muddied water

Farmer devastated over loss of crop says dream of making Abbotsford the 'saffron capital' of B.C. persists

Farmer devastated over loss of crop says dream of making Abbotsford the 'saffron capital' of B.C. persists

For Avtar Dhillon, living in the Sumas Prairie in Abbotsford meant cultivating his dream to farm the world's most expensive spice in British Columbia. Now his crop of about 250,000 saffron bulbs lies still under several feet of muddied water. The farmer, who recently said he was B.C.'s first to farm saffron on a large commercial scale, says his farm has suffered catastrophic damage due to flooding in the Fraser Valley. "I'm very upset about [the] saffron ... I take six years to get to this point ... and then Monday just lost everything." For Dhillon, who is also a blueberry farmer, it took several years of experimenting with different methods of growing saffron before finding one that worked.