[FROM THE ARCHIVES] Banking on Red Gold | Carte Blanche | M-Net

some call saffron the 24 carat gold of spices you use it by the thread it's so expensive because getting your hands on just one thread is highly labor intensive now a local farmer is leveling the spice playing field and putting south africa on the saffron producers map you might not recognize this exotic purple flower but it's testing south african farmers who have signed up for the challenge of carefully cultivating it to produce the spice known as saffron so this is red gold each fragrant strand precious and can transform any dish it is the world's most expensive spice at two hundred thousand rand a kilo saffron was first cultivated in ancient greece today it's mainly grown in iran morocco india and now in south africa benny engelbrecht left his television producing cake eight years ago returning to what he calls his poor roots to farm although others had tried and failed to grow export quality saffron engelbrecht refused to be beaten by a flower strangely my wife said to me this is going to work a lot of people said you're absolutely crazy what makes you think that you can grow it if nobody else has done it before the spice is the stigma of the crocus sativas flower to collect one kg takes about a hundred and fifty thousand flowers as each one only has three stigmas that's these red strands over here not only is it labor intensive but it's painstaking engelbrecht and his team spend days picking the stigmas from the flowers which is a mundane and back-breaking task the saffron rash happens on this isolated farm in the northern cape between williston and calvinia how cold are my children he believes saffron has its own fighting personality it needs you to look after it and you need to feel it and be part of it i love what i do i'm very passionate about this this two-acre plot is where his saffron experiment as well as his patients has been tried and tested with his corms or bulbs today we preparing the land the field for this year's saffron all these corns that i hear from last year's harvest they went dormant and now they're starting to wake up so now it's time to plant them the saffron you plant it 40 days later you get your fruit and then the rest of the season the bulbs multiply under the ground and in october it goes into dormancy till about february where it wakes up again and starts the process all by itself engelbrecht has found that the multiplication underground takes three years to reap the most profitable yield so while he was literally waiting for flowers to grow he came up with an outgrower business strategy called safrikon which rents out the quorums to other farmers creating a new market but also strategically finding out where else the fussy flower will grow successfully it's african has decided that we were not selling outcomes we're renting them out basically for three years and then after three years because they multiply up to 27 times in three years we buy all those gorms back again from those outgrowers engelbrecht's farmhands joked that they've broken their backs with engelbrecht not for him my family is without me i want them to grow with me in this business to take ownership and you can see the pride this soccer field size crop will rake in a million rand engelbrecht's team also hand delivering these starter packs to small-scale farmers around the country i don't want to give out hectares of this and then everybody's crossed with me because it didn't work the best thing to do is to make sure that works with you and then next year you can make an educated decision by yourself saffron provides a beautiful golden color and a pungent aromatic flavor to food the red gold threads are sold in a few strands or even in ground form it also has many other uses in medicine perfume and dyes and it's the color and the smell that determine the quality we met up with the team in johannesburg who have found an international buyer iran is the biggest producer they do about 300 tons of saffron a year and so this is the core that's it that's it [Laughter] we just got feedback from a shaking bahrain that wants to buy all our saffron that the quality is extremely good so how much would saffron this much be about about 10 grain 10 gram so i'm holding 10 grand here yeah 10 000 yeah and to fill this that's about a day day to two days work doing it two days just for this match yeah two days north of pretoria small-scale farming project has been set up to plan saffron march is planting season and by the end of april the flowers will be ready to harvest jaku fick is a painter but upon hearing about the lucrative opportunity decided it was worth digging up his family's plot and planting the picky flower when did this operation all start basically from breaking soil uh three weeks three weeks this is three all of this in three weeks yes wow and are you excited yes we are we are um totally excited we are really looking forward to what this can actually become this is the most expensive space in the world 200 000 kilograms absolutely absolutely was that the conversation basically basically basically it was if we if we're gonna do this we need to do it hundred and ten percent farming solutions expert cornell liebenberg shares englebrecht's vision but also safrikon as co-director he's assisting investors in cultivating the spice successfully what's the excitement around saffron the potential income stream they started i think about 300 um of the coins and now it is more than two million so it's a good success story you have to create a market and a good brand and i think that's going to create even a bigger market because but currently the demand is just way way higher than display so kids we can stop saying old macdonald had a farm they could say old mcfarland had a farm right [Laughter] engelbrecht has gifted a starter pack to the local calvinian municipality hoping they become as excited about the flower as he is back on the farm it seems even the weather which has brought rain is spurring on engelbrecht to succeed very nice surprise last night went 25 millimeters and basically the soil was prepared for us for today using modern farming techniques like a planting machine the team cut down a week-long process to only a few hours for now it's very crucial that we don't go overboard and go too quickly but for now we need to do our own work and make sure that it works right now engelbrecht's can-do attitude will hopefully see that careful homework rewarded for now though he's content to while away the time waiting for his saffron to grow reading his own poetry on his stoop in the vast karoo landscape distiller thank you for watching our stories here online and please subscribe below to become part of our youtube community and be notified when we upload our latest content

Channel: Carte Blanche

Views: 131,146

Keywords: carte blanche, carte blanche mnet, carte blanche south africa, carte blanche sunday, mnet, mnet sunday, Derek Watts, Devi Sankaree-Govender, Bongani Bingwa, John Webb, Claire Mawisa, latest carte blanche, macfarlane moleli, Devi Sankaree Govender, Masa Kekana, carteblanchetv

Id: Lh7Ws_72ifY

Length: 8min 35sec (515 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021