The purpose of this blog is to document an experiment we are running on the viability of growing Saffron in Nelson, New Zealand.
It's Saffron season and our team is busy picking, processing and packing saffron spice. Saffron is known as the worlds most expensive spice and is widely reported as being more valuable than gold (this might not be the case today with gold surging over $US3,000 an ounce). We started investing in / experimenting with Saffron about 4 years ago. Our rationale for this:
- As a horticulturist we are very dependent on the weather. If we got bad weather over the peony season then the financial outcomes for that year were ruined. I wanted to look at ways to diversify this risk and having a crop that matured a different time of year provides some of this diversification.
- The work required to manage peonies is very seasonal with the majority of the work occurring over a 6 week period when the bulk of flowers are picked. By necessity this leads to a seasonal workforce that needs to be recruited every year. While we will never get away from the need for seasonal labour we wanted to be able to employ at least some people all year round in part because having full time external labour helps turn a family job into a family business and in part because we believe it's better for our core team. Having a second crop at a different time of year helps to provide consistency of work throughout the year
- The economics / business model for Saffron was similar to peonies particularly when comparing returns per hectare and the basic farm management practices.
- There were several Saffron farms already established in NZ and there appeared to be strong growing demand for NZ grown Saffron.
- and finally, Nelson looked to have a the right sort of climate with cold winters and warm / hot dry summers.
With this in mind we invested in some corms and set out out to test the hypothesis, can we grow Saffron commercially in Nelson and will this support us to diversify our business and income? Some of the specific questions we wanted to answer included:
- Will Saffron grow and thrive at our farm and under what conditions? To test this we planted some Saffron in the ground, some in pot plant pots and some in grow bags. Note, while planting saffron in pots or planter bags increased the cost of establishing the saffron we believed using them had the potential to reduce weeding needs and may speed up picking as they are slightly raised
- Can we confirm that there is a market for NZ grown Saffron and will the market pay a premium for a local product?
- How much labour do we need to successfully grow, care for (eg weeding), pick and process Saffron? Is it feasible to automate key labour tasks?
- Considering 2 and 3 is growing saffron profitable?
- Finally is growing Saffron compatible with growing peonies.
The experiment continues but this is what we have found out so far.
Will Saffron grow and thrive? The short answer is yes but there is some subtlety here. The grow bags gave the best results substantially outperforming other growing method. Those planted directly in the ground performed OK but as expected required more weeding effort than the others. Interestingly the saffron planted in pot plant pots struggled and the pots on the north side of our rows performed the worst. We are not sure why but the pots were black and we wonder if the corms simply got cooked. Saffron is traditionally a dessert plant but another possibility is that the pots simply dried out to quickly even for a dessert plant. This seemed to be confirmed when pots that were placed near trees (thereby getting shade and less evaporation) performed better than other pots.
Is saffron compatible with peonies? Largely yes. The work patterns between the two crops were very compatible and if scaled would provide year round work for a core team. The one potential issue is that as a food product we want the saffron to be spray free and as organic as possible. The peonies are a vanity product and need to look"perfect". To achieve this consistently requires at least some spray to manage disease and meet export requirements. This means there needs to be separation between the two crops to achieve both goals.
Is there a market for locally grown Saffron? Yes and there does appear to be a well established premium for locally grown saffron. That said, it's fair to say that we have underinvested in marketing to date and there is more work to be done to prove this out at a reasonable scale. On the positive side there is a reasonably robust market for saffron corms meaning the sale of the corms to home gardening enthusiasts and new growers can provide a significant supplementary income stream.
What is the labour commitment and cost? Part of the reason Saffron is so expensive is the amount of labour required to pick and process saffron. This is problematic in low wage countries and perhaps unsurprisingly a significant issue for us particularly in the face of our commitment to pay a living wage. Without going into the detailed number this cost is likely to make growing saffron unprofitable or at best marginal, unless significant labour substitution is available.
Is labour substitution practical? Maybe, but only if you are at scale and I think scale means 50 - 100 hectares or more not 5 to 10 hectares which is more practical for a start up family business. That said what are the automation possibilities:
- Saffron needs to be lifted, split and replanted every 3 to 5 years (depending on who you listen to!). For a commercial saffron operation you would likely be lifting and replanting a million(s) of corms every year. This process can be mechanised through the use of slightly modified potato and garlic planting and harvesting machines.
- If you have millions of saffron corms that is a lot of weeding! There are number of commercial weeding machines available on the market or in prototype. The best of these use precision GPS location, AI and visual identification of plants. My favorite which is in prototype overseas and a laser based system that literally burns the weeds.
- Picking the flowers could also be automated through a derivation of a vegetable picker. It easy to imagine an AI / vision based system identifying saffron flowers and picking the flowers. That said, I am not aware of commercially available products.
- Processing flowers is the most time consuming activity. Processing involves removing the spice (aka the stamen) from the flowers. Is is fiddly and dexterous work where you split the flower, ID and grasp the saffron threads, extract the threads from the flower and trim the threads separating the red portion of the thread (the highest quality) from the rest. It may be possible to automate this with precision robotics (think surgery robots) but these are likely to very, very expensive.
Is Saffron likely to be profitable? It's too early to tell. While the costs of growing saffron seem fairly well defined what we don't understand well is the potential revenue from saffron sales. Can we build a premium brand? Can we sell direct to saffron large scale users (e.g restaurant, food manufacturing companies) thus improving our prices? Can we leverage the medicinal value of saffron into value add products?
So that's our saffron story to date. The work continues with our current focus being brand, marketing and value add uses. As we learn more I'll write up an other update, or perhaps add this this blog.
In the mean time, if you want to know more or are interested in buying some saffron from us then please visit our website https://peonies.nz/saffron-nz/