Capitalist meritocracy, folks!
You could grow some bananas in Florida but most of the land suitable for it has been used for sugarcane, a government-subsidized industry that Marco Rubio is largely responsible for propping up, weirdly enough
Legit I wonder which crop is more rentable per hectare per year
In any case sugar cane has been easily mechanized decades if not a century ago. But for bananas is tricky work so you need very expensive robots or very low payed workers, and nothing is better than unequal exchange to facilitate very low payed workforce, so you need to produce it in a colony or
Not sure actually, I just know that the soil and climate type for both crops is very similar. Also that sugarcane wouldn’t be profitable in the US either without the subsidies that Rubio gave to his sugar industry buddies while he was senator.
the weather/climate fluctuations of sudden record extreme lows in winter make perennial systems (bananas) more fragile. and banana production is less resilient to extreme lows than citrus production (another perennial), which has been in free fall for decades in florida. basically, one weird freeze will terminate a massive orange grove and make the random survivors wildly susceptible to disease. so usually, the whole grove gets scrapped and all the upfront labor/material investment in getting it to that point is lost. thats when people usually apply for an insurance payout and just get out of it all together.
with annuals (and crops grown commercially like annuals) like sugar cane (or tomatoes or whatever), you only need to thread the needle of the growing season i.e. x days between the last and first frost dates, because the plant doesn’t need to survive over winter. it’s still risky, but you can get in and get out in the same calendar year before the winter. that’s an oversimplification of all the other shit necessary to do plant production at scale, but you get the idea.
Oh I thought bananas were annual
they’re like 9 months, at the earliest, to get fruit under ideal conditions. but you want them to push for another 6+ years to get a real return on your planting labor/material investment. so probably more like a decade.
admittedly, the annual/perennial distinction gets weird once you get closer to the tropics with a temperate climate, because what is grown as an annual at higher latitudes (or altitudes) could potentially be grown as a perennial, since there’s no frost/freeze die back. usually in those cases you eventually get a disease kill, and/or lots of commercial production cultivars have a limited growth and fruiting window, and then they die (determinate tomatoes).
i know people in central FL who dick around with bananas, but they almost always end up dying way back from a frost/freeze kill before they get a fruiting. i’m sure if you were like on the Keys, or generally far south florida, had a stretch of years of no frosts on kind of an ideal slight slope where cool air didn’t pocket or induce an inversion frost, and went with some early/dwarf variety, you could do those bananas. especially if you could baby them a little, like have some temporary cold frame to push the temps up on cold days.
they do bananas big time in cuba, which is not far away from s. florida. it’s just the farther you get away from the tropics, the riskier it is.
i also read some bonkers article once in a scientific journal about a 1960s soviet agricultural project one time where they were growing oranges in the black sea region by doing this earthworks system with trained/dwarf varieties in like sloped channels to take advantage of thermal mass. it apparently worked, but eventually the USSR established some trade relationship to get their citrus from a tropical ally and the emphasis to continue went away.
the point being, you can pretty much do anything anywhere if you have the will, the water and the energy. it only becomes clever if you can find a way to do it with one big energy investment up front (like earthworks) instead of being reliant on constant energy input to keep it going, unless the energy is truly renewable and doesn’t require complex engineering or materials for maintenance.
Thanks mate I really like reading about this kind of stuff
In any case sugar cane has been easily mechanized decades if not a century ago
This is why
has to put a quota on it so domestic sugar producers can make boatloads of money off the taxpayers. 
you can produce a lot of tropical crops in places like Florida and Hawaii. its just that’s prime real estate that has better shit to do than produce oranges and bananas. so places like brazil and india just take over production slowly over time.
you’d think that there’s some lobbying going on to ensure the profits of landowners, but one group that was making bank are the cattle ranchers and trump just opened the markets to argentinean imports.
Build Banana Bettermy banana factory in alaska is going to blow people’s minds.
2600 megacalories of fossil fuels in for each calorie of nutrition out. a $100 banana.
it will be the most patriotic and american line of bananas ever built, in complete defiance of all the laws of gods and men.
it wouldn’t be practical for crops by any means but i wonder how far capturing waste heat from a building would get you for a rooftop greenhouse situation.
They used to grow pineapples in Victorian England by using horse manure to create either to create a greenhouse effect in the glasshouse or they’d capture the gas and burn it to heat the greenhouses can’t remember exactly but wikipedia can give you more details, there was this whole pineapple craze where it was vogue to just have a pineapple, you wouldn’t even eat them you would just own one. Iceland also had a tropical fruit industry when tropical fruits used to have a high tariff on them.
my brain inserted the linkedin AI slop hype emojis at the start of each line of your post
Good news is the proliferation of AI slop will actually make his business idea more viable thanks to climate change
Gasoline has about 11 kcal per gram, so it would actually probably be substantially more than 2600 kcal of fossil fuels per food calorie to grow them in Alaska.
now corrected. and my 12,000 square mile subterranean alaskan banana system does not run on fancy gasoline, but rather asphalt-burning boilers providing heat and converting mechanical energy into electrical power for metal halide lights.
its more of a global terraforming effort that produces $100 bananas as a side hustle.
At that point it’s more venuforming than terraforming
build bananas better
Ah shit beat me to it
Well that’s an easy one! Just annex country after country until ya get one that can build a banana"Well I guess the plan, if there is such a thing, is to expand the empire until you have banana production.
The canary islands meanwhile absolutely bananamaxxing
Mfw no food sovereignty and thousands of tons of produce wasted because of market conditions 🇮🇨🇮🇨🇮🇨
Looking forward to my workday at the Banana Factory.
You load sixteen bunches, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt Saint Peter, don’t you call me, 'cause I can’t go I owe my soul to the company: “Dole”
I’d say that Day-O is a much much more apropos song.
Work all night on a drink of rum
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Stack banana ‘til de mornin’ come
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Come, mister tally man, tally me banana
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Come, mister tally man, tally me banana
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Lift six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Lmao
Here’s the joke tho folks you actually cant build anything in america
Uh, excuse me? Yes you can, it’ll just be 10x over budget, take 40 years, and be falling apart when it’s “finished”
Am from Florida. Not even 40 yet, already falling apart, and definitely don’t feel finished.
They talk about markets this and that but their end goal is always to get overpaid even if it means underdelivering.
Bananas grow in Puerto Rico and Guam and Fig bananas grow in the Virgin Islands. So TECHNICALLY they do already build banana in Amerikkka.
Serious answer to this kind of proposal: Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands only have enough arable land to provide maybe half of the US demand for bananas. And that’s if you just plow over the existing agricultural land (that is already being used for fruit growing and winter nurseries).
Yeah, I know. I was just making a joke by being pedantic.
you can grow bananas in fucking wisconsin in heated vertical greenhouses, if you really want to. in december, if you put extra lights in.
Too expensive. Better annex Guatemala and Nicaragua, kill about a million people and get to see USS CHILD ANNIHILATOR in action.
yeah but i think this is actually the more expensive way overall…
well the costs of empire are borne by the public, but the revenues and profits flow into the pockets of the already-rich and well connected.
this is the heart of capitalist innovation: externalizing costs and concentrating value among a small, exclusive set of BFFs.
“They’ll trickle down to you poors too.
” — 
Oh shit, nobody has said ‘banana republicans’ yet
:kelly:
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Come to this thread four the bourg-bashing stay for the agricultural lesson
