NBJ Award 2023: Stewardship and Sustainability

This article originally appeared in the Nutrition Business Journal's Awards Issue.

From the outside, Appalachia sprawls across 13 states, straddling the spine of eastern North America as a fogged-out blot on the map, a stretch of dense forests and farmland, hillsides hollowed out by coal mining and populated by communities left behind in an accelerated modern world.

But that’s the outsiders’ view.

The view Katie Commender sees when she walks those dense forests and farmland is very different. What the founder of the Appalachian Sustainable Development’s Herb Hub project sees written into those hills and tight valleys are stories of culture and tradition, and in those stories, she sees something else.

What she sees is potential.

And the people eager to make it happen.

“As people are looking at Appalachia, they see a coal-impacted community or the opioid crisis or all of these narratives that are out there,” Commender says, “but I think the story that I would really love to be out there more is the rich cultural heritage and connection to these forests’ botanicals.”

ASD’s Herb Hub brings those stories together as a business model for small producers of woodland herbs and botanicals and independent wildcrafters trained to sustainably harvest wild-growing plants, connecting them to herbal product companies looking to responsibly access the unique and rich ecosystems of Central Appalachia. The Herb Hub provides not just the training and education but also the processing equipment required to make the products market ready. They match farmers practicing agroforestry to companies that sign contracts for harvests years down the road, allowing the farmers to invest in the seed stock and other resources required to make those harvests happen.

It’s what Commender describes as “conservation through commerce.”

It’s what makes the potential possible.

Crash and earn

The  botanicals-focused agroforestry practiced in the Herb Hub’s vision got its start in an industry crisis for what the layperson might regard as plain-old “forestry.” During the great recession of 2008–2010, U.S. home building skidded to a stop, and demand for the Forest Stewardship Council-certified lumber harvested from the wooded acreage of Appalachian farms all but disappeared. Prices plummeted. With the economy stalled coast to coast, the region’s rural communities were particularly hard hit, and the people ASD was founded to help needed new opportunities.

“We started looking under the trees,” Commender says.

What was under the trees was not only American ginseng and black cohosh—two ingredients well known to wildcrafters and the companies that source from them—but also a unique ecosystem where other herbs and botanicals can be grown. “We saw it as an opportunity to both help forest farmers access markets and have an economic benefit from their woodlands, but also as an incentive to retain their forest land versus cutting it down,” Commender says.

That potential seems almost obvious, but the path to that potential was more complicated. Wildcrafting has an immediate payoff that has attracted less-than-responsible players who overharvest ingredients like ginseng. ASD worked up training and education around those issues. Cultivating high-value herbs and botanicals, however, is not an overnight proposition. Commender says a landowner hoping to grow on their woodland acres can expect to wait seven years to harvest some of their crops, and all of that comes before processing the herbs and connecting with buyers who both need the ingredients and can fit small quantities into their sourcing scale and standards.

The Herb Hub came together seven years after ASD had its  “looking under the trees” epiphany, when those first crops came to harvest in 2017. The organization already had an Appalachian Harvest Food Hub to connect farmers with buyers for more standard crops. “Our forest farmers said, ‘Could you do the same thing for us that you’re doing for fruit and vegetable producers but for herbs?’”

For wild harvesters, ASD has worked with Virginia Tech on a “Point of Harvest” certification training that Commender hopes will soon align with FairWild. For cultivators, Commender and her team chased grants to acquire processing equipment, allowing forest farmers to scale up—“They were processing in multiple small batches in these tiny little tabletop Cabella dehydrators”—and then devised a system that made clear how much companies were prepared to buy. The Herb Hub aggregates from multiple growers to meet that demand.

That’s what made the potential possible for Brian Jenkins.

Jenkins has a full-time job as a registered nurse in Virginia, which keeps him busy, but he also has 180 acres of his family’s farm to look after, half of it pasture for cattle and half of it wooded. The woods provided a pleasant landscape but not much else. “The mainstream thought at the time was you do a generational timber harvest, and that was about it, as far as what you can do with it.”

Loggers harvested one section of the property, but Jenkins bristles at the idea of having them back on the family tract. It was an agricultural extension event focused on ginseng where he saw another path to bring more income to the family and keep the trees standing.

He just didn’t see a simple way to do that until he heard about the Herb Hub.

“It’s so much easier having someone like the Herb Hub as a one-stop shop,” Jenkins says. “End of the day, all I have to do is concentrate on growing and on production. I don’t have to worry about the marketing in the equation.”

ASD and the Herb Hub don’t just connect people to the market, they connect the land to its potential too, Jenkins adds. “They will come out and walk your property with you and assess what you have, what your conditions are, what it’s conducive toward and what it’s not conducive toward.”

In Jenkins’ case, the woodlands on his farm were ideal for blue cohosh, a high-value ingredient. But that blue cohosh is more than just extra income for the farm and something that keeps the land in agricultural production—meaning, a cut on property taxes. It also buys the seeds for other herbs and supports different ideas that, in turn, support the farm.  “It provides some money so you can experiment with other things. You can buy some different herbs,” he explains. “It sort of pays for itself and generates a little money, enough cash that you can dabble in this or that.”

The Appalachian Harvest’s Herb Hub in Duffield, Virginia, supports small farmers in selling their their herbs to manufacturers. Upper left, a worker rolls a crop to remove larger clumps of dirt. Lower left, another worker sprays the herbs with a hose to finish cleaning them. Right, an employee packs fresh herbs for delivery. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMyJ-AEqmvA

To the source

For Meghan Cleland, a buyer at Lush Fresh Handmade Cosmetics, being able to put money into the hands of people like Jenkins is central to the company’s identity, but it would be all but impossible in Appalachia without ASD. Networking in Appalachia to find people with the land and the interest in growing the herbs would be extremely complicated, and then coordinating the processing, the timing and the delivery would add layers to that complexity. There are middlemen but not always with the integrity and goals of ASD.  “Without the Herb Hub, I’m not sure we would have had continued success, harvest after harvest.”

Lauren Nichols-Sheffler’s role at WishGarden Herbs is very similar to Cleland’s, and her view of ASD is precisely the same. She depends on the Herb Hub for ingredients that are impossible to find at the level of transparency and commitment to economic development that ASD guarantees. “Without ASD, I don’t know where we’d be right now.”

Just as Jenkins calls Herb Hub a “one-stop shop,” Nichols-Sheffler knows she can connect with the growers and the most responsible wildcrafters with a single call. “Every spring, Katie [Commender] and I talk about our needs. I tell her what I’m thinking, and she proposes it to the wildcrafters and the forest farmers of the region. And then she comes back to me and tells me what they could grow or collect.”

It’s not just the ease of doing business that makes the phone call so unique and so valuable to WishGarden. It’s more than the transparency and the quality, too. As with Lush, WishGarden strives to support farmers adding herbs to their crops. WishGarden founder Catherine Hunziker has long spoken about “herbaculture” as a concept to supplement farmers’ incomes and keep families on their land. ASD’s Herb Hub makes that happen beautifully, Nichols-Sheffler’s says. “Their goal in the region is to teach the people to collect it [herbs] sustainably so that they can keep having an annual income to feed their families. When you hear suppliers talk like that, you know they’re doing it right.”

What makes ASD’s efforts stand out even more is that it’s happening in the U.S. Many of the responsible sourcing programs that focus on supporting communities—and that brands make central to their stories—operate in developing nations.” Appalachia is that rare, domestic story, and though it may not be a developing nation, it is clearly a region that has not always thrived. Cleland says ASD makes it possible for brands to do good right in their backyard. Appalachia needs that, she says. “So many people from the outside come in, and they take a lot. They take the timber. They take the coal, the water, all these things. It’s been so extracted and sort of taken advantage of.” The team at Lush wants to do better. Without ASD, however, Cleland believes she might have “almost zero impact as an outsider.”

The source story

For Commender, brands like Lush and WishGarden are obviously invaluable. They’re not just buying everything the Herb Hub growers and wildcrafters produce ever year—demand has outgunned supply for the past several years—they’re also signing contracts with farmers that go years ahead, contracts that make it possible for those farmers to commit to keeping the trees on the land, and, in turn, keep the land in their families.  

But it’s not just the commerce or the conversation that matters to Commender. It’s the stories that those brands and the supplement industry at large can now tell. ASD is coordinating the building of a monument to celebrate the herbal traditions of Appalachia at the Flag Rock Recreation Area in Northern Virginia. It will salute the people who have kept those traditions alive. It will draw attention to the role that herbs and botanicals can still play in the region’s economy.

It won’t be a story of opioids or coal dust heaps or unemployment and desperation.

It will be a story as old as the hills but perhaps brand new to the ears of consumers, a story that could “help change the narrative of Appalachia.”

“It’s been deeply rooted in our culture for a very, very long time, well before we started mining coal,” she says of herbs and botanicals, “and I think that’s the story that I would like to be out there.”

The NBJ 2024 Awards issue is available at no cost at the NBJ store. Subscribe today to the Nutrition Business Journal.