If there is too much moisture, mold and bacteria develop. It’s a fine balance between strong color retention and too much moisture. Root Harvest, photo by Mountain Rose Herbs. However, we work very closely with the farmers to help them succeed by connecting them with select growers who know how to cultivate medicinals to coach the new farms along. It is especially difficult with something like borage which is prone to blight and blistering. We’ll say, “Give it a shot.” But the growers then find that it is really hard to do larger economical harvesting and drying and processing. People will contact us and say, “Hey, can we grow borage for you.” And Mountain Rose will go out and visit and discuss growing and harvesting and timing and drying. But it is really hard to find good partners who can provide what we need. That’s pretty much unheard of in the industry. Sometimes we’ll pay half of a contract in advance, which could be half of $50,000-60,000 worth of botanicals to help the company get set up, to buy the machinery, etc. We like to contract out to an entire operation so that all of the acreage is growing crops for Mountain Rose. Mountain Rose has 15 contracts with small producers growing on less than 100 acres each. Bringing woodland crops into production has been especially challenging and we are reaching out to forest farmers in Appalachia to pilot trial these crops for us. We worked with a farm in Washington to try to grow a few Appalachian herbs, but the crops didn’t take. Fifty percent of the time it doesn’t work. The availability of seed stock is a primary challenge, so there is usually a several year investment just producing the seed. We work with two of our largest US growers, testing the soil and climate to see if they can grow new herb crops for us. Irrigating Echinacea, photo from Mountain Rose Herbs. Unfortunately, there isn’t a strong enough market for this equipment, so it is not available. They have a rich history of cultivating herbs and they understand the conditions needed, soil types, etc. They also have specialized equipment for specific herbs such as harvesting chamomile that just aren’t available in the US. So, we rely on a few herb farming experts with whom we have longstanding relationships.Įurope has much better farm development because they’ve been growing medicinal plants like this for years. With Boneset, California poppy, plants like this, people don’t know how to grow them. There are textbooks and extension agencies to explain growing these crops. It’s different from growing soybeans or corn. Procurement is the more difficult of the two because there isn’t a lot of empirical knowledge about growing, drying and harvesting medicinal herbs in American farming communities. The Purchasing department focuses on buying manufactured products bought from 3 rd party vendors. These products are all certified organic, cultivated without chemicals, or produced from sustainable sources. Procurement is responsible for farm contracts and development of sources etc. ![]() Shawn: Mountain Rose has two departments that handle this: Procurement and Purchasing. They should be read as research notes from a larger process of trying to understand the issues involved in sourcing medicinal plants for a large market, rather as a finished piece.Īnn: Can you talk a bit about sourcing? Where does Mountain Rose buy its herbs and how do you find good partners to do so? Because I feel like this is important information that might be interesting to a lot of people now, before I complete the project, I am posting these selections. It isn’t typical for anthropologists to share selections from interviews during the research process. ![]() I am seeking to understand the issues involved in sourcing medicinal plants from multiple points of view – not as an investigative journalist trying to uncover secrets or reveal bad information. This interview is part of my ongoing research for the Sustainable Herbs Project. Below are from my written notes from the interview. I spoke with Shawn Donnille, Vice-President and Co-Owner about sourcing and sustainability issues this past November. What started out as mail-order part of Rosemary Gladstar’s herb shop in northern California more than 20 years ago is now one of the nation’s second-largest distributors of organic dried herbs. Mountain Rose is the go-to source for bulk medicinal herbs by most herbalists in the US and a generous supporter at herb conferences and of United Plant Savers.
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