Kashmir saffron nears flowering after a 31.2°C October day
Growers around Pampore say the soil is too dry for the crocus to flower well. The weather office promises light rain on 10 October, and the last official harvest figure is three years old.
Kashmir saffron goes into its flowering weeks after an October heat spike: Srinagar reached 31.2°C on 4 October, 5.7 degrees above normal, according to the India Meteorological Department. Growers around Pampore say the soil is too dry and that the crop now depends on rain.
The reading is the second highest the Srinagar station has logged in any October, Greater Kashmir reported; the record, 33.9°C, dates from 2 October 1935, and the average October maximum is about 21.4°C. Qazigund, further south, reached 31.4°C the same day and broke its own record from 1985. Mukhtar Ahmed, the department's director in Srinagar, put the heat down mainly to the absence of rain.
Saffron needs moisture in September and October, while the plant grows before it flowers. Rain in July and August had refilled the fields on the plateaus around Pampore, the paper wrote. A dry month since has used that up, and a grower in Lethpora told it that newly planted corms had dried out.
Three seasons without an official figure, and the crop still waits for rain.
What growers say about Kashmir saffron this season
"Temperatures are quite high these days, and this can affect flowering," Abdul Majeed Wani, president of the Saffron Growers Association Kashmir, told the KNO news agency on 3 October. Wani said more farmers had planted this year, and asked the government to keep irrigation in the saffron areas working so that growers do not depend on rainfall alone.
Growers credit the National Mission on Saffron with reviving fields, the agency reported, and say the benefit stays limited without reliable water. In 2023 the authorities approved a 1.46 billion rupee (Rs 146 crore) programme for high-value crops, saffron among them.
The last official harvest figure is from 2023
Government data put production at 17.33 tonnes in 2021, 14.87 tonnes in 2022 and 14.94 tonnes in 2023. After that there are only growers' estimates, and they do not agree. Growers quoted by KNO put the 2024 crop at about 30% of a normal one and 2025 at nearly 10%. Greater Kashmir reports last year's fall as an estimated 20% to 30%, after a dry June and July with 34°C.
The longer line is clearer. Official figures cited by the paper show the area under Kashmir saffron shrinking from more than 5,700 hectares in 1996-97 to 2,387 hectares in 2019-20. Vanilla, the other spice sold by the gram, is moving the opposite way: Madagascar vanilla prices have fallen to a decade low.
The Meteorological Centre in Srinagar forecast on 9 October light rain in scattered to many places on 10 October, dry weather on 11 and 12 October and more light rain on 13 and 14 October. Light rain is what is on offer. The fields will show within weeks whether it was enough.
