It’s with pensive eyes that 60-year-old Ali Mohamed Reshi gazes over his saffron farm in Pulwama’s Lethpora area, some 22 km south of Srinagar. The protracted dry spell and climate change spells doom for his crop of saffron, the world’s most coveted spice.
Since the beginning of June, the Valley has been reeling under a scorching heatwave with temperatures going up to 34 degrees Celsius. On July 3, Kashmir recorded a temperature of 35.6 degrees Celsius, the highest in the last 25 years.
The climate change over the last several years has taken a toll on the Kashmiri saffron fields, sprawling over thousands of hectares across Pulwama and Budgam districts. The erratic weather patterns have also led many farmers to convert their saffron field into apple orchards and other crops that they believe are better suited to a changed climate.
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Declining production
According to Reshi, his seven-kanal farm once yielded between 1,100 to 1,200 grams of saffron, but it has declined to a few hundred grams in recent years.
“In 2022, the production dropped to 100 to 150 grams only”, he said.
Official data suggest that the saffron production over the last two decades dipped by 65 per cent.
The annual production in 1990 was 15.95 tonnes, compared to 2.6 tonnes in 2023-24.
Similarly, the land used for the spice cultivation shrank from 5,707 hectares in 1996-97 to 2,387.71 hectares in 2019-19.
Mohammad Ashraf, another saffron farmer from Pampore, said that he had switched over to mustard cultivation. “The low snowfall and rain deficit have impacted the production over the last many years,” said an agriculture scientist.
“Kashmir experienced more or less a snowless winter in 2024 and this change is bound to impact the crops”, he added.
Chief Agriculture Officer, Pulwama Mohammad Iqbal Khan, told businessline that if the ongoing dry spell continued through August, it would severely impact the crop.
He said that in August, the soil needed moisture as the farmers grubbed their fields around this time.
A failed dripping system
In 2010, the government introduced a drip irrigation system as part of the ₹412-crore National Saffron Mission to combat prolonged dry spells. However, farmers report that while a network of pipes was installed on their farms, it was never made fully operational. The crop is losing spice for farmers.