Pongamia trees grow where citrus once flourished in Florida. Here’s what you need to know.

An ancient tree from India now grows in citrus groves in Florida and could help provide the country with renewable energy.

While much of the Sunshine State’s once-proud citrus industry has all but disappeared over the past two decades due to two deadly diseases, chilling and citrus canker, some farmers are turning to the pongamia tree, a climate-resilient tree that has the potential to produce plant proteins and sustainable biofuel.

For years, pongamia has been used as a shade tree, producing legumes—small brown beans—that are so bitter that wild boars refuse to eat them.

But unlike the orange and grapefruit trees that have long occupied rural Florida groves northwest of West Palm Beach, pongamia trees require little attention.

Pongamia trees also don’t need fertilizers or pesticides. They thrive in drought or rain. And they don’t require teams of workers to pick the seeds. A machine simply shakes the tiny seeds off the branches when they’re ready to be harvested.

Terviva, a San Francisco-based company founded in 2010 by Naveen Sikka, uses a patented process to remove bitter-tasting biopesticides, making the beans suitable for food production.

“Florida offers a rare opportunity for both Terviva and former citrus growers. The historic decline of the citrus industry has left growers without a viable crop on hundreds of thousands of acres, and a scalable replacement variety needs to emerge very quickly,” Sikka told The Associated Press. “Pongamia is a perfect fit.”

What is a pongamia tree?

Pongamia is a wild tree native to India, Southeast Asia and Australia.

The legume is now used to make several products, including Ponova culinary oil and protein, which are ingredients in Aloha’s Kona protein bars. The company also makes protein flour.

The legume also produces oil that can be used as biofuel, primarily in aviation, resulting in a very low carbon footprint, said Ron Edwards, Terviva’s board chairman and a longtime citrus grower in Florida.

Edwards said transforming a wild tree into a domestic one wasn’t easy.

“There are no books on the subject either because no one else has done it yet,” he said.

Bees and other pollinators feed on the pongamia flowers, supporting local biodiversity, Edwards said. An acre of trees could potentially provide as much oil as 4 acres of soybeans, he added.

What’s left after the oil is removed from the pongamia bean is “a very high-quality protein that can be used as a replacement in baked goods and smoothies and all sorts of other plant-based protein products,” Edwards said. “There’s a lot of potential for the food industry and the oil and petroleum industry.”

Why Florida?

“We know pongamia grows well in Florida, and the end markets for pongamia bean oil and protein—biofuel, feed, and food ingredients—are huge,” Sikka said. “This allows farmers to now lower their costs and become more aligned with leading sustainable farming practices.”

At a nursery near Fort Pierce, workers specializing in pongamia grafting techniques attach part of the mother tree to the pongamia rootstock, ensuring that the genetics and desirable characteristics of the mother tree are retained in all Terviva trees.

Pongamia vs citrus

Citrus was a major crop in Florida for years until it was hit by disease starting in the 1990s with the emergence of citrus blight and later citrus greening.

Citrus canker, a bacterial disease, is not harmful to humans but causes lesions on the fruit, stems, and leaves. Ultimately, it makes the trees unproductive.

Citrus greening, also known as Huanglongbing, slowly kills trees and degrades fruit, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The greening has spread across Florida since 2005, devastating countless groves and reducing citrus production by 75%. The disease has spread to Louisiana, Texas and California.

Hurricane Ian caused an estimated $1.8 billion in damage to Florida agriculture in September 2023, hitting the citrus industry early in the growing season.

Diseases and climate problems have also hit most of the world’s leading citrus-producing countries. For example, this year’s harvest in Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of orange juice, is expected to be the worst in 36 years because of floods and drought, according to a forecast by Fundecitrus, an organization of citrus growers in the state of Sao Paulo.

However, company representatives claim that climate and diseases have little impact on pongamia trees.

“It’s just a tough, jungle-tested tree,” Edwards said. “It can withstand a lot of abuse with very little care.”

Pongamia also grows well in Hawaii, where it now grows in areas previously used for sugar cane cultivation.

What do citrus growers say?

John Olson, owner of Circle O Ranch, west of Fort Pierce, replaced his grapefruit groves with 215 acres of pongamia trees.

“We went through all the ups and downs of citrus and eventually, because of greening, we gave up citrus production,” Olson said. “For the most part, the citrus industry in Florida died.”

Olson said that although the grapefruit grove was modest in size, it was common in the 1980s and 1990s for a grove that size to be profitable.

Edwards said farmers used various sprays to kill the insect that spread the disease. Eventually, the cost of caring for citrus trees became too high.

He then decided to take a different path.

“What attracted me to pongamia was the fact that it could reuse fallow land that was citrus and now lies dormant,” he said. “From an ecological perspective, it’s very attractive because it can replace some of the oils and vegetable proteins that are currently produced by things like palm oil, which is a much more environmentally damaging crop.”

What about biofuels?

In December 2023, Terviva signed an agreement with Mitsubishi Corp. to supply raw materials for the production of biofuels that can be processed into biodiesel, renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel.

“Our partnership with Mitsubishi is off to a great start,” Sikka said, noting that the company works closely with Mitsubishi on tree planting and product development and sales. “Terviva’s progress has been accelerated by Mitsubishi’s experience and leadership around the world in all aspects of Terviva’s business.”

What foods does pongamia produce?

Research is still ongoing, but Edwards said that in addition to table oil and other plant-based protein products, including flour and protein bars, they’ve also managed to produce some really good graham crackers.

Pongamia offers an alternative to soy and yellow pea protein “if you don’t want your protein to come from meat,” he said.

By FREIDA FRISARO, Associated Press