Life change leads to growing opportunities
Words and Images by Annie Studholme
Geoff and Jude’s story starts about five years ago. Happily living in Christchurch, where Geoff worked in civil construction, the Slater's whole world was turned upside down when Jude suffered a severe stroke, which very nearly cost her her life, resulting in nine months of rehab.
Reduced to just one income, it forced the pair to look at other alternatives. “I wanted to spend more time with Jude, and they only way I could see to do that was moving onto a lifestyle block that could generate us an income,” explains Geoff.
Although they had lived in the city for more than 30 years, both had grown up on farms and had a strong affinity with the land. Jude was brought up on a sheep farm in Southland, while Geoff’s family were dairying in the Catlins. To forsake suburban living for a small piece of paradise seemed like the logical next move, but there was still the question of how they were supposed to generate an income off just 4 hectares.
Geoff looked at a number of different options, and that’s when he discovered saffron. The bulk of the world’s saffron is grown in Iran, Greece, Morocco and India, but there are a handful of growers in New Zealand with the return to growers doubling in the past 20 years.
Saffron, which is the stigma of the purple-petalled autumn flowering Crocus sativus, is the world’s most expensive spice; weight for weight it’s more valuable than gold, and has been used as a yellow dye, perfume, medicine and in food flavouring for thousands of years. Traditionally, just a pinch of saffron is used to flavour rice dishes such as risotto, biryani, paella, and in the French style fish soup, bouillabaisse. It can also be added to sweet foods such as rice pudding, halwa, cakes and pastries.
Geoff soon found that the unique Mediterranean native was also ideally suited to Canterbury’s cold winters and warm dry summers, prefers well-draining, light, friable soils with a sandy or loamy texture, and doesn’t need a lot of irrigation.
“We looked at growing blueberries and feijoas, but with the cost of the trees and ongoing irrigation, they simply didn’t add up. In some cases, it was going to be two to three years down the track before we could generate any income, whereas saffron was right away,” explains Geoff.
They went in search of the right property and looked at many before settling on 4 hectares near at West Eyreton, near Rangiora. “We looked at 8-9 different 10-acre blocks but kept coming back to this one and we won’t be moving from here. We just love it here.”
After much research, Geoff and Jude took the plunge and planted their first 6,000 corms (bulb-like plant organs) which they managed to source from a fellow local grower in January 2017, planting them at 10cm apart and between 10-15cm deep.
Just 40 days later, on March 27, the Slater’s excitingly started welcoming the first of thousands of tiny crocus flowers as they emerged through the soil. Having found full-time work on a nearby dairy run-off, Geoff worked the harvest in around his employment, picking in the early mornings before the flowers have had a chance to wilt.
Harvest lasts around 4-5 weeks depending on the weather. Each plant may produce 4-6 flowers over the entire picking season. Flowers have to be picked daily, explains Geoff. “You can’t afford to leave a flower until the next day because it will deteriorate.”
The blooms are picked into sterilised buckets and carted inside, where Geoff spreads them out on a table and tirelessly plucks out each of the precious orange-red stigmas by hand before transferring them to a small, domestic dehydrator, drying them down to 10% moisture. While the flowers can be stored for up to three days in the fridge, ideally, it’s best to move the stigmas straight away, he says.
Drying times vary depending on the machine, humidity and quality of the threads, but on average, Geoff dries them at 65 degrees for about 1 hour to achieve the maximum glossy, dark red colour.
It is pain-staking, labour intensive work, but the pay-off is worth it, says Geoff. To make up one kilogram of dried saffron, requires more than 170,000-200,000 flowers, depending on the quality. To put it in perspective, one kilogram of quality dried saffron sits at well over $10,000 on the commercial market and can fetch anywhere up to $30,000 per kilogram.
For Geoff, it’s been a huge learning experience. They knew little about growing saffron when they first put it in. Luckily, he says saffron is “pretty easy” to grow, and it’s the perfect lifestyle crop because it doesn’t require much land.
“The other benefit of saffron is that it is dormant over the summer, so it doesn’t need water, and it starts growing again in April. It can get root rot due to poor drainage, but we use a product to try and eliminate that, which we use after flowering or when it’s dormant in the summer.”
Although it doesn’t need irrigation, looking ahead, ideally Geoff wants to have the ability to irrigate when and if required. Rain (irrigation) 10-15 days before harvest can greatly affect production, whereas drought has a tendency to cause small flowers and stigmas. Rain in the spring is also said to be important for producing corms underground. He’s looking at making the space between the rows big enough so he can fit a tractor between them, so he can use a 1,000 litre water tank to spray irrigate when needed.
“It’s like everything, if the soil conditions are right, they get fertiliser and water, they will grow. It’s just about knowing what they need to be at their best,” says Geoff.
To maintain a high nutrient content in the soil Geoff’s found that a gypsum soil conditioner with added potassium works well to enhance flower production. During flowering, he is also exploring the option of using natural fertilisers such as fish or seaweed. They also use a mix of dolomite lime and magnesium, as saffron thrives best in a neutral soil (ph 6-6.5).
With spraying not an option to keep a totally natural product, weeds continue to be their biggest battle, with all weeding carried out carefully by hand.
Ultimately, like so many crops, the Mother Nature has the potential to have a huge impact. “Last year was good because we had the frosts to bring them on, but this year’s been a lot warmer and we haven’t had the frosts, so it was almost a week earlier. The rain over the summer has also helped. The stigmas weren’t as big as they could have been this year, but they were much brighter,” he explains.
This season was just the Slater’s second in operation. Unlike most traditional crops which are planted annually, saffron is infertile and does not set viable seed, so replication comes from corm multiplication. Each season the crop grows as the corms multiply. “It’s not cheap to put in (5,000 corms cost $8,000), but the beauty is that it’s a oncer, they keep on producing,” explains Geoff.
Working on an average of each mother corm being replaced by four new cormlet daughters (in some cases they can have as many as 10) each season, the Slater’s should have had 24,000 corms this season, which equates to four times the amount of saffron from 2017.
By the fourth year, they could have as many as 384,000 corms in the ground at which time Geoff intends on digging them up in December, sorting and air drying them before replanting them in bigger beds, so the process can start again.
“We are working on the lowest side of the scale. At the fourth-year mark we could be harvesting up to 2.25 kilograms of saffron. If we worked on five corms per year that would grow to 4.4 kilograms in the fourth year. You can always overstate it, but it’s nice to be realistic. By year five we hope to be producing 4-5 kilograms of saffron.”
Geoff has just finished his second harvest. He was pleased with the results, but it’s made him realise that they’ll need extra help during the 4-5 week picking and processing season going forward.
Harvest time is a tough few weeks; sleep is at a premium. Geoff is out there on his hands and knees picking most mornings after the dew has lifted, and then is up into the wee hours of the following morning by the time he’s finished removing the stigmas, going to bed with his fingers stained purplish-black from the petals. It’s all encompassing. There is no time for anything else. “We barely managed this season, and it’s only going to get bigger. There’s just no let up over that time; it’s full on for a few weeks and then it’s [the picking season] gone,” he says.
As well as employing short-term staff, Geoff is also looking at options for future mechanisation to get him off his hands and knees, but over thousands of years no-one has come up with a way of substituting picking by hand because of the delicateness of the saffron. That’s why it’s so expensive. “There are a lot of options out there, it’s just a matter of finding one that is going to work for us.”
As the business grows, Geoff hopes to create new markets for his prized saffron either selling direct to restaurants or adding it to other products like cosmetics or honey, but admittedly that’s still a year or two off.
While he and Jude are focused on growing their saffron business for now, he is also experimenting with growing Myoga ginger (Zingiber mioga) with the first rhizomes planted last October with the first crop expected in 2019.
A native to Japan, China and South Korea, Myoga ginger or Japanese ginger is a true delicacy, sought after by Japanese Kiwis but almost unknown by everyone else. A bit like a cross between ginger and a mild pickled onion, it is floral and gingery, with the flower buds and shoots (not the root as with traditional ginger) used in many Asian-style soups, salads, stir-fry’s, seafood and savoury dishes.
While there is little grown in New Zealand commercially, research results from the late 1980s and 1990s suggested it was likely to be a successful crop when grown under 50 per cent shade cloth to avoid sunburn on the top growth, explains Geoff.
It likes similar soil conditions as saffron, but the similarities don’t end there. It also dies down, retreating underground before the frosts arrive and re-emerges in September. The flower shoots come up from the soils separately from the leafy stems and the pale-yellow flowers open at ground level. The unopened buds are harvested just before they appear through the soils and the flowers start opening. Picking starts in February and goes through to about April. It’s so new to New Zealand there seems to be no diseases or pests to attack it.
Geoff is excited about seeing just how successful the Myoga ginger might be. “It’s always exciting when you are growing something for the first time, but only time will tell.”
In time, Geoff’s confident they can be completely self-sufficient off their 4 hectares and is looking forward to the day when he doesn’t have to leave the property to find additional work elsewhere to supplement their income.
The Slater’s joined Ruralco last year with an eye to the future, broadening the spectrum of outlets they can use throughout Canterbury, securing great deals, while at the same time simplifying their accounts with just one, simple bill.