The uncertain future of the world's most expensive spice
After facing one of its worst harvests on record, the Kashmir Valley’s farmers worry about the future of their prized saffron.
Pampore, Kashmir — Noor Mohd Bhat is a second-generation farmer who has worked the Kashmir Valley’s saffron fields since the summer of 1947. Cloistered in his family’s shop on the side of the highway near the town of Pampore, the octogenarian sat at his desk sorting a giant pile of the spice.
For just three days out of the year, the thousands of purple crocus flowers that grow here bloom in the fall, exposing the dark red stems inside. Once plucked and dried the stems become the world’s most expensive spice, prized for its rich flavor and medicinal qualities.
Throughout the November morning, thousands of farmers like Bhat ventured out to family-owned plots to pick crocus flowers. Historically, harvesting took the full day, from first light to dusk, when the sun disappears over the western mountains toward the Pakistani border. However during this past fall’s exceptionally dry season, spanning late October to early November, each day’s harvest lasted only a couple hours. Last year was the worst harvest many members of the community could recall.
“Saffron is a gift from god, and its success depends on how people interact with each other, themselves, and nature,” Bhat said while rolling one of the crimson threads through his cracked fingers, “[If] human intervention in saffron production is not currently working, it means we are not yet worthy and need to change ourselves and the world before it is ready to grow strong once again.”
In 2024 and 2025, saffron production in Kashmir hit an all-time low, and production here has fallen by 68 percent in the past 20 years. Local farmers and experts suspect shifting rainfall patterns and temperatures in the western Himalaya are playing a major role.
As the future of Kashmiri saffron becomes uncertain, farmers are turning towards a combination of tradition and science to perpetuate its survival.
The origins of an ancient spice
Pampore is in Indian Administered Kashmir, an hour’s drive south of the region’s capital city Srinagar where Silk Road-era markets still flourish beneath oak-carved minarets and traditional shikara boats drift silently across the chilled waters of Dal Lake. While Pampore has been the center of saffron cultivation in Kashmir for many generations, it’s unclear when and how the spice first arrived.
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In 2022, paleobotanists studying the DNA of the saffron crocus estimated that it was first cultivated as a crop nearly 3,500 years ago in central Greece or possibly Persia.
While crocus flowers occur in the wild, saffron does not, which leads botanists to believe that it was created, possibly even by accident, through artificial cross pollination.
From its place of origin, the legendary spice became widely and rapidly recognized for its bright color, aromatic smell, and pungent flavor. Acting as a biomarker for conquest and trade, saffron followed in the footsteps of armies and caravans into the Middle East, Central Asia, and eventually North Africa. Today, most saffron is produced in Iran, but it’s also commonly grown in Kashmir, Afghanistan, Spain, and Greece. The terroir of each country produces notably unique flavor profiles in their saffron, and the Kashmir spice is valued for its quality and rarity. Even proud saffron farmers I met in Morocco and Greece look to Kashmir as the source of the world’s most coveted spice , and spice vendors laud the region for producing exceptionally flavorful crops.
Shubli Bashir is a fourth-generation saffron farmer and PhD candidate studying agriculture at Sher e Kashmir University in nearby Jammu where she researches the phytochemical compounds of saffron.
“Crocin is a compound responsible for saffron’s color, picrocene impacts its taste, and safranal creates its rich aroma,” Bashir told me while picking flowers in her family’s plot. “When properly grown and processed, Kashmiri saffron has the highest concentration of all three compounds, which explains its high reputation.”
In Kashmir, a popular local legend tells that saffron first arrived in the 1200s tucked in the pockets of two sufi saints passing through the valley. After falling sick and being healed by a local doctor, the mystics gifted the doctor two saffron corms, the plant’s bulb, and instructed him how to plant and harvest the saffron in a field just outside the village.
Bashir thinks the origins of the spice likely have a more economic root in her village’s history.
“While folklore likes to credit the Sufi saints,” she told me while holding a wicker basket filled to the brim with freshly picked crocuses, “historical and agricultural evidence suggests a mix of trade, migration, and cultural exchange brought saffron to Kashmir and enabled a unique homegrown tradition to flourish.”
Whether it came with saints or traders, saffron has been an economic centerpiece for Pampore, surfacing in the region’s culinary history over the past 800 years. It’s a staple in Wazwan, a 36-course royal feast first served to Mughal emperors in the 1500s, and in kawha, a saffron based tea that spread throughout Central Asia during the reign of Afghan kings in the 1700s.
An uncertain harvest
Saffron is considered one of the most labor-intensive crops in the world because the purple crocus only blossoms for thirty-six hours, and there exists no mechanized way to harvest it. For the farmers in Pampore, family offers a helpful solution to this obstacle.
Every autumn, as the crocuses first emerge from the tan mountain soil, the village triples in size as children return from university, doctors travel home from cities far away, and policemen take time away from their daily shifts to help with the annual harvest.
The flowers are picked in the fields and the saffron inside is then plucked and dried in the living rooms or front yards of family homes. It takes around 50 flowers to produce just a teaspoon of the spice, and one ounce of Kashmir saffron can sell for around $1,000 on the market, according to a number of local saffron resellers I spoke to and one online spice vendor.
To blossom, saffron corms require cool and dry conditions with intermittent rain halfway through the planting season. According to farmers, over the past decade autumn temperatures in the mountain valley have risen substantially. When researchers recently looked at temperature and precipitation trends throughout the Kashmir Valley, they found significant increases in both. Precipitation in the region, however, is increasingly falling in the form of torrential floods, with more periods of drought throughout.
Shubli thinks this climatic shift has resulted in fewer flowers blooming and puts those that do manage to grow at risk of being eaten by animals like porcupines. These native herbivores are increasingly being driven into the farms as erratic weather patterns and deforestation depletes their natural food sources such as roots and tree bark.
“In the early nineties we would harvest around one hundred kilograms of flowers in a single day,” says Shubli’s brother Ubaid Bashir who works as a general practitioner in Srinagar when not at the family farm, “in 2024 we only harvested fifty kilograms the entire season…[in 2025] we only harvested six kilograms in total.”
Shubli says she has never seen the harvest as dire what the region experienced this past fall.
“This is the first time in my life I have seen such a bad situation,” she told me, “The fields were almost empty and we couldn’t even get pictures because there was nothing to click.”
Working alongside government initiatives, farmers and scientists like Shubli are looking for ways to assist the fragile saffron corms during periods of unstable weather.
“Some farmers and experts are adopting indoor and controlled environment cultivation to make saffron production more resilient” she said, “In other areas [that cannot afford expensive technology] corms are being traditionally rejuvenated by hand sorting, rotating crops, and by avoiding chemical fertilizers and pesticides which help maintain soil fertility and ecological balance.”
While these early-stage efforts have the potential to help, it will take many seasons to fully know if they succeed.
Whether it is by technologically adapting to a changing climate, or changing the way we interact with each other and the earth as Noor Mohd Bhat believes, every saffron farmer agrees that something needs to be done if the future of this treasured flower is to survive.
Bound by spice
On my final night in Kashmir, I sat on a hand-woven rug on the floor of the Bashir family’s sitting room in Pampore. As the final rays of golden light pierced through the window illuminating a tray of freshly brewed kahwa tea, Azi Begum, Shubli and Ubaid’s 104-year-old grandmother sat at the head of the room.
Over the saffron infused beverage, the family spoke of spices, climate change, and the difficulties of living in Kashmir’s disputed territory which is so often characterized by violence and extremism in international headlines.
“Harvesting is not profitable right now, so many of us have other professions but still return every year to continue our family tradition,” Ubaid said, “Saffron is a symbol of rebirth and when everything in the natural world dies in the autumn, saffron is reborn…it is a beautiful thing that we must remember.”
Despite the economic hardships that saffron farmers are bracing for, their connection to the spice and its traditional importance to Kashmiri culture remains strong.
“Kashmir has beauty, complexity, and humanity embedded in its valleys, people, and history,” Shubli said while gazing into her cup of steaming kawha, “if more people could see Kashmir through lenses like saffron instead of only headlines of conflict, I believe they’d gain a deeper understanding of its heritage, resilience, and potential.”
