You Can Make Money Harvesting and Selling Botanicals
(Page 3 of 4)
September/October 1977
By the Mother Earth News editors
My approach is somewhat different: I go after the more common botanicals-May apple, pokeweed, and blackberry in particular-and then harvest large quantities of them, to make up for their lower market price. I find, in other words, that my time is better spent digging than searching. And the nice thing is, Bill Skaggs and I never get in each other's way.
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THE HARVEST
A number of botanicals (ginseng and goldenseal, for example) have become all but extinct lately due to indiscriminate overharvesting by zealous foragers. To keep this situation from becoming worse, it's important that you adhere to the following commonsense rules when harvesting any root, bark, or herb:
[1] Gather only the part of the plant you're going after. (There's no sense pulling a specimen up by the roots if the berries or the leaves are what you want.) Likewise, don't take all the top growth from any one plant when you can harvest a small amount of foliage from a large number of plants.
[2] Collect bark from one side of the tree trunk only. If you debark a tree all the way 'round its circumference, you might as well strip the whole plant . . . because you've just killed that particular tree anyway.
[3] Dig roots in a manner which will allow the future regrowth of plants in the area. (Take roots, for instance, from several spots near the center of a bed . . . that way, the remaining plants will be able to "fill in" again.)
MARKETING YOUR WARES
Once you've brought your medicinal roots and herbs home, rinse them thoroughly in clean water and lay them out to dry in a wellventilated area. (Be sure to label the drying areas so that later-when you're ready to ship your dried roots, barks, and/or foliage-you won't forget what's what.) This is an important step. Herb buyers will not accept botanical materials that have not been thoroughly clean and allowed to dry completely.
When your plant materials are bone-dry, pack them in separate boxes, label them, and ship the packages off to market via parcel post. Send May apple root to the firm that pays the most money for May apple root, ship bloodroot to the company that pays the most for bloodroot, and so on. (The prices quoted for various botanicals can-and do-vary as much as 50% from one company to the next.)
Before shipping a large quantity of materials, you'd do well to send small samples of your wares to the firm(s) you wish to do business with and ask for a positive identification of the roots, barks, etc. (What you thought was snakeroot may actually be something totally different... and--perhaps--totally worthless.) Also, estimate how many pounds of the pure material you can deliver and ask for a firm price quotation based on that amount. You may get a quote that's considerably better (or worse) than the "going rate" printed in the company's price sheet.
