How saffron became an American cash crop | Hacker News Reader

How saffron became an American cash crop

nytimes.com

89 pointsThevet61 comments

My understanding is that saffron grows almost anywhere (there's people growing it up here in Norway). It's mainly the labor to harvest the threads that makes it economically unviable.

I guess you can sell American produced saffron at a premium but I'd still love to see the labor cost / profit calculation on those.

>In 2021, Peace and Plenty harvested 700,000 flowers, which yielded about 3.5 kilograms of saffron. Ms. Price sold it to home cooks, and to chefs.

>I was doing one flower per five seconds at my fastest, which sounds good

So with 5 seconds per flowers 700,000 flowers are about 1000 man hours to harvest. With the Californian $16.5 minimum wage that'd mean about $4.50 per gram just in harvesting labor cost.

> My understanding is that saffron grows almost anywhere

As in it grows in a farm, outside, under the sun, in Norway?

Otherwise, Banana, coffee and Mango can also be cultivated anywhere in a controlled/enclosed environment.

Grows outside in people's front/back yards. People grow them for fun. Farming wouldn't make sense.

Saffron comes from crocus flowers. Crocus is an extremely common plant, you can probably find bulbs for sale for it in ever big box home improvement store in the US during the spring

Indeed, and they're well suited to northern climes. Here in the upper Midwest, they're one of the first things up in the spring, often poking up through the snow.

In the Netherlands and Flanders the week-long school break in late February/early March is called the Krokusvakantie (crocus vacation).

Close but not quite correct. Saffron comes from a specific Crocus plant named Crocus Sativus aka Autumn Crocus (because it blooms in Autumn). It’s easily mistaken with the other Crocus flowers. They require different climates. I can’t be sure (don’t live in US) but I would be surprised if they sell Saffron flowers in such stores as it wouldn’t make much sense for gardening, especially if want to have spring flowers.

It's growing in our back garden which freezes solid every winter. In fact the crocus is very hardy - it grows on a path which we walk over every day.

(I still buy saffron in the shops.)

People commonly mistake other Crocus family flowers with Saffron's. Are you sure it's Crocus Sativus? Crocus is common and the flower looks very similar to Saffron's but it is not that. When do they bloom? If they bloom in Spring (which I suspect they do, they are also common here in Germany) they are not exactly the same plant and they have different requirements.

Not Norway but there is a place in Switzerland, far up the in the Alps, very proud of it's saffron traditions.

I'm surprised that, as the price increased, there has not been a mechanical automation found that would remove the labor requirement. Terrible for developing countries where labor is cheap and depends on that laborious task of harvesting threads.

It's been done, by the iSaffron unit of Solbar Food Technologies in Israel.[1] Or so says a hype site from iSaffron in 2021.[2] No current mention. Solbar is the largest soybean processor in Israel, and saffron would be a rounding error for them.

A Swedish company which produces saffron uses some robotics.[3] There's a German student group doing something. Nobody has video of anything working.

It's probably do-able, but too niche to justify the effort.

This 2018 "automatic saffron processing machine" looks fake.[4]

[1] https://www.solbartech.com/about/

[2] https://www.isaffron.life/

[3] https://osterlensaffran.io/

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQMwknN8wQY

I was about to say that $4.50 in labor cost doesn't seem outrageous, given the high retail prices but according to my low effort internet search in the US cheap saffron goes wholesale for about $0.81 / gram and expensive saffron does for about $1.68 / gram. The retail markup on this is quite high!

You could potentially make it work selling direct to consumer, which might not be so bad given the very low quantities we're talking about here.

"A nation of shopkeepers" applies here. Intermediate steps and distribution, all the steps along the way extract their little bit here and there. The economy is built like a bloated JavaScript framework with a call stack 100 layers deep.

"American cash crop" is a little misleading (implies that its a substantial amount) when the article cites 3.5kg and 360g of harvests of saffron from American farms. Iran produced 174 tonnes, for comparison.

The term "cash crop" refers to a crop that is grown for sale rather than use. So NYT is using it correctly, but I agree they could have chosen a better term for the headline, since "cash crop" doesn't really help to explain the article.

Also, to be pedantic, 3.5kg was from one American farm, not "from American farms".

He also mentioned the 360g from another farm.

Maybe this article is trying to seed it for American consideration.

At $100/g 3.5kg is $350,000 which is pretty decent cash for a crop that was planted in September and harvested in November. And unlike marijuana you probably don't need to have armed guards.

I'm intrigued by the harvesting technique. Mostly because it looks like an interesting problem you might be able to work on with robotics.

As far as I understand there are machines or automations for this process. But it decreases the quality. We have saffron here in Switzerland and the reason it's premium priced is mostly because it's done the exact same way as 100 years ago.

$100/g? You can buy it for less than 1/10 of that in Europe at least

I was just quoting the article. Apparently 'bespoke' saffron gets a premium?

Saffron was also introduced to BC's lush Fraser Valley through years of effort by Avtar Dhillon:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/abbotsford-f...

It doesn’t make sense to grow it with US labor, on the other hand, in desperately poor countries like Afghanistan it provides a living for women like this project: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7267488...

> doesn’t make sense to grow it with US labor, on the other hand, in desperately poor countries like Afghanistan it provides a living for women like this project

Between adulteration risk, transport costs and concerns around financing the Taliban, I can absolutely see the American product competing with Afghan exports.

It obviously won't come close on cost to the consumer so what do you base that on? Surely simple market economics apply in this case?

> obviously won't come close on cost to the consumer

What about an international supply chain involving the Taliban and co-mingled with opium production and transportation is obvious?

> Surely simple market economics apply

Why “surely”? What are “simple market economics”?

If you by “close on cost” you mean there is a fundamental reason the price of the American product cannot compete with the Afghan stuff, you’re wrong. (Also, there is great Kashmiri saffron.) If you’re suggesting nobody thought about producers’ margins, no, that’s not insightful.

There are many fakes but they're easy to spot. The street vendors in NYC use real or fake saffron, and if you have enough halal food you can tell. The more American supply the better, this stuff is crazy good.

Due to those higher costs, buying something from the US pretty much guarantees quality, i.e. the logic of "if someone has a successful business selling saffron in the US, it must be pretty great saffron".

This compares to other countries where you have to do work to figure out if you're getting the good Afghani saffron or the bad Afghani saffron. Personally, I buy mine from Diaspora Co. who source it from Kashmir. In that case, I'm replacing the brand reputation of the country with the brand reputation of the spice merchant.

If you are looking for a quality product (ex. Non contaminated soil, high ecological standards, ...) I wouldn't think a second of buying an American produce.

This is good! Price of saffron got really high there for a while and it really impacted specific dishes. I noticed this about 12 years ago, popular rice brands removed the word Saffron from the front of the packaging. It was replaced by "saffron seasoning" which was a blend of things. The taste changed because I felt it had less saffron, which I thought was due to higher prices.

The article mentions sanctions on Iranian exports, that might have played a role in higher prices.

Sorry to hijack the thread. If I wanted to use my garden to plant things, where should I start and learn? Does anyone have any good resources for this?

I'm not very good with my hands and don't know anything about plants. I'd love to grow some vegetables and/or fruits as they seem to be the most useful for me.

There is a very good book called Square Foot Gardening that's aimed at beginners.

Could you give me the ISBN or author name? A quick search gave me a handful of books so I'm not sure which one you're talking about.

Mel Bartholomew is the author of the version I have, but it looks like "Square Foot Gardening Foundation" took over after he died.

"All New Square Foot Gardening", I assume?

Thanks!

An essential ingredient of authentic bouillabaisse.

It's also tasty in chai, though rarely present in store-bought mixes (but you can just toss in a couple of threads when brewing).

Here in Sweden we use it in buns and in ice cream.

It says that the first couple spent $20,000 on bulbs 3 years ago which gives them a $25,000 harvest, and have somehow made $1 million from this. There seems to be some information missing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42585112

I noticed not long ago that nootropic users were talking about it a lot. I wonder how much demand comes from that?

For what it's worth, it is studied to have a variety of related benefits: nootropic, hedonic, antidepressant, retinal, macular, anti-glaucoma, and more. Its dose range is quite tight.

https://webcf.waybackmachine.org/web/20250103061402/https://...

Pesky paywall begone.

That link didn’t work for me, a few paragraphs down it just shows a swirling “please wait why we verify access”.

In case anyone else has the same issue;

https://archive.is/2025.01.02-101341/https://www.nytimes.com...

For those who don't know it yet, "bypass paywall" extensions are an alternative for a smooth browsing experience. I just can't bother with archive links.

see. (https://github.com/bpc-clone/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean)

How do we know that this extension can be trusted ?

We read the source code.

Then it auto-updates.

Then we blindly trust that someone else is still reading the new version’s code and will raise the alarm if something bad happens.

I highly recommend turning off auto updates on browser extensions.

I suggest looking into the Obfusicated C contest before relying on your own reading of code to verify lack of malicious intent.

There's no source provided in the repo? It seems to just be a discussion of how to download the xpi from somewhere else.

You run it in a VM that you only use for casual web browsing, so the scope of possible damage is limited.

We simply can't, I guess. Not after the original repo is long gone due to DMCA. Therefore, better to mention to do your own due diligence.

"Why can't we nowadays find any quality content?"

Hence why.

These people are selling it at 10x the market rate which is senseless for the consumer. It is strange that they even have any market at all at this rate. It is a completely unscalable price.

It pairs well with a $25 (plus tax and shipping) single, frozen, partially-cooked hamburger that you gave to finish preparing yourself.. https://www.goldbelly.com/restaurants/gramercy-tavern/the-gr...

They are rich retired people selling miniscule quantities to other rich people. It's just for fun. The excess cost of the saffron is lower than the transaction cost of fulfilling the order.

>Homemade Sesame Seed Buns

Let me guess, Homemade is the company name?

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