.
So we said that the new variety has to be good for the buyer. It has to be good for the importer because it's not good for the importer. If he's not going to make money, he won't push this variety.
And there's one thing we all forget. We all forget the grower.
The grower needs to make money. too many grow mango growers in the last few years in the different countries beat Mexico beat Peru beat Guatemala are losing money and and that's bring us the traits of of of the mango you cannot the new varieties needs to have good yields I love to eat atulfo it's a great tasting Think mango what is the production of an acre or ectar of atulufo very low we won't go into numbers kit huge big atfo taste much better than a than than than kit but we make more money with the kit so it has to be a compromise because if the goer going to go every day another goer going to go bankrupt we won't be able to to to push this industry ahead. We cannot go palante you know if if if the gore now if we have a very small size variety and the yields are low to pick this variety is cost a lot of money because in order to fill a box you need more mango.
Now if this and E if this variety is not flowering and maturing uniformly and you have to come three four times to the same tree that cost money. I need a variety.
I'll come one time and I clean the tree.
We in Puerto Rico pay right now $10.50 per hour.
I know that all our competitors in this side of the world pay less but you know things are changing. Take it start taking it into consideration. One day will come you'll have to pay more for your workers and it's not going to be that easy to climb on the trees with with ropes and leathers and so on. You have to think out of out of the box how we can make things more efficient.
So what should we do?
We should breed and start using the new technology that we have and breed knowing the traits, knowing the chances and making things easier. Because if I'm throwing a seed to the ground and I'm waiting six, eight years and I don't know maybe it will have nice color but it will taste bad. Maybe it will taste good but it will have fibers.
Maybe it will won't have fibers but the it will be very susceptible to diseases.
So we need to find the new technology which exist and bring it. We are lucky the future Thiago is is is doing all those things in apples. We just have to bring them to Mango and we are bringing them slowly but surely.
Dr. Chad is working with the new all those new technologies and we are doing research with him.
For example, all those traits that we are looking for color. Yeah, we want good color. We have a few mangifer species like mangifa casuri on the same pinnacle. This one is red. This one is not ready. It's green. His neighbor is ready change into purple. Mifera quadriida the same. You can see the process how it changes. That's a question of days not of sometimes of hours in that weather. So we have those traits.
We just have to find them.
And Dr. child with your jwas and and so on. Find them and in the crossing then we will do how to do it breeding but not ah I ate mango I threw it to the ground. No, we do breeding where we have two varieties on the same tree or we bring one variety to the cage with another one. Dr. Campbell has shown he's been doing it as well of course and uh that's the way to go.
So what is happening if we will do it the old fashion we did the breeding and we were looking for red color. Okay we grew it for five six years that cost a lot of money and then we going to come back to Rammon and to the mango board. We need more money for research. No, no, no. Guys, you will tell us you have to use the new tools to do it the right way because here 25% have red color. But maybe they taste bad. Maybe those three out of those 12.
From those three, two taste very bad.
And the last one has fibers. So we grew 12 trees five, six, seven years for nothing.
Now we have the mango genome.
We are not that much behind.
We have the mango genome. Now we have the old genome. Having all genome is very nice but you need to know the small parts of each trait. Sometimes it can be the easy way is having one gene controlling one trait.
That's an easy job but some many times you have two three four genes and all the interaction between them but it can be done. So basically what we do we do the cross new seedling now instead of growing it for five six seven years we take a leave we extract the DNA and we have if we have the markers for the right traits right there we can go for one two three we don't want we want the right color red color we want it to be without fibers we want to know what is the temperature for flowering. We know that Kent needs 16 kit in Puerto Rico. It when it goes down to 20° Celsius, people are freezing to death. You know, uh it never goes down and we have mango 12 month of the year. Unless we have a hurricane, we can manipulate the flowering relatively easy.
Okay. And we have a lot of rain and and we have problem and everything is expensive. So it can be done. But we need information. We need knowledge. We cannot be these farmers, these stupid farmers that just work. No, no, no, no, no. It's the 21st century.
We need varieties. We need to know what we are doing. and we need to sell the mango like we should and so on and so on.
So this is basically how it goes. We have four seedlings and right away we know 50% we are looking for color. So we can gather all the one with color and look for the other traits that we are looking and and and that's the way to go.
So uh this is I I must read it to you.
Innovation in breeding is not accidental.
It require patience, science, vision and willingness to challenge what a mango can be. And believe me a mango can be the best of the best. The best of the best.
And this is where this is one of the experiment that we we we've been doing for many many years in that this is in the volcanic center in Israel. So when I'm saying we've been doing and this and that the major problem nowadays is those all those lab are not really connected to the field and all those fields are not really connected to the labs.
I am mostly in the field, but I'm working with laboratories in Puerto Rico, in the US, in Israel, and with everybody all around the world that is willing to work because the way I I and I must um Dr. Victor Galan said in one in in one of the meetings, one of the guys start bringing politics and religion and he said no no no no here we are at the family of mango we all love one each other we all want to help one each other and to work one each other so that's the way I see it so but we have to be very very careful ful with people that coming. Wow, we have those new varieties which are excellent maybe, but it might be for a certain location and you need to see it for a few years because maybe next year there's going to be El Nino. Maybe h next year there's going to be another thing and not only this maybe it's good for this place but not good for that place. So don't be like like when there's somebody is sick and everybody right away is getting sick. You have to check and you have to be smart.
So I would like to show you some of the new varieties that uh are there from Israel and uh might be excellent. They are not perfect. They are not perfect but I think they are better than what we have now and hopefully they going to be even better for the future.
So uh now you don't see here first of all you don't see here the weight of those varieties. We are looking only for varieties from sizes 6 to 12 which means from 400 g to 700 g. We are not looking for anything else. So everything you see here is between 400 and 700 grams. Now tali is very easy to manipulate for flowering. No problem.
Uh but there are even some other better varieties.
Omr is one of the best varieties transport great in transportation.
You can handle it like like like a football you know. uh tastes excellent bricks up to 20.
But I wouldn't recommend you to take it to the tropics. It won't flower there. It's like the Kent needs cold weather to flower. So before you take any variety in Sinaloa, it will do great. For example, in uh in Puerto Rico, we can make a picnic there. We won't be picking any mangoes.
Shelly. Shelly is a great variety.
You'll be careful not to go by the tree and do up because it starts flowering.
You can manipulate it. You can have it any time of the year you want. Tastes good.
uh stay on the tree for as long as you want without spoiling the problem. If you need to do hot water treatment, don't touch it. The skin is too sensitive.
Too sensitive.
King David is one of the new ones.
Excellent varieties, but we had it only for like six, seven years. So, we don't know enough about how does it flower. Great variety, great skin, great taste, but we still need to check it in different location before we can tell you, you know what, for your location is the best. I can tell you that in cold places is doing great. In the tropics we haven't been checking it enough yet.
Jon if you will have in Israel Maya heat and Jon flowering at the same time and in Israel usually everything flower at the same time because there's a very cold winter.
The first one to be ready to eat is the Maya.
Six weeks later, the kit will be ready. And six week later, the yunon will be ready. Which means in those countries where you want a very late even for local market, very late variety.
And as you can see, it's not so great in color. It resemble a little bit the kit, you know.
But this is a variety in a place that you are looking to have a long long long season of mango.
This one will do it. Now, we are still working. So this is this is a new variety. We have it only one year now and in in Israel in us in in general in the subtropics it's very hard the kit in Israel South Africa where we are working as well the kit is completely green most of the varieties are green very hard for them has to do something with the Antonian or whatever I'm I'm not I don't know enough about it. But look at the color. Great. We still need to find more thing about it as well. We have some varieties varieties seedlings I can call them with sugar of 20 bricks 20 21 with no problem. But we have to look for the other traits. uh sweetness is not enough. So again you cannot declare after one year two years oh I have the best variety again depends for what if it's for local market that's a different story if it needs to go on a container and go for 14 21 25 days shipping that's a different story so we have to know our varieties.
>> Thank you very much.
>> Wonderful. Wonderful. Always great to hear about these new varieties. This is the stuff that gets us going as mango people. Um, many questions. Questions from the field.
No questions. Quiet. I've got a question.
>> Okay.
So, with these Israeli varieties, are you seeing that more and more growers in the Western Hemisphere? I know that in in Peru, I've heard of some, but I haven't heard of too many in Mexico. Have you have you seen good acceptance of some of these varieties planting on a a more commercial scale beyond just a few hectare plot? It it doesn't take hours.
It takes a few years. But Mexico, Sinaloa will soon be be moving.
>> Okay.
>> And uh hopefully some other places. I mean, look, I'm I'm I'm I'm not uh I'm a researcher in this and I want to see them in as many places as as as possible. And I've in Peru, I've seen them on a daily base almost. and uh in Brazil as well. By the way, >> wonderful Danielle, >> one of the main issues in Mexico and it's also in in the south hemisphere is that we have tomies and tomies are not well taken by some customers because they're higher in fiber than other commodities with the other varieties.
saying this um we have Tommy's from October to almost by the mid December from Brazil and Ecuador and then it comes back in Mexico from February to April.
So that early varieties what will be something that could be a a a challenge there that well a game changer that could help a variety that has the adaptability that Tommy does have uh the strength to travel and the strength for those uh all those uh all those um What's that?
>> Okay.
The as as I said Shelly in Israel they are producing Shelly in nurseries about 10 month of the year because even if it's cold and you close it in the nursery you know protected you can put it to flower with no problem. and it will produce.
Shelly would be wonderful for sinaloa because it does not have to go through the hot water treatment. I wouldn't recommend shell for chiapas if it has to go through hot water treatment because the skin is not is is susceptible for this treatment. This is is this is for all the part these old parts are for hot water treatment parts not for Sinaloa.
What I'm talking is that norala actually doesn't have tomies they have more cans and kids >> but I'm talking about all where it's grown in Wajaka which is grown in Mitakan which is grown in Nayarit and those parts they have a lot of tomies in in Mexico. Th those varieties can replace a Tommy to my opinion and of course >> hot water treatment >> sorry >> with hot water treatment.
>> Yes. Yes. Except Shelly you have to be careful but you can do Shelly but you have to know in advance that it will have some hot water damages. I know that is not perfect for hot water treatment as well.
So I don't know in Shelly just to give you an idea Shelly is you want you're talking ectars or acres >> both I mean >> acres Shelly we are getting in Israel 50 ton per ectar I'm sure that in that old for you don't get 50 ton per hectar and and and if you say you know what 50% won't take the hot water to bridge ment. Well, I will take it to the industry for the for the dry mango or for the juice or for the IQF.
Maybe that's the solution. But then you have the other one. If you have a cold place, Omar will will laugh at the at the hot water treatment. But Omar needs cold weather in order to flower.
>> Yeah. But customers they like treat mangoes like yellows and rounds and rounds they are even red or green. So it's not like the same for them.
>> I understand but I'm saying those ones cannot replace they can replace Tommy with no to my opinion. Look we are exporting right now mango to Europe. Europe doesn't want to see Tommy. Tommy Sakab Sabo and the only question is is the growers that's depends where you are going to export it but the United States I believe it's going to take time they going to go out of Tommy >> especially the thing is that we haven't found a variety that is strong enough to compete with and can be hot water treatment and Tomy's are very awful after hot water treatment. They they tend to sunken.
>> I know. I know. We had we had in Puerto Rico tomies. We did hot water and we decided to cut them down. We don't have even one tree of Tommy anymore. Sakabo.
Yes. reach up.
>> If I could uh just say one more thing about the Tommy and I was we were talking about it earlier that we when we started to do tree ripe programs for or ripe ready to eat programs for chain stores, right? And we did it for Kroger and Kroger's sales on Tommy's went down when you had ready to eat. And the reason is that the vast majority of the consumers who buy Tommy's never eat a ripe mango. They throw it away and they come back and buy another. But once they got it ripe, they found out it didn't taste good. Th This is a true story, by the way. This is the absolute true story. What killed the ready to eat program for Kroger was because they they once a consumer ate a tummy they realized that's not what they wanted.
See >> and do you think in the future um irradiation will replace hot water treatment or another system another irradiation new irradiation systems or not?
>> I I I I I don't have any answer for this. I don't know.
I don't know because don't forget that uh especially small countries look Mexico is huge Peru is huge Brazil is huge Puerto Rico we don't have the facility for irradiation I know we can send it to the US like the Indian do and and treat it over there it's too complicated for us now I don't know and I'm for sure I'm not the authority to say how the the public in the future going to take irradiation because irradiation has a very bad content you know but maybe I'm I'm not the person to answer it I'm I'm sorry I don't know that's uh that's maybe the people of the mango board can say what the the direction they they see it's going >> so just a comment on radiation right um 5 years ago the the volume of mango that was uh getting into the US irradiated was about 2.3 2.4 million boxes last year 2.2 2 2.3 million box million of uh boxes 4 kilogram boxes well mostly from Mexico but other countries as well right last year that number topped 10 million and so that is a sign that this market is growing >> okay >> there is uh there is alternatives that there are two two different I mean there's one there's one um um treatment that it's a with uh cobalt 60 and then the other one is with the X-rays. Uh but there was a new plant that was got developed in um in Mexico about last year in Aaskientes and and then again uh by the way in in in that plant I was able to to to see some some numbers uh early earlier this year about this plant um and and then turns out that if not 80 or 90% of what they treat there it's mangoes. So, so, so I think there's an opportunity and and slowly but surely, um, they will continue to grow.
Um, and then who knows? I mean, nobody knows, nobody has a crystal ball here, but um, the way we see technology changes and some of them good, some of them not so good. I see a an apple hanging out on that mango tree. So, I don't know whether that is a a onego, a crazy onego there or not.
>> No, no, no. That's just a sign that we have to learn from the Apple industry how to go for the future.
>> Uhhuh. Okay. Well, well that you know I mean having said that um technology may play a critical role in the way things are developing. Who is to say that hot water treatment down the road 10 years 5 years from now it's it's an old thing but it's interesting to to see how you know Ramon this week Cesar was organizing this very nice talk and you were participating as well because you were sending their message um about Guatemala trying to have Guatemala fly free zone and believe Being in an island like Puerto Rico, of course we can do it. It's only a question of chavos money, you know, money talk be a sw and uh Guatemala he said has the biggest plant for sterile flies for the Mediterranean fruitfly. They irdiated the the the Mediterranean fruitfly. Good job for Guatemala. And it looks like they are going to eradicate the the anastrafa obliquequa which is the West Indian fruitfly which is our problem but we don't have enough pressure on the Puerto Rican government to put the money. It's at the end of the day it's money. It's money and it can be done.
And I think that's the way to go. Just get rid of irradiation, get rid of hot water, get rid of the food fly.
>> Thank you very much everyone.
Great uh great information. I wouldn't get rid of a hot water radiation just yet, but uh an untreated mango is an untreated mango. Tastes much better. So with that, I wanted to thank everyone for coming. Um, we give special thanks to the National Mangle Board and Fairchild, our title sponsors for the event. I hope people found this informative.
Uh, we're here contact. You've got people in the orange shirts. You can walk around and speak with them if you need more information about the Mango Board. You got local growers, you got international growers. Great day and hope you guys can come to the Mango Festival Saturday and Sunday. If you want to swing by, come and check us out.
Have a great afternoon everyone.
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