The avocado is a very long-lived tree and can live up to 400 years.
The plants planted by my father over 40 years ago today stand imposingly, have a trunk with a diameter of ½ meter and, if pruning had not been carried out to facilitate harvesting, today they would be over 20 meters high.
Today, however, I want to talk to you about trees that are much, much, much older . . . practically prehistoric.
The first historical evidence of the avocado is due to the discovery inside a cave, in the Mexican region of Puebla, of a hazelnut dated, with the charcoal method, to 14, over 12,000 years.
The avocado grew luxuriantly in Mexican forests as early as the Cenozoic and, according to scholars, represented the favorite food of the Gonfoteri, animals that lived for millions of years, very similar to elephants but larger and equipped with an elongated beak and 4 tusks. They were capable of swallowing the whole fruit, feeding on the pulp and expelling the stone, which, in the typical environmental conditions of the time, easily gave rise to a new plant, ensuring the perpetuation of the plant.
The avocado of the time was very different from how we know it today: it had a 12 cm stone and this allows us to imagine the considerable size of these animals which weighed up to 4 tons.
Having survived evolution, also thanks to this expedient, the fruit developed throughout America, even in areas that at the time were much more temperate than today.
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About 13,000 years ago, following the last ice age, there was a mass extinction throughout the world that led to the disappearance of most of the large American mammals; not even the glaciation, however, succeeded in destroying the tenacious avocado, despite its proverbial sensitivity to the cold. From that moment on, in fact, man took care of planting it and making it develop. The fruit, thanks to its high caloric power, entered the plant diet of prehistoric populations and this explains the discovery of the Puebla seed.
The growth of these trees remained exclusively limited to the two Americas, being cultivated in large quantities especially by the Aztecs, to whom we owe the name “Aguacate”. Europeans only made his acquaintance thanks to Christopher Columbus and the discovery of America. In 1526 the Spanish historian Fernandez de Oviedo, who lived at the court of Charles V after a trip to America, described it as an exceptional fruit, praising it.
In the 18th century it arrived in the Philippines and Indonesia, where its cultivation is still very flourishing. The same did not happen in India where, even today, it is not very successful. In the 20th century it arrived in California and Florida where some farmers imported it from Mexico: their plantation developed very well but a frost, 2 years later, almost completely destroyed it. Only one variety of plant survived which was defined as Fuerte (vigorous), capable of adapting to the Californian climate and its temperature variations: it is the same variety that AvocadoBio still grows in its fields today.
Today's history is the explosion in the cultivation of this fruit which, little by little, has conquered the tastes of consumers and favored large-scale world production.
The first experimental cultivations in Italy took place, with dubious results, on the Ligurian side around the years ‘20, but the big boost to production was given by the reconversion of many citrus groves, now unprofitable, in Sicily and Calabria. It doesn't take a fortune teller to predict a great development of Avocado and tropical fruits in the coming decades, due to climate change and the consequent “tropicalization” of the South,
In our own small way, we have been pioneers, cultivating this fruit for over 40 years now, but we intend to ride the wave by planting other varieties that can increase the annual production period.
