By Nathaniel Axtell, Times-News Staff Writer
Published: Sunday, December 9, 2012
www.blueridgenow.com

For generations, Appalachian residents have harvested ginseng roots as a source of extra income. Often, whole families would search the woods each fall for the distinctive three- or four-pronged plant and the lucrative roots lying beneath its yellow leaves.

Today, ginseng is so prized in the Orient for its medicinal properties that poaching and overharvesting of the plant by collectors threatens to wipe out wild Appalachian ginseng from North Carolina’s forests, experts say. Dried roots now sell here for $500-$600 per pound.

“I’m very concerned that we might not have ginseng in the wild in a few years,” said Jim Corbin, a plant protection specialist with the N.C. Department of Agriculture, which regulates the sale and export of ginseng.

Corbin was part of an expert panel of botanists and regulators discussing plant conservation Friday at the International American Ginseng Exposition, a conference held this weekend at the Mountain Horticultural Crops Research and Extension Center.

Conference speakers agreed that more ginseng must be grown on private lands by forest farmers to take pressure off wild populations on federal lands, which have been hard-hit by drought, poaching and decades of intense collecting pressure.

“Getting more ginseng grown on private lands is the key to sustainability of ginseng long-term,” said Pat Ford, a botanist with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

While the conference focused on numerous barriers facing ginseng cultivators, experts say high demand for wild ginseng in China and Hong Kong offers local landowners the opportunity to sustainably manage their forests while generating steady income.

“Every single year, they continue to make some kind of money off it,” said Robert Eidus, a medicinal plant dealer from Marshall who teaches courses on ginseng growing. “Where as when they cut the trees down, boom, that’s it. The key here is to diversify. If somebody does cattle, soybeans and a nice woodland lot (of ginseng), you’re talking about a nice $200,000 income.”

‘Sang gets rarer

Since the 18th century, Appalachian ginseng collectors have been exporting the plant’s root to the Orient, where Asian ginseng has been used as restorative tonic and energy booster for 5,000 years. But in recent decades, global demand has outstripped supply and intensified pressure on wild populations.

In 1997, about 6,500 pounds of dried wild ginseng root were harvested in North Carolina; in Henderson County, just 86 pounds were recorded that year by the N.C. Department of Agriculture.

By 2007, when prices hit close to $1,000 per dry pound, the statewide harvest almost doubled, to 12,799 pounds. Locally, harvests reached 216 pounds that year. Corbin said the lure of big money turned what once was a sustainable family affair, where seeds were sown and immature plants left to ripen, into a ruthless business.

“These folks we’re seeing today, they’re taking everything,” Corbin said, even baby plants whose roots aren’t five years old, as required by state law.

Ginseng reproduces by seed and usually doesn’t produce fruit until its third growing season. So harvesting a young plant before it’s able to produce seed stifles reproduction. A study of 335 likely sites along the Blue Ridge Parkway found just 47 ginseng populations, 35 percent of which had no mature plants left.

“Seventy-one percent of the populations — this just staggered me — had less than 15 plants remaining,” said conference panelist Nora Murdock, a botanist with the National Park Service. Many experts consider 30 ginseng plants the minimum number necessary to ensure the long-term survival of a population.

These ginseng patches weren’t found close to the road, or even near trails, Murdock said. And harvesting ginseng is illegal on national park lands.

“When we started this, I honestly thought when we got back to these really remote sites, we’re going find some big populations,” Murdock said. “And we’re flat not finding them.”

A four-year study in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park of six ginseng populations found that most patches were so bereft of mature seed producers that they “are currently barely maintaining themselves and cannot tolerate any further harvest,” Murdock said.

On National Forest lands, where ginseng may be harvested in most areas between Sept. 1 and Dec. 31 by permit, botanist Gary Kauffman said the number of permits has risen steadily over the last five years, while harvestable ginseng has become more rare.

“So I’m kind of wondering where people are getting all the plants,” he said.

‘Wild-simulated’ to the rescue?

Experts at the conference said “wild-simulated” ginseng — plants sown, lightly cultivated and sustainably harvested on long rotations in private woods — could help take pressure off wild populations.

Roots grown under such conditions typically are nearly indistinguishable from those of fully wild ginseng, and command high prices, but the practice has its challenges. Poaching of wild-simulated “crops” is widespread, growers at the conference said, and it requires ample patience and land.

“You really need this huge amount of forest because you’re doing 400 roots, 10 years old to make an average pound,” said Eidus. “And they have to be spread about three feet apart, so you need a lot of land to do it.”

The first harvest can’t occur until the seventh year, Eidus said, but when combined with other commercially valuable medicinal plants such as goldenseal, Echinacea, bloodroot and black cohosh, a forest farmer can make good money from his or her land without having to log or subdivide it.

Not all forests are suitable for growing ginseng, Eidus said. The best sites are shaded, north-facing cove forests dominated by tulip poplar, beech, and maple, not woods filled with rhododendron and mountain laurel.

Chinese consumers also need to be educated more about the value of cultivated ginseng, said Dr. Jeanine Davis, a horticulturist at the research center. Years ago, buyers were wary of cultivated goldenseal, another medicinal herb, but research proved it was just as potent and more consistent a product than wild-grown.

“We need to work with consumers to have them understand that wild-simulated is better for the environment, it’s better for the conservation of the plant and I would like to see the research that shows wild-simulated ginseng is a more consistent product,” she said.

Reach Axtell at 828-694-7860 or than.axtell@blueridgenow.com.

The Permaculture Activist (North America’s leading permaculture periodical),
www.permacultureactivist.net

Ginseng Speaks by Robert Eidus

Who will speak for the plants
The gentle flowers cloistered
In quiet meadow and lonely wood
Plants whose power is in their softness
Or in their strange difference?
Grandfather Ginseng will take the stand!
~ Lee Murray

Panax quinquefolium (American ginseng), a relative of the Chinese Panax ginseng, is a member of the Araliaceae, a family of approximately 700 plants which includes spikenard and English ivy. Though the Chinese have been using herbal medicines for approximately 5,000 years and writing down information for over 4,000 years, the earliest mention of Asian ginseng is in Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing, the world’s oldest comprehensive herbal document, written about 2,000 years ago.

American ginseng, which may have been used at least as long by Native Americans, lives in the rich, shaded, and moist coves of the mountains of the eastern United States and has a range from Georgia to Maine and west into the plains. On the West Coast, wild ginseng can be found in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Like its Chinese cousin, “sang” as it’s called by the mountain folk, ginseng is a perennial herb, its stem and leaves die in winter but regrow in the spring. This shade dependent plant has a fleshy, slow-growing root and short stem, and is native to hardwood forests. It is best adapted to cool, temperate climates.

The Shapeshifter

Ginseng is magical and mysterious. Although there are general patterns of growth, sometimes it will trick you. Most perennial herbs look the same each season of their growth, but not ginseng. The first three years it changes its appearance each successive year. When the seedling first emerges, there are three small leaves (said to resemble wild strawberry) on a little stem. When it unfolds in year two, there is more growth to the central stem with two prongs, each producing three to five leaflets. In the third year, three prongs emerge from the leaf stem, each bearing a palmate cluster of five leaflets. Where the prongs are joined to the stem, white-green flowers appear which later ripen into bright red berries containing the seeds.

Ginseng is the only species I know that reveals the age of each and every plant, because when the stem falls off in the fall it leaves a scar on the neck or curl. The new bud emerges just above the old scar. Just count up the scars to determine the approximate age of the plant. Each year the plant grows, more prongs may be added. As a rule four prongs indicate a seven-year-old plant that is medicinally mature. Ginseng can continue to grow more prongs as it gets older. I remember seeing a five-prong, which is getting rare, and two of the prongs had five leaflets but two had six and one had seven.

Above the ground ginseng plants of a similar age look pretty much alike, but when you look below the surface, wild roots will vary greatly in appearance. Cultivated roots tend to be more uniform. Every now and then you can find a mature root with a human-like shape, with arms, legs, and body. These were prized by the Chinese whose ideogram for ginseng means “essence of the earth in the form of a man.”

At Home in the Woods

Ginseng needs hardwood forests to block out the sun and to provide a roof. It thrives in mixed groves of poplar, beech, maple, and dogwood. If the trees above are cut down, ginseng’s root and seeds dry out, a fatal condition. Clearcuts thus destroy habitat for this threatened species. Shade from the forest canopy keeps the soil cool, the roots stabilize the earth, and the trees provide a rich annual mulch of leaves. Herbaceous plant companions commonly found near ginseng include trillium (Trillium spp.), cohosh (Caulophyllum thalactroides -blue, Cimicifuga racemosa-black), jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema atrorubens), wild yam (Dioscorea villosa), goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis), and Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum).

Some of these companions help the ginseng to survive. Research by Dr. Jeanine Davis, with the North Carolina State University Agricultural Research station, has shown that goldenseal can clean up beds of ginseng infected with fungal disease. Since ginseng has a problem with fungi, goldenseal’s anti-fungal properties make it a choice and valuable companion. Many Native American tribes consider ginseng and goldenseal to be brother and sister plants because they grow well together in the wild.

The Ginseng Industry

Most Asian and American ginseng is grown in an environment that is not natural. How did this happen?

Panax ginseng has been in increasingly short supply, especially in the last four hundred years. With population growth and the steady loss of forest cover to agriculture, the governments of China, Korea, and Japan long ago took measures to ensure a supply of this precious medicine. For many years they licensed the growing of ginseng on plantations in guarded walled compounds, but only in the last century have these growing techniques been documented. Although Asian growers were successful with ginseng in a monocultural environment, very strict rules and procedures were required to achieve healthy plants.

The labor-intensive procedures developed in East Asia were largely abandoned as chemical fungicides and nasty stuff like DDT became available. Although, the worst of the chemical sprays are not used in America today, most cultivated ginseng, including woods-grown ginseng, is still heavily sprayed worldwide. Studies in recent years have shown fungicidal residues to be cumulative and toxic in cultivated roots. This discovery, along with recent EPA fines levied against Wisconsin ginseng growers who had used toxic biocides, has sounded a worldwide wake-up call to the dangers of contamination of this great plant.

At the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora (CITES), 80 countries identified American ginseng as one of the many plants that need international protection. The CITES agreements were implemented in the US in 1977 and are administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Despite rules and regulation governing the export of American ginseng, we are still losing this plant in the wild due to over-harvesting. Currently, more than 90% of the ginseng harvested in America is exported to Hong Kong and other Pacific Rim markets. With worldwide demand steadily increasing, the situation becomes ever more critical for this powerful tonic.

An Awakening

But I didn’t learn this until 1977, when, at a health conference in Hot Springs, North Carolina, I met Hawk Little John, a Cherokee medicine man, who discussed ginseng and goldenseal. His enthusiasm and respect for plants seeded in me an ever-deepening relationship to the green world.

In 1992, Dr. Jeanine Davis of the N.C. Dept. of Agriculture, organized an historic conference on ginseng, near Asheville, where I learned much about the wonderful nature of the plant and techniques for growing it. After the conference, I went back to my land in Madison County, and with the help of a knowledgeable friend, found ginseng growing. When Paul found the plant he gave a Native American war cry to the forest spirits. After praying, we harvested this root and dropped some tobacco as an offering. It was a wonderful day.

A couple of months later, I founded the North Carolina Ginseng and Goldenseal Company in Marshall, but it was not until 1995 that I left my real estate job and decided to grow and sell medicinal herbs as a full-time business. This was not an easy choice, for though I was an experienced gardener, I was still new to forest farming and botany. But following a weeklong illness I reappraised my life and saw that selling real estate was not something I did very well. The ginseng plants spoke to me during that feverish time and asked me to help them survive. Definitely a favor worth returning.

I agreed with the plants to become a role model for the new wave of ginseng farmers.

I soon found myself trying to convince others to attempt farming in the woods. Unexpectedly, my New York accent and urban background turned out to be a big plus. If I could learn to grow high quality ginseng there was no reason others couldn’t also be successful medicinal herb farmers.

As I became a spokesperson for the plants, I knew that the plants, especially ginseng and goldenseal, would do their part to help me to the next level. An unexpected assist came in the form of a request from the owner of New Frontiers magazine to review Eliot Cowan’s Plant Spirit Medicine. I loved the book and gave it an enthusiastic review. By learning about the spirit world of plants, I came to realize that I could communicate with them and that I had a special ally in ginseng. My heart had no problem understanding this psychic relationship. My body followed.

Thus, the North Carolina Ginseng & Goldenseal Co. was born with the primary goals of actively re-seeding both plants in the wild and encouraging their organic cultivation in the woods. In the last five years we have laid a strong foundation for both aspects of this work. In that time the United Plant Savers, a non-profit organization dedicated to rescuing endangered populations of wild botanicals, was founded, and the land I steward, Eagle Feather Organic Farm, became a U.P.S. Native Botanical Sanctuary. At the same time research into organic methods of cultivating ginseng has given us some important tools. Following Dr. Davis’ work, we’ve learned to spray extracts of goldenseal on the ginseng beds to control soil-borne funguses in the fall. And now a group of people are conducting research into the use of horsetail (Equisetum arvense), another native plant, as a spray to curb airborne fungus in the spring.

A Growing Challenge

In some ways, however, the situation for ginseng is getting worse. Though more information is available today and interest in growing and in conservation is high, the harvest of ginseng is increasing. Last year 11,000 pounds were legally exported to Hong Kong from North Carolina. This is 2,000 pounds more than the year before. Five and a half tons may not seem like much until you consider that it takes approximately 400 dried ginseng roots to make a pound. That would mean that over four million roots were harvested in 1999. During the same year I sold 21 pounds of ginseng seed to Madison County Extension Service. That seed was divided and sold by the ounce to local farmers. If all the plants come up, (350 seeds to an ounce), that would be about 500,000 first-year plants, nowhere close to replacing all the plants taken in the North Carolina mountains. There are only a few of us selling ginseng seed in this region, and only one other Extension office, in Yancey County, is offering this program to area landowners. That leaves 31 other mountain county Extension offices pushing Xmas trees, blueberries, strawberries, or other non-herbal commodities.

You do not have to be a genius to realize that the plants are losing the battle for survival. The two-leggeds must rally round these beneficent plant alies and help save them from greed and extinction.

Robert Eidus grows ginseng near Marshall, NC. Contact him at eidusbiz@gmail.com