This Farmer Is Using Drones to Deal with His Crops

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Food

This Farmer Is Using Drones to Deal with His Crops

A long-time tropical fruit farmer has gone deep into the jungle of Belize to preserve it and to learn its lessons with the help of drone technology.

"Every time, I think I'm going to wake up back in the jungle. While I was here, I wanted to be there and while I was there, all I could think of was getting back in the jungle."- Captain Benjamin L. Willard, Apocalypse Now.

He's no Colonel Kurtz—or Kurtz at all. In fact, Marc Ellenby couldn't be farther from the enigmatic fictional characters found in Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness, both of whom go into the jungle bearing the burden of Western civilization. Instead Ellenby, a long-time tropical fruit farmer whose LNB Groves is one of the most progressive farms in the Homestead, Florida area, has gone deep into the jungle—of Belize—to preserve it and to learn its lessons.

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Ellenby is a scholarly botanist and a long-time practitioner of Transcendental Meditation who has spent several decades overseeing more than 150 acres of tropical fruits in South Florida. There he grows longans, sapodilla, mamey, sapote, black sapote, jackfruit, dragon fruit, and more along with his wife Kiki and several of their now-grown four children. He also has a 15-acre organic home farm in Homestead.

But Ellenby is spending more and more time in the heart of the dark jungle of late, having recently purchased 800 hectares (around 1,978 acres) of land in central Belize. There he is on a mission that has nothing to do with that of generations of ivory traders, poachers, and colonists who have left the comforts of Western civilization for the wilds of the third world. Instead, in Belize, Ellenby hopes to show that it is possible to create a sustainable jungle—and to live gently there, off the grid. And in the meantime, he's using drones to map the unchartered territory, developing products using farm-grown bamboo and medicinal plants, and clearly loving every minute of his Central American adventure. We just had to sit down with him and learn more.

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The grove where jackfruit is grown.

MUNCHIES: LNB Groves is arguably one the most well-known and successful small-scale tropical fruit growers in south Florida. How did you even start out in the tropical fruit farming business? Marc Ellenby: After college, my wife, Kiki, and I had a big garden in Indiana, on the east side of Lake Michigan, and we thought, This is really fun. So we decided to go to school all over again and study agriculture and horticulture. Then I went to work for Brooks Tropicals [in Homestead, Florida] in the summer of 1978. I was really intrigued by tropical fruits. And then Mr. Brooks, who's been a mentor to me, gave me the opportunity to get my own farm. I planted my first trees in 1980.

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Going back to your pioneering years in tropical fruits, you were sort of catering to ethnic minorities, weren't you? And how do you see the exotic fruit market today? Are they now mainstream? I'm not sure that our fruits have made it into the mainstream. I think our fruits still are restricted to the broad-based multiethnic marketplace. So the fruits that I grow that appeal to more than one ethnicity are my best fruits. An example would be sapodilla—it has a Hispanic market, a broad-based Asian market of good depth, an Indian market, people from the Caribbean, and people from Central America. The one fruit that we tell Americans they should be eating is star fruit, which everybody knows from tropical vacations. I'd say Florida avocadoes have entered the mainstream. But I don't think longan has. Lychee has to a degree—but most lychee really comes from offshore, it's not grown much in Miami-Dade County anymore because of climate change. Our winters haven't been cool enough.

What led you to Belize? I'm sure the ecosystem is spectacular—but why go all the way there from Florida, which isn't exactly a barren landscape? Well, Belize is actually pretty close—it's only two hours from Miami, and then I'm in a different universe. We found a gorgeous piece of land. It's pristine with no industry to speak of. So we're just trying to see if we can live off the grid. We capture rainwater, we have rainwater showers, we have a nursery, big gardens with cassava and cocoa, greens like chaya and amaranth. We have chickens, ponds for our milk cows. We have lamb. My wife thinks I'm insane, but I'm not. We have ducks on a duck pond. We have solar power. We run LED lights. We make solar rainwater ice with a DC freezer that runs on three 50-watt panels. To make ice on the edge of the jungle is thrilling! The jungle is huge and we're having a lot of fun out there. It just suits me.

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Are you growing any cash crops there? I really wanted to grow bamboo so this Belize bamboo project started a decade ago and we're just now introducing ourselves to the world at the Fairchild Tropical Gardens' Ramble in Miami this month, where we're bringing some of our bamboo furniture and cutting boards. We never cut down a tree ever; it's just tree fall. Big trees fall, really big. We make furniture, cutting boards. Bamboo is completely renewable and sustainable.

palm-fruit

Edible palm fruit

So have you run into any kind of road blocks in Belize? I heard you got dengue fever on one of your trips down there. Yeah, that was challenging. It's been a steep learning curve. The forestry people are great; the agriculture people are great. It's a small country so you know the ministers. I haven't run into roadblocks. I've had good support from the local people. People are anxious to do work. It's challenging but I can run my farm in Belize for a week for what it costs me to run my farm in Homestead for a day. It's been really fun. I just want that farm to run itself and we're very close.

I've heard you started mapping portions of Belize with drones. How did that start? The forest is just vast. And there's only so much you can do with a compass and mapping so I got a DJI Phantom 3 with an integrated camera. My son is the pilot on the ground. We're capturing screen shots and just beginning the mapping process. We're identifying open areas, then I'm ground truthing it by hiking in. We're going to develop a whole GIS map of the whole forest. We're hoping to develop a conservation plan that will make sense and then maybe the forestry department will say, "Hey, we're going to start using this because Belize has a tremendous conservation agenda." These are wildlife corridors, and that's what Belize has going for it. We have actual pictures of jaguars, pumas, ocelot, which are all coming right through our land. It's wonderful. We also have red brocket and white tail deer. Belize should hold on to this, right? We're still working out the logistics, but in the next 12 to 18 months, we'll have everything photographed. Then we need to start analyzing the data.

What are your long-term goals for your Belize property? What I want to do is to not upset the ecosystem. I want to make the forest better, but not introduce something that is an exotic or that is invasive and use what is already there. There's so many things we can do. It's not about making money but about making the forest more sustainable. Did you know that something like 75 or 80 percent of the people on this planet still use plants as medicines? They don't use pills out of jars. In Belize, there are still healers that go out into the bush. You have teas and tinctures, formulations, barks, saps, waxes. I think all the answers are in plants.

Do you still teach TM and do you think being a meditator has affected your tropical farming, in any way? Yes, I do teach. My wife Kiki is the head of the Miami TM program. I'm like her assistant. I clean up well, come off the farms, and might teach every four to six weeks because I enjoy it. It's good for my own personal evolution. I think when you're in touch with the environment, both by standing on the ground and by tapping your inner resources, then you're in touch with all of the laws of nature, and then nature comes up to support your desires. We've had the support of nature for our entire careers, so I think TM has been a very, very positive thing. I'm very thankful to have this practice.

Thanks for speaking with us, Marc.