NEW BETHLEHEM, PA. —
Denny Colwell fires up a weed whacker and makes quick work of his prized American ginseng patch, a fall ritual that helps hide the slow-growing, long-lived perennials from poachers keen on digging them up.
Colwell has been planting, growing and harvesting ginseng in the forests of western Pennsylvania for four decades, producing a root that’s virtually indistinguishable from, and every bit as valuable as, its wild counterpart.
That makes him a juicy target for thieves. But it also means he’s helping to conserve a plant deeply rooted in American history and commerce.
As wild populations continue to be thinned out by poaching, habitat loss and an overabundance of deer, backers of a new labeling program are encouraging landowners such as Colwell to cultivate ginseng where it grows natively — on shady hillsides in the eastern U.S. — and to get it certified as “forest grown.”
Their goal is to take some of the pressure off a coveted botanical that retails for hundreds or even thousands of dollars per pound in Asia, where very old, distinctive wild roots are often given as gifts and put on display and less expensive roots are widely used as a tonic in traditional medicine. Diggers of wild American ginseng received more than $60 million for their roots in 2013, according to the American Herbal Products Association.
“What we’re trying to get some momentum around is this whole idea of growing ginseng to conserve it — conservation through cultivation,” said Eric Burkhart, a Penn State University ginseng expert involved in the program.
The effort got a boost last month when the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded a coalition of agricultural extension, conservation and other groups and academic researchers, including Burkhart, a grant of about $650,000 to support beginning and existing forest farmers of ginseng — often colloquially called “sang” — and other medicinal plants in the Appalachian region.
American ginseng, which has been harvested commercially for 300 years, has been protected by an international treaty on endangered plants and animals since 1975. But there’s evidence that wild populations are still under stress, given high demand in China, where most wild and forest-grown American ginseng winds up (along with a field-propagated variety grown under artificial shade).
Scientists have documented widespread decline in national parks — where harvesting is illegal — and in national forests in the species’ core range in southern Appalachia. Other evidence of the species’ relative scarcity includes a decrease in exports, from 141,000 pounds of wild ginseng in 1992 to 81,446 pounds in 2014.
