The Business of Botanicals by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

Questions of Scale

Zack Woods is a family-run small farm with six employees on ten acres at the end of a dirt road in northern Vermont. We had been working in a small patch of oats next to Mel and Jeff’s house. Neat rows of plants in many shades of green, some with a blush of purple, bright orange, or dark pink, spread out around the house. Straw mulch covered the soil, breaking the bands of green. From afar, the rows looked like strips of colors in a painting, small-scale and to my mind, right-sized, unlike the sameness of a sea of corn growing in fields in the Midwest.

Mel is Rosemary Gladstar’s stepdaughter, and she and Jeff previously ran Sage Mountain Herbs, a small herbal products company that made tinctures and salves. Like others who started herbal product businesses, they found it hard to source high-quality herbs. Jeff was working part-time in a nursery at the time. He liked working with plants and so they decided to start growing their own medicinal plants. For the first few years after founding their herb farm, they continued working off-farm jobs—Jeff in a restaurant and Mel as a teacher and then principal of Stowe Middle School. They both now work full-time on the farm. Their goal is to provide the highest-quality certified organic herbal medicine they can.

Mel and Jeff believe passionately in the importance of small, family-run certified organic herbs farms, and their book, The Organic Medicinal Herb Farmer, describes how to cultivate medicinal herbs for the market. Writing the book was a remarkably generous act, an herb grower once told me, considering that in doing so, Mel and Jeff were essentially educating their competitors.

Their niche works because there is a strong network of herbalists interested in buying certified organic and domestically grown herbs, especially those grown by small farmers who are also herbalists. Mel and Jeff have succeeded by emphasizing their close involvement with the farm, their understanding of the life cycle of the plants they grow, their knowledge as herbalists about how the plants will be used, and their commitment to caring for the spirit of the plants.

Mel and Jeff’s vision of healing is much broader than simply growing nettles and oats and yarrow. They are committed to the whole system of medicinal herb production. As Mel explained, “In order for the system to be sustainable, to be strong, to be well, for wellness for all, we need to make sure the system works on each level. It needs to work from the ground level with the microbes in the soil, to the seeds, to the plants growing on the farm, to the ecosystem of the farm. How are the laborers being paid? How is their lifestyle when they leave the farm? How are they being treated on the farm? How are the plants being handled? When are the plants being harvested and are they respected?

“I am concerned about the herbal industry right now,” she continued, “because it seems it’s gone from the medicine of the people to big business.

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