Te Anau saffron growers Steve and Jo Daley were even prepared to pay up to $2500 a load to get compost trucked the 650km from the Living Earth processing plant at Bromley.
The Living Earth market was 95% rural based, included pastoral and cropping farmers and the rural sales were 85% repeat business, the company’s rural and urban sales manager Graeme Wright said.
The Daleys were determined to be organic growers and the cost was worth it for them, with the consistency of the compost and its ability to hold its properties through a hot, dry summer.
They worked with North Canterbury couple Cheryl Rault and Ray Hughes, whose Kiwi Saffron business was a cornerstone of the industry for several years. Rault co-ordinated a group of about 40 growers and found export markets for the high-value spice.
She and Hughes composted the rows of their Greta Valley plots and supplied saffron to Black Estate Winery in the Waipara Valley, another Living Earth customer. It used saffron in the restaurant menu and sold the spice at the cellar door.
Co-owner and winemaker Nicholas Brown said the compost enriched the ground and improved the friability of the topsoil. Weeds along the vines couldn’t be sprayed and the building up of the soil made mechanical weed control much easier.
The saffron growers said the black, organic compost was a key ingredient in the growing process for the corms.
It helped NZ’s cold winters and dry, sunny summers in making the spice among the reddest produced in the world – the redder the better for quality.
It took a huge number of corms to produce the significant volumes of flowers that produced the spice. That’s why there was a list of 40 in the growers’ group. Their product was measured in kilograms, perhaps about 12kg-14kg in total.
The scarce spice was worth about $37 a gram in its purest form, about $37,000 a kilogram.
It took about 150 flowers to make one gram.
Hughes and Rault wanted to get their production up to about 4kg next year from about 2kg now.
The Daleys had about a million corms in their bigger growing business but eventually wanted 50 million corms, mainly through the corms dividing over time.
Rault was working to establish export markets in Italy and China.
As well as a food spice there was also potential in pharmaceuticals, though much bigger volumes would be needed.
One of Rault’s NZ customers used saffron as a treatment for eye disease. She and Hughes also produced saffron honey.
Living Earth sold significant volumes of organic compost to pastoral farms, Wright said.
On dairy farms, spreading compost helped improve water-holding capacity of pasture and reduced nitrate leaching through the soil.
Living Earth had soil science papers reporting that for every 1% increase in organic matter added to pasture, the water-holding capacity would double, partly by preventing soil crusting.
The organic matter held a lot of water, more gradually releasing it for pasture and crops. It also encouraged earthworm activity.
The compost contained a host of minerals including nitrogen, copper, potassium and lime that were gradually released into the soil over three to four years, complementing commercial fertilisers, he said.
Living Earth, a Waste Management subsidiary, owned and operated the compost business on the Bromley site owned by the Christchurch City Council.
The plant took in about 55,000 tonnes of green waste a year, mainly from the weekly green bin collections in Christchurch and turned it into 22,500 tonnes of organic compost.
Each of 18 tunnels was filled with 300 tonnes of waste and heated to 60 degrees within 48 hours.
After a week, the waste had broken down to a level where two tunnels were mixed into one. After a second week the compost was taken out into windrows, watered and turned.
Winery Black Estate was also testing the mix of Living Earth compost with its own grape waste, Brown said.
