Brazil consumes about 40 million tons of fertilizer per year. Roughly 85 percent of it is imported. Supply is concentrated in a small number of mega-suppliers, mostly out of Russia, Belarus, Morocco, and China. When global commodity fertilizer markets seize up, as...
Peruvian blueberries don’t grow in soil. They grow in pots filled with coconut coir, drip-irrigated several times a day, with every nutrient delivered through the fertigation tank. The entire industry is built on this substrate-based production system, and...
The soils of Colombia’s Eje Cafetero are some of the strangest agricultural soils on earth. They’re young, formed from volcanic ash less than ten thousand years ago. They’re high in organic matter, often 8 to 12 percent in the topsoil, two to three...
Mexican Hass avocado moves through one of the most demanding export pipelines in agriculture. From a packout in Uruapan, fruit ships 1,500 miles to a US distribution center over 5 to 7 days in cold chain. It gets graded at the Mexican packing plant, again at the US...
A Kenyan rose grower’s job isn’t to grow roses. It’s to land a flower at the Royal FloraHolland auction in Aalsmeer, or at a Tesco distribution center in Reading, that meets a specific set of measurable quality criteria – stem length, stem...
Nigeria is the world’s fourth-largest cocoa producer. It used to be the second-largest. The slip down the rankings wasn’t because Nigerian farmers stopped growing cocoa – it was because yields per hectare stayed flat for thirty years while Côte...
