When the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) set out to help Florida farmers diversify their crops, they landed on a homey spice that’s come to stand for something dull and run of the mill—vanilla. It turns out, though, that vanilla may be anything but.

Eighty percent of vanilla bean production takes place in Madagascar, an island off the coast of East Africa, that has a climate very similar to that of southern Florida. And at a current price of more than $300 per pound, vanilla could be the cash crop of many farmers’ dreams.

UF/IFAS is heading up a project to see how vanilla will grow in southern Florida. They will provide 100 growers with the vanilla panifolia orchid, the plant that produces the familiar vanilla bean. Those volunteers will then grow the plant over about 18 months and monitor how it does in this climate.

Twyla Leigh, director of UF/IFAS Extension Collier County, explains how they’ll check on the volunteer’s plants: "We'll monitor it for growth. We’ll actually measure it, how tall it grows, how wide it grows, that sort of thing. Look at the general health, does it have yellow leaves, are the roots looking good. And then the survivability."

Leigh says there are both economic and environmental advantages to growing vanilla in Florida.

"Environmentally, you don't have to ship it in. It doesn't come from so far away. But economically it could be really important for our state for small farmers or farmers who need more diversified crops," she said.

UF/IFAS has a full slate of volunteer growers set to go, and plans to distribute the plants to them this fall. Then they’ll meet for a symposium in the spring to see how the plants did over the balmy Florida winter.

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