New Harvest Turmeric

Our turmeric is grown organically, hand-harvested, cleaned, steamed, sun-dried and ground fresh. It's irrigated primarily using rainwater, which helps reduce the farm's water consumption, while the water-saving techniques intensify the turmeric's flavor.

Our partner farm allows the turmeric to go through a curing process in the soil before harvesting. The skin tightens and turns glossy, and the flavor concentrates and sweetens. This turmeric is particularly sweet. We don't know exactly why; maybe it's because it grows alongside (and is crop-rotated with) sugarcane. But we think this curing step also helps avoid the bitter, chalky off-flavors in low-quality turmeric and makes our New Harvest Turmeric so sweet and buttery.

To grind his turmeric into powder, our partner farmer drives 2 hours each way by tractor. There are other grinding facilities closer to home, but they have smaller, less-effective motors and use metal grinding mechanisms, which heat the turmeric and shed microscopic metal fragments as they grind. He prefers the more powerful motor and the stone grinder at this facility to make an especially fine, soft turmeric powder, and the stone grinding plates help keep the turmeric from heating up through the friction of the grinding process. Since it's a shared facility in an area with lots of non-organic turmeric farms, he scrubs down the grinder AND discards the first ~100lbs of his turmeric to prevent any contamination from pesticides or other chemical residues in his final product. The care he takes at every step of the process is one of the reasons his turmeric is so exceptional. We're so proud to work with him.

Meet the Farmer: Our turmeric is grown by Dr. Salunkhe, a naturopathic and Ayurvedic doctor, a doctor of pharmacology, a disciplined Yogi, a community leader and a passionate organic agriculture advocate. About 15 years ago, he realized that the connections between poor health and nutrition extended all the way back to farming practices, and he decided to focus his scientific expertise on agriculture. He is deeply, overwhelmingly passionate about his farm and his crops.

Recently, we got to visit his farm, where he told us that his neighbors have laughed at him and dismissed his insistence on organic methods and regenerative techniques for years, but that since we've been buying his turmeric (at almost 10x the going price for commodity turmeric), they've started to change their minds. The fact that we made the long trip to visit the farm and meet him in person was especially meaningful, both for him personally but also for his campaign to show his neighbors the value of organic farming.