Sowing opium poppy days

Opium poppy is a quite common crop in Spain and more specifically in the Albacete area, located in La Mancha land. Spain is the world's second largest opium poppy producer after Australia. It is a crop controlled in Spain by a single company, Alcaliber, since 1973. Alcaliber is the only company that contracts the production of opium poppy to farmers by renting their fields, supplies the seeds, their technicians together with the farmers follow the entire production process with regular checks. It is also their task, once the plant is dry, to harvest it with special harvester combines and processes included in the procurement of individual medicinal products.

The opium poppy cultivated in Spain, variety Nigum, is used for the production of morphine, codeine and thebaine. This whole process is surrounded by the strictest security measures (by Police agents).

Opium poppy is an ideal crop for the extensive irrigated fields in the province of Albacete and it is also a crop that has very good yields so it can reach about 3,000kg/ha (the price is around 0.8€/kg.). Moreover, the amount of needed water is not excessive (similar to cereals) and it is a fully mechanised crop.

If we focus on the sowing tasks that our friend Juan was carrying out, as you can see in our pictures and video, it is very important to have a well-prepared seedbed. This soil needs to be lightly tilled and even to be a little hard (it is worked with a cultivator, although the ideal situation is to use the power harrow very superficially and then roller it before sowing). The seed is left very shallow as the first watering will be responsible for covering it. As you can see, the seed drill has no rear harrow and it is disc seeder for maximum precision in placing the seed in the soil.

In one working day, many hectares can be sown as Juan's equipment consists of two twin Amazone D9-3000 Super seed drills with a working width of 6 metres. The seeding rate used is about 2 kg/he so he does not need to stop to fill the hopper during the day and the working speed is around 6.5 km/h. After sowing, a pre-emergence treatment is carried out in order to prevent the emergence of weeds and a small irrigation to fix the seed... but this will be another topic to be dealt with in another future post.

Versión en español.

​Harvesting opium ​poppy

We continue to speak about harvesting tasks.​ O​n this occassion about poppy or opium plant (Papaver somniferum). Next to where our friend Alfonso and Sergio were harvesting estero wheat with their Fendt 6300C combine, two New Holland combine (CX 780 and TX 63) were harvesting poppy. It was very interesting seeing how two combines worked in the same field simultaneously because it was like a fully synchronized dance. Sergio told us that using two combine together is mandatory to harvest this crop.

The cutting header used is a Moresil M29-14 like a corn cutting header... we had never seen anything similar before. As you can see in our video, the working was performed at breakneck speed so they harvested all opium fields in a few days (and you can imagine they are large fields)

This opium is used in pharmaceutical products mainly to make morphine and codeine this crop is supervised by the Police from sowing to harvesting, besides the farmer needs to have a lot of documentations and pass inspections to grow it since this crop is illegal for other uses. Nowadays, this crop is more and more coming into fashion in extensive farms with irrigation system mainly.

Versión en español.

Video:

Pictures:

Joaquín Herminio Tribaldos (Twins' Farm)