Growing Pongamia
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Pongamia, a “super tree” originating from Asia, has slowly been making its way to the United States over the last 15 years. Naveen Sikka of Terviva says it was first introduced as a revitliziation crop in Florida after the citrus industry fell due to citrus greening disease.
Sikka… “It turns out that really the best place to grow pongamia in the U. S. would be Florida and Hawaii. And the set of fortunate circumstances that came around those two geographies was that in Florida, as we started to get to work there in 2011 and 2012, they were facing the collapse of the citrus industry. You might have heard of that. There used to be about a million acres. When we showed up, they were about 7 or 8 years off from there being 1 million acres of citrus in the ground in Florida and there was a disease, an incurable disease that was wiping out the trees. As we sit here today, there's less than 300,000 acres of citrus in Florida and you had this huge, tree farming community looking for a large-scale new tree crop. What are the odds? And that happens to just be in our backyard, you have all the infrastructure, you have all the talent. And so we got some early cultivars of pongamia in the ground there and about four or five years in, they did reasonably well enough that we were able to go from, you know, planting 10 acres, five acres, 10 acres, about 100 acres that was scattered across the state, we're able to take that step up to the next commercial scale point.”
Sikka is the CEO and Founder of Terviva, which is pioneering the commercialization of the pongamia tree.
