A farmer from Dakshina Kannada district has many varieties of bananas and the latest addition is blue java bananas or ice-cream bananas as they are popularly called. For the past 15 years, the farmer has been growing more than 700 varieties of tropical fruits on his land but it is for the first time that a farmer in Karnataka has grown blue java bananas popular in Southeast Asia.
This variety of bananas took the internet by storm some five months ago when a person talked about it in detail and revealed it actually tastes like vanilla ice cream. These bananas are creamier and their skin is blue. These are grown in bags to protect the plant from getting infected. Hence, the cluster of fruits was limited to about 50. The farmer spent Rs 21,000, including transportation, to get the tissue-cultured plant from Thailand during his visit for an exhibition two years ago and now has 10 plants of this variety.
He sells plants to nurseries across India. Farmers in this region have so far managed to grow (also called ice-cream beans), native to South America and harvested nearly 1.5 quintals of the fruit. In addition, there is white jaboticaba, abiu fruit, mamey sapote, durian, Japanese variety of blackberry, Egyptian variety of gac fruit, and so on.
The focus is on growing fruits from Southeast Asia and those that suit our climatic conditions. For farmers, along with growing traditional commercial crops like areca, inga edulis Champedak jam fruit rollinia deliciosa it is important to cultivate a variety of fruits which have a good market and support livelihood.