Many Ukrainian farmers prefer saffron to traditional vegetable and berry crops. The spice is unpretentious, and its prices are consistently high: at least $5 per gram. Harvesting is done by hand. Productivity — 10-20 kg per hectare.
How to start a saffron business in Ukraine. Planting 1 hectare of saffron requires 6-8 tons of planting material. The purchase of bulbs and payment of labor for the supply will total $50.000 per hectare to start a saffron business. But the crop is harvested for 8 years. Then the bulbs can be planted already on 10-15 hectares. Depending on weather conditions, up to 20 kg of saffron can be harvested from one hectare in the third year.
“There are no problems with the sale of saffron, either with the stamen or with the bulb. Today we have about 5 hectares of saffron. We sell stamens to England and Holland. For the first time, 10 kg were sold to Azerbaijan. We plan to collect 40 kg of spices this year. Wholesale consignments, as a rule, 10 kg each,” says Vitaly Shakalo, founder of the farm Shafran Lyubimovsky.
The main consumer of Ukrainian saffron is located inside the country — restaurants and just people who buy the spice for food purposes.
