We don’t always take pictures of our food for instagram, but when we do, it’s because we grew it ourselves. Introducing our first ever Florida Long Neck and Brogdon avocados grown to maturity at Rebel Farms. Both cultivars, though very different, offer their own unique flavors and uses. The longnecks are prolific producers and large in size making them excellent for use in guacamole and salads. The Brogdon is cold-hardy and excellent-tasting making it the perfect snack eaten plain or with a sprinkle of salt.
It’s easy to look at this breakfast and think what a blessing! Look how the earth provides! And yea, that can be true. But when you weigh the inputs; soil creation and mixed to the perfect PH level, organic fertilizer (created mostly by our chickens in a labor-intensive, time-intensive composting process) and maintaining a regime of watering throughout the first couple years of the trees life and the bill for each of these avocados goes way higher than anyone would like to admit.
We call it the “First Fruit Equation”. Some trees, like mulberries and loquats, have a low “first fruit” cost, sometimes as low as $1.00 per fruit for its first produced fruit. But these avocados you’re looking at have a first fruit cost of at least $50.00 each after all the water, fertilizer, and soil creation. Looking at this plate, with a price tag of more than $100.00, can really put a damper on the idea of growing your own food.
But next year these trees will produce at least 25 fruits per tree, up from the average of three per tree this year. 2025 will see 50 fruit per tree and so on and so on until the trees are kept at the size we need them in their respective orchards. Now that the bill is paid, so to speak, we’ll never look back on this first year’s “first fruit” equation. Each meal that each tree provides will chip away at the opportunity cost as our baby grows from a ground-bound slowpoke to a bi-pedal terror fed on organic produce whose roots run deep under his little feet.
Check out this awesome document from the USDA on Florida Avocado Varieties. We hope one day when we find our bigger farm property that we will have ALL of these cultivars available….. A boy can dream 😉