Extraction of Natural Indigo Dye (From Indigofera Tinctoria)

The natural indigo we use in India comes from a plant called Indigofera Tinctoria. The plant itself is pretty amazing and has been used for generations as a crop to help fix soil depleted from farming.

Depending on the weather, this crop can be harvested a couple of times in the year, at which point it immediately gets taken to a traditional extraction pool. The plant is left to ferment overnight, releasing the dye into a beautiful green pool.

To get the dye into a state where it can be turned into a dried cake, the pool must be aerated, which was traditionally done by foot as you see in the video. More recently this has become mechanised (by use of a electric paddle repurposed from the fishing industry), although some traditionalists and craftspeople we work with insist they get better results by doing it manually.

[muriloacioli]

Onde posso encontrar essa planta no Brasil?

[CPSSTUDIO-uu]

HI Could you please tell me in which part of the India the production take place ? specific locations in India ?

[ninavolante]

Hi! My name is Lisa, and I write from Rome, Italy. Can you tell me, please, where I can buy your indigo pigment? And I also would like to ask you, for curiosity, how many grams of pigment you can extract from how many kilograms of plants/leaves? It seems to be a very long and hard process, to extract just a few grams of indigo from tons of kilograms... if you have just 1 plant, how many grams of indigo powder can you extract from this only one plant? Is less than 1 gram? Please let me know, Anyway thanks for your video, I really liked to see the traditional extracting process! 🤗

[Theamclub]

Idk why but the way they were stirring it with their leg is the saddest thing I saw today

[AnithaGummadi-ky]

Where it is doing? Farmers growing this Crop in sullurpet area in Andhra pradesh. But they r using as green manure crop. Kindly provide your phone no for contact.