Saffron -“the red gold spice”: how to improve its profitability

... The aim of this work, which is currently underway, has been to investigate how the adoption of sustainable cultivation techniques can improve the profitability of saffron at the primary level. Thus, economic and technical data have been collected directly (all the data referred to 1 ha) on farms in a marginal area in the North West of Italy. It was considered the effects on the productivity of: a) sustainable practices, used as inoculants of beneficial microorganisms, such as arbuscular mycorrihizal fungi (AMF); b) optimized agro techniques. As far as the utilization of AMF is concerned, an increase in replacement corms and in the corm weight, which are important aspects for the production of its flowers, has been observed [9,10]. Such results will allow a comparison to be made with recent economic data1 which indicate that saffron2 was the most profitable spice, in terms of Gross Margin (GM)2, in Italy in the 2015-2020 period, a result that reflects the profitability of each farm’s production activities [11] and the Operating Margin (OM)3. Moreover, the human labor cost (HLC), that is, 83% of the total Farm labor cost4 has had an incidence of approximately 54% on the GM [11]. Our study has excluded the effects of the utilization of the violet tepals of the flower on profitability, as they have long been considered a floral waste of saffron, although they have health-promoting properties (e.g., antioxidant and antidepressant) and could generate a new source of income from saffron [12-15].