Moringa

Moringa

Scientific name: Moringa oleifera Common names: moringa, drumstick tree; marango (regional Spanish) Family: Moringaceae Category: multipurpose perennial tree / leaf, pod, seed, and oil crop

Moringa is an expansion crop beyond the project’s original five-crop comparison. It adds a fundamentally different production system: a fast-growing perennial tree managed either as an individual household tree, an orchard for pods/seeds, or a dense repeatedly cut stand for leaves.

⚠️ Status: drafted from a metadata-level literature survey (research/moringa/report.md). These pages document the existence and coverage of candidate evidence, not validated numeric recommendations. Substantive values remain Unknown until human screening, full-text review, and S-#### source notes. Do not treat this as growing, nutrition, or medical advice.

Why moringa

Moringa connects horticulture, perennial-tree management, repeated leaf harvest, edible pods, seed storage, and seed oil. Its central comparison is not seed size but production-system choice: one perennial garden tree and a high-density leaf crop require different spacing, pruning, irrigation, labor, and yield accounting.

For Mexico, the sweep found a direct Northeast Mexico biomass study (10.54167/tch.v10i3.177) and a study of Mexico-grown material (10.1155/2015/860381). Mexico-specific extension guidance is still a gap.

Scope boundary

• Included: propagation, tree/stand management, leaves, pods, seeds, oil, drying, storage, food-use safety boundaries, labor, and economics.
• Excluded: claims that moringa treats or prevents disease. Medical and pharmacological literature is outside this crop dossier.
• Leaf, pod, seed, and oil yields are separate outputs and must not be combined into one “moringa yield.”

Documentation map

This crop follows the standard structure (PRD §12), adapted from templates/crop/:

• index.md · biology.md · climate.md · soil.md · planting.md · irrigation.md · fertilization.md · pests-diseases.md · harvesting.md · processing.md · storage.md · yield.md · economics.md · open-questions.md · sources.md

Coverage snapshot

• Strong metadata coverage: propagation/germination, density, pruning/cutting interval, leaf biomass, fertility, seed maturity/storage, seed oil.
• Moderate: temperature, drought/salinity response, pod postharvest, leaf drying, economics.
• Weak: frost limits, practical irrigation schedules, Mexico pest calendars, manual labor per kilogram, household-scale seed-oil pressing, invasive/self-seeding risk.

Suggested reading order

index.md → biology.md → planting.md → harvesting.md → processing.md → open-questions.md