Make money selling ginseng

How a Maryland ginseng farmer is rolling back our trade deficit with China. Deep in the Maryland woods, under thick tree cover and hidden in plain sight amid the forest undergrowth, Larry Harding grows his prized crop. Poachers are a constant threat, and Harding says he patrols with his gauge. Back in , the Drug Enforcement Administration raided his compound, overturning barrels and interrogating Harding about money laundering.

Harding lawyered up, won a settlement, and went back to harvesting. At a time when the Chinese are getting rich exporting to Americans, Harding is a countertrender: As China becomes more affluent, an emerging middle class is claiming a ginseng supply once divvied up among the elite.

While China has about four times as many citizens as the United States, it has about half the arable land, and a large portion of that is farmed by hand, so meeting the demand needs all the help—i. The Harding farm is in Garrett County, about as far west into Maryland as you can go before it turns to West Virginia, a few miles past the foot-long ark being rebuilt by the United Church of Christ and just north of Negro Mountain. Harding, 50, has been growing ginseng for almost 40 years now, from seed originally gathered in the wild by Kenneth Harding, his father.

Kenneth Harding was an enthusiastic hunter of wild ginseng, as are a lot of the old-timers throughout Appalachia.

Native Americans had used it for centuries before that, for everything from apoplexy to headaches. Daniel Boone and John Jacob Astor made fortunes off it, George Washington mentioned it in his diaries, and many historians contend that the ginseng trade funded the American Revolution.

I may donate it to the Smithsonian. Welch, who is retired, walks the woods a couple days a week and brings in between 10 and 15 pounds a year. His best year ever, he got 17 pounds.

The Harding farm is a testament to agricultural adaptation. Seventy acres of rocky land is covered with thick timber, a series of sloping planes divided by creeks and washouts. Traditional row-by-row, combine-driven farming would be impossible here.

Even if you clear-cut the forest and cleaned out all the rocks, the slopes would just wash away in the first hard rain. But ginseng can grow only in the shade, generally on or near a slope, and it thrives in the presence of certain trees and weeds. And since the root absorbs nutrients and toxins alike from the surrounding soil, overseas buyers strongly discourage the use of pesticides. It grows on otherwise unusable land, fetches exorbitant prices, and requires little or no maintenance.

Even such modest intervention, however, degrades ginseng from its truest, purest form. Thirty-year-old wild root brings in several thousand dollars a pound.

Also keeping the price way up is the fact that ginseng is notoriously hard to find in its native habitat, even for seasoned hunters. Each wild root represents hours and hours of hiking up and down heavily forested, bear-infested mountains squinting into the underbrush. Not the easiest way to make a living, though it probably beats working in marketing. The lowest grade is cultivated ginseng. This is grown in rows in a field, under special perforated tarps that reproduce the effect of hardwood canopy.

Million-Dollar Man Root

Most ginseng buyers believe that a difficult life, as exemplified by a twisted, scarred root, makes ginseng more potent, and these cultivated roots fetch only a few hundred dollars a pound. This is ginseng grown under tree canopy and amid native undergrowth, in a cultivated-slash-uncultivated setting.

Harding never mixes roots, though he says the practice is common among poachers. The downside to planting on steep timberland is that you have to harvest by hand.

Digging by hand, sometimes literally, often in ankle-deep mud, sifting through upturned earth for the valuable root, braced against a tree so as not to tumble downhill—this is agriculture as it was practiced pre-Industrial Revolution. Once winter puts an end to the harvest, Harding dries his roots in a specially constructed high-circulation drying room, packs them into hundred-pound barrels, and ships them off to Thurgood Marshall Baltimore-Washington International Airport, at which point his product is passed along to buyers all over the world.

Some of it goes directly overseas to China or Korea, and some goes to American dealers who sell it off to their own contacts. I came across the Harding ginseng farm online when I was doing ginseng research for personal reasons.

How To Sell Wild and Woods Grown Ginseng Roots

In the space of less than a year, I had bronchitis, sinusitis, pharyngitis, mild pneumonia, several cavities one of the first signs of immune deficiency , and several severe colds. I went to the YES! Organic Market, bought a bottle of ginseng capsules, and started taking two a day.

In my mind, the before and after is too dramatic to be attributed to anything but ginseng. The medical establishment is decidedly lukewarm about the effects of ginseng.

While one trial indicates that ginseng helps fight cancer, another indicates it actually increases mortality. One experiment finds that ginseng increases stamina in long-distance runners, another finds it does nothing for elderly couch potatoes.

She stopped, and her breasts returned to normal old-lady breasts. She started taking ginseng again, and they swelled up again. In one study of men with low sperm count, ginseng increased their little swimmers by 30 percent.

It can also speed healing. Ginseng is very subtle.

Chi , in traditional Asian medicine, is the energy that sustains life. Of course, one of the most common motivations for taking ginseng is to increase the type of energy that creates life. Over dinner one night I asked my girlfriend to think back to when we first started dating. I began taking ginseng about a month into our relationship. Does she remember any change in the firmness of my erections around then?

The guy who works for me on the harvest, his last son was the same—nine months later. I seem to remember some positive effects in that direction, but then again there are few things on earth more susceptible to the power of suggestion than an erection. Harding is also a believer though obviously not unbiased in the more generalized benefits of ginseng. When he finds an especially nice-looking root, he soaks it in a large jar of moonshine, shaking it vigorously every day for a month to make a potent tincture.

How to Make Money With Ginseng | eHow

He then adds a syringeful of the solution to his coffee each morning. Each ring on a ginseng root indicates a year of growth; these specimens are about 30 years old. Photograph by Darrow Montgomery The Harding farm is located off Highway 74, through the town of Friendsville population , and down an unmarked turnoff. This stops some, but not all, thievery.

In recent years, as the Harding farm became more successful and ginseng prices shot up, poaching became more and more of a problem. Harding once caught an acquaintance in his mids making off with an apronful of his prized seed, and regularly comes across holes in the ground where roots used to be. Harding has had to become more vigilant in recent years to protect his livelihood.

And when he comes across thieves? Another grower around here came home one day to find people digging up his prize patch. He got out his shotgun and held them there while he called What did the cops do when they got there? They handcuffed the grower, for holding the poachers there at gunpoint, some nonsense about kidnapping. Harding also has problems with deer eating his crop, though not as much as other farmers.

Where most farmers simply kill any deer that come around, Harding befriends them. He shows me a photograph of him kneeling next to a baby fawn, his arm around its neck, and says that the local deer come into his house to play with his kids and even sleep on his sofa sometimes.

Once a deer becomes comfortable around him, Harding will present it with a handful of ginseng berries and a handful of carrots. As the deer eats the carrots, Harding pets it and speaks in soothing tones.

I smack it upside the head! Each spring when deer hunting season rolls around, Harding outfits all his favorite deer with bells and fluorescent orange vests, in hopes of saving them from local hunters. None have survived yet.

Crop protection takes on added urgency if you consider that it takes years, decades even, for your efforts to pay off. Harding never harvests his crop before the five-year mark, and often waits eight or 10 years. Also, ginseng sucks so many nutrients out of the ground that after a harvest, the soil is often left sterile, incapable of sustaining plant life.

Harding learned this the hard way. After his first record-breaking harvest, he sunk a huge portion of his profits into immediately replanting his plots, only to find that nothing came up.

While the motives behind this tradition have been lost darn genocide! Unfortunately, American ginseng hunters have no such tradition. Nor did the Chinese, which is another reason they buy so much of ours—theirs is mostly gone due to voracious harvesting. Years of rising prices and rampant overharvesting have decimated the wild ginseng population.

Many states have cracked down on ginseng poaching, after years of essentially no enforcement at all, and others have raised the harvesting age from five to 10 years. Here I speak from experience. However, a little Googling led me to a U.

She made a sound like a spit-take. Is it a common plant? The rare plants person was not in, and I got his voice mail. I went into the woods on a footpath and before long I was in the forest. The sloping ground and thick tree cover looked promising. Ginseng grows around hickory trees, and near a plant called bloodroot.

My enthusiasm for poaching was lessening by the minute, but I remembered one of the ginseng hunters saying that ginseng is always found in the nastiest, thorniest, thickest areas. With visions of top-shelf liquor dancing in my head, I plunged into a nearby thicket and began descending a tangled slope.

I was seeing plenty of plants, but they all looked exactly the same. In the meantime I was getting whipped in the face repeatedly with branches while a swarm of mosquitoes injected every square inch of my exposed flesh with, I assume, West Nile virus.

Man, this poaching was harder than I thought. After about an hour of this futility my back hurt, I was covered in sweat, and I decided to quit. He is now trying to sell a juice made from the ginseng berry, a red fruit that appears on the plant in late summer and has traditionally been used for seed, if at all. The small body of research concerning the ginseng berry has found that it contains many of the active ingredients found in the root and that it may be an effective treatment for diabetes and weight loss.

Harding says he has several loyal customers who swear by it. When he got down to his target weight he stopped taking it and right away gained back the 60 pounds. Then he started taking it again and lost the weight again. Now he takes it religiously. If he travels, I have to overnight it to his hotel wherever he is.

This client, who Harding says is some kind of big-time businessman, saw the billion-dollar potential of a mass-marketed ginseng berry weight-loss supplement and, through a doctor friend in Baltimore, set up a subject double-blind scientific trial to verify his claims.

But at the last minute, Harding balked at supplying the juice. Additional Resources Best Of D. Do This Sponsored Content Deals Promotions Events Downtown Holiday Market Guide Camp Guide User Tools Subscribe Login Register Logout ETC Jun 27, 12 AM. Photograph by Darrow Montgomery. City Dismantles NoMa Homeless Encampment. Bill Would Tighten Tenant-Friendly Law. Barry Farm Relocations to Begin This Summer, Displacing Residents.