Medicinal Herbs in the Garden, Field & Marketplace, 1999 Lee Sturdivant & T. Blakely, published by San Juan Naturals, Bootstrap Press.

Growing Echinacea
John and Elaine McLeod

Now a look at a family growing Echinacea on Bowen Island, just north of the city of Vancouver, in British Columbia. John and Elaine McLeod bring a strong background to their medicinal herb growing effort, but what’s most impressive about them is their intelligent, tenacious search for all the missing information- plus the path they are choosing in their marketing. Follow their example and you can succeed as a medicinal herb grower. Echinacea may not be such an important crop for small growers by the time you read this, but it’s the McLeod MO, their method of doing things that is so important to notice.

Their little echinacea field will also be a good place to focus on a few details in one of the key secrets to success in growing medicinal herbs for profit: the McLeod determination to learn to grow the highest quality herbs possible. Theirs is the same idea pushed by the Wheelers. As more and more companies start meeting the growing demand for these herbal preparations, the question of ingredient quality will become ever more important in the market sectors where the start-up opportunities are. Watching the McLeods is a good way to see just what that can involve. Their first experiences with medicinal herbs also show an interesting almost typical, path for these early herb growers.

John was once a wheat farmer in Manitoba, while Elaine took her degrees and worked in the field of early childhood education. They moved west to Bowen Island 16 years ago and opened a small retail plant nursery to serve the few thousand Bowen Island residents.

Meanwhile, their two daughters, Erin and Christine, had developed both food allergies and immune system disorders. It was the McLeod search for help with these complicated family health problems that brought them to their first encounter with medicinal herbs. This pattern is one that reappears throughout this book with the people involved in growing and marketing the medicinal herbs. Personal and family success in using herbs seems to make converts of us all.

After making the rounds of all the regular doctors without much relief, Elaine was told about a naturopathic doctor in the area and decided to give him a try. The doctor, who had been trained at the naturopathic college in Portland, Oregon, put the girls on treatments that included Echinacea, and they both began to improve. John and Elaine then began to pay attention to medicinal herbs. They also became quite close to the naturopath and learned of the difficulty he was having getting enough high quality Echinacea for his own practice. At that time the primary North American supplier of organically grown Echinacea was sold out for a least the following two years.

The situation instigated the McLeod search for information about the plant along with the idea of growing some on the land they owned surrounding their small nursery. They first visited and gathered a little information from the Canadian government agriculture research stations in British Columbia. Then John went back to Manitoba where, because of increased freight rates, farmers were looking for niche crops instead of the usual wheat, oats and barley. The government there, he found, was taking an active interest in herb crops and he was able to gather a little more information. Later, on a trip to the Far West Garden Show in Portland, John visited the library at the naturopathic college there. (“I took rolls of dimes along”) and copied everything he could find on the research done on medicinal uses of echinacea.

It is this determined and patient searching that is bringing John and Elaine past the frustration most new, would-be medicinal herb growers feel at the lack of information available on crops they know are wanted and needed in the marketplace. There are not yet a lot of textbooks for growers available on these crops; your county agriculture agents and provincial agriculture ministers are scrambling themselves to find out helpful information, right alongside the new growers.

Echinacea has become the best known and most often used herbal remedy in the U.S. and Canada. In Europe, it has long been sold as an approved over-the-counter (OTC) medicine, commonly prescribed by most doctors in Germany for prevention and early treatment of colds and sore throats.

Echinacea is a native American plant that was heavily used by Native Americans in their treatment for sore throats, toothaches, infections, and even snakebites. In the late 1800’s it was touted to American pharmacists by a patent medicine maker named H.F.C. Meyer who had been selling it in his “blood purifier.” Meyer was such an enthusiast for echinacea (and his own patent medicine) that he sent samples of it to well known pharmacists and physicians in Cincinnati, raving to them about the “proven” uses of Echinacea. Meyer even offered to come to Cincinnati bringing “a full-sized rattlesnake, possessed of its fangs....” He would let the snake bite him in front of the doctors, he wrote, to make his point.

Two other men- John King, an “eclectic physician” (meaning one who used plant medicines in his practice) and John Uri Lloyd, a pharmacist (who later became head of the American Pharmaceutical Association)- eventually became convinced of the medicinal value of Echinacea and began making products with it themselves.

Echinacea was then recommended by a group of doctors in America known as the “eclectics” (who included herb medicines in their cures) and it soon became a very popular medicine among all doctors- both “eclectics” and “regulars,” as the other doctors were called. All found it quite successful in their practices. But echinacea has never been approved as an OTC medicine by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Echinacea remained popular in the United States until the eclectics and herbal medicines both came under attack by organized medicine in the 1920’s and ‘30’s. The discovery and wide use of first sulfa drugs and then antibiotics also contributed to the downfall of plant medicines in the U.S. But in Europe, Echinacea and many other herbal preparations remained popular and continue to be sold on the shelves today right along with all other OTC medicines.

The renaissance of herbal medicine in this country has now brought this plant back into popularity with millions of American and Canadian consumers, and the irony is that we must look now to Europe for all the modern research on this native American plant’s properties- although some clinical studies of Echinacea have recently started in America.

Hundreds of scientific research papers in Europe have shown that echinacea does boost the immune system, and is an excellent treatment for many common conditions. The government drug agencies in both the U.S. and Canada are now trying to deal with the increased popularity of this and many other herbal remedies, but in the meantime, people like John and Elaine McLeod just got busy in their fields to meet the increasing demand for high quality, organically grown herb crops.

Which brings us again to the few McLeod acres surrounding their little nursery on Bowen Island, in B.C. At the time of our visit, the first planting was only months old and already starting to show a few of the distinctive tall-stemmed purple flowers with the dark conical centers and the drooping rays, so typical of echinacea purpurea, pronounced ek-kin-AY-sha pur-PUR-ee-ah.

The Bowen land had been fallow for five years and the McLeods have applied for organic certification under the Canadian system. It is a south slope that is covered with glacial till down to about three feet. John calls it a very mineralized soil with little organic material.

They had the seed started for them in organic plugs by a greenhouse grower in the Vancouver area who does nothing but plugs, which are tiny plant pots used by commercial growers everywhere. These miniature starts can sell from 10¢ to a dollar each- depending on the number needed. Their 24,000 growing echinacea plugs were delivered during a spring storm and the clock started ticking to get these plants in the ground as soon as possible. The McLeods ended up having to hold and care for the plugs for two weeks waiting for a break in the weather to plant.

They used their John Deere to help form raised beds and then set the plant in by hand on 14” centers with 26” between the rows. With four or five people working, they could set out 2500 plants a day. Each little plug was dipped in water and rolled in bone meal before being set in the ground.

The plants went in before the irrigation system, so that meant hand watering for the next few weeks. That first planting of only a quarter acre added up to nearly two miles of rows to tend.

“ We practically lived out there night and day hand watering,” said Elaine. “The sprinklers would have simply missed too much. So we took hours and hours to drag hoses very carefully over the field.” But that early hand watering, they believe, made the big difference in giving the plants a great start and keeping their plant losses to almost zero- only one hundred of the 24,000 plants needed replacement.

Their water is from a surface pond with a pump and T-tape system, delivering about one half gallon per 100 feet. Some of the rows have black plastic for weed control; one has been top dressed with chicken manure; one control bed has had no fertilizer and several are being fed a locally made and tested compost material. Living on a ferry-serviced island can often mean extra expenses; brining loads of fertilizer across from the mainland would add too much to the cost of the crop. These test plots were very important in their plans to add more Echinacea plantings to the rest of their land.

At our visit, the McLeods were realizing that they were going to need a small rototiller to cut down on the hand weeding between the rows. John estimated basic farm equipment to be worth about 80 or 90 thousand dollars, but figures he can probably do 10 acres of Echinacea, or other medicinal herbs without much more investment. They both also realized that the other expenses involved in putting in even this small field have been far greater than they first imagined. The fact sheets put out by the B.C. Agriculture Dept. seriously underestimated the costs, says John. And the plugs cost them several thousand additional dollars, but seemed necessary because their own greenhouse space was committed to their nursery plant needs.

John and/or Elaine have walked the fields nearly every day since first planting. It’s like getting to know someone, they say, learning all their habits, and learning how the plants react to the patches of different soil types they found in preparing the field. Every two weeks they have counted the leaves on each plant, measured the plant height and then recorded everything in journals. In the evenings, they read everything they can get their hands on about the plant itself, attend herb conferences whenever they can, keep in touch with agriculture offices in both B.C. and Manitoba, and consider their choices for marketing as the plants develop.

In Germany, they have learned the root has not been used for medicine at all- only the leaves, flowers and seeds. Elaine has wondered if that would be the most practical thing to do: harvest only the top parts.

And, wouldn’t they be better off, they’ve also wondered, learning to actually make the tinctures themselves and then marketing them in the area? Their naturopath encourages this and that suggestion has set them off on that new path to learn about tincture making.

This determination to learn everything they possibly can is what sets the McLeods (and other very successful medicinal herb growers) apart from those who would try their hand at medicinal herbs (or anything else) and come up short. Grow culinary herbs, flowers, or market vegetables, and you can no doubt find lots of information in your local library or book store to answer all your questions. You can also find a ready outlet at your Saturday market, your local grocer, or restaurants. But grow medicinal herbs and you need to plow new ground in more ways than one.

“ When we started this idea only a year and a half ago,” said John, “no one had a clue around here what Echinacea was all about. Now we keep running into locals who know all about it. Last week, a 10 year old rode by on his bike stopped to ask what this plant was and when I told him it was a medicinal herb called Echinacea, he said ‘Oh yes, I know about that’ and off he went.”

The McLeod daughters, meanwhile, are gaining back their health, with one of them being given echinacea, thuja, and baptisia- a strong combination of herb plants used in Germany and sold under the registered name of Esberitox N.

There are several species of Echinacea, the E. purpurea species being the most commonly used for medicine in the U.S. The native plant, first used by the Native Americans was actually E. angustifolia, a shorter plant with much narrower leaves than E. purpurea. The McLeods were told that E. angustifolia didn’t like rain, so they only planted a tiny test plot of it. At our visit that plot had done so well that Elaine said she thought they might be willing to try it out now. Others around the country are also finding that angustifolia is not impossible to grow, so more of that cultivated species will be appearing.

Echinacea pallida (for pale) is the third species that is used medicinally. Until recently it has been considered not quite as good medicinally as the other two varieties, but that, too, may be changing with the new test results. Actually, the pallida species has long been grown in Europe and sold as angustifolia, because of an early mistake in seed identification. It is this kind of identity error that has driven the FDA and other herbal medicine critics so crazy in the past. Medicinal herb growers are starting to realize that paying closer attention to where the seeds come from, to even having their seeds scientifically identified in a botanical laboratory, may be required.

In all, there are actually nine different species of echinacea growing around the world, but only these three, purpurea, angustifolia, and pallida, are so far considered useful for medicinal purposes. Most medicinal herb people have been turning more towards the use of the purpurea species of Echinacea because it is fairly easy to grow, and because of the recent decimation of the wild angustifolia plantings all across America.

Just as with the wild ginseng and goldenseal, echinacea has now become known for its increased value in the market place and the get-rich-quick screwballs are out there in parks and along roadsides, pulling up the wild plants by the roots and throwing everything in the backs of their pickup trucks before tearing off down the road looking for someone to buy their valuable crop.

The parts of the plants that could be used for fresh tinctures are easily spoiled by this kind of careless treatment; the parts that are used dried for medicine making should be harvested at certain times, dried at certain temperatures, and treated like what they are: material for use as a medicine.

People like John and Elaine McLeod are making the work for future medicinal herb growers a whole lot easier by their thorough, careful approach and their willingness to share their learning with the rest of us. When I last checked in with them, they had added lots more crop, were trying several other herbs and were well into the process of learning how to make herbal extracts. That puts them even further along the route to becoming successful medicinal herb growers and marketers.