 Let's put hands together and welcome Jessica Layton and learn about this medicinal roots project. So I'm here to chat with you all about medicinal herbs. Start by giving you a little overview of just our farm operation as a whole. We started our market season in 2015 and have been growing for market and CSA ever since. We're about a three acre operation. Our farm is a lot bigger but we intensively grow on about three acres. Organic production with cover crapping, compost applications, all those kinds of things. We sell at a farmer's market in Kansas City. Last year our CSA was about 40 folks and we sell through a growers group out of Topeka also. So you can see we have a couple people that we employ every year too and we have volunteers come out and do trade for the CSA. So we have a lot of people out and that feels like good energy. Ever since we started the farm, I've been working with medicinal herbs. It started small and has just kept growing. Echinacea was one of the first things we grew being on the prairie, it felt right. But probably close to experience about like 50 different medicinal herbs that I've worked with. We do a lot of value added goods with our herbs like dried herbal teas, balms and things of that nature for market. And from starting eight years ago or so we just found a lot of people interested in medicinal herbs. It seemed like there's a lot of people online and just coming to market being like, oh what's this, we're really curious, tell us more. A lot of people really interested in getting their herbs locally and from the Midwest as much as they want to get their veggies from the Midwest too. That made me curious about doing some research thanks to Sare with the medicinal roots. We started with three Ashwagandha, Ella Campaign and Marshmallow. We went with those because a lot of medicinal roots have to be in the ground for three years or more. Ashwagandha is an annual solanacea like peppers and tomatoes. Ella Campaign and Marshmallow have given us good yields after two years. So it fit well into the grants timeline. We were kind of looking to see, to have a more directed view at those crops about how much it cost to grow them, if they were actually a sustainable profitable crop for folks in the Midwest. This project enabled us to track all that information. Furthermore, they're really great because they are perennials. You can factor that into your growing system, a little different than just an annual. It's like another market, different set of people that you'd be targeting it to. Not a lot of folks growing these crops around here. I'll just get into what it was like to work with these. We got the okay with the grant a little later in the spring, so like in April. So we didn't get these seeds started until about then. We found out some really important information right off the bat. So this one right here is Ashwagandha, you could see. But the Ashwagandha, it took like a month plus to germinate, even in ideal conditions. So that really put us behind. But the other ones, they got off to a good start. At the time we were using this paper mulch, it was like leftover end rolls from a paper factory in Lawrence. They don't do that anymore, so we had to shift gears. But some kind of mulch was important because they were going to be a perennial crop. We did drip lines underneath. We fertilized with chicken manure, like pelletized chicken manure in each hole as we transplanted. We did do it a second year. So that was in 2020. In 2021, we were able to start our Ashwagandha seeds earlier. They did significantly better. They grew to their full size. So that was good. So here they are, like at the height of their season. So you can see the LA campaign, it grows to like, it's like six feet tall. It's huge. It gets real wide too. So these things we planted them about 18 inches apart and rose about 24 inches apart and staggered them so that they would hopefully have the space they needed. The marshmallow also gets pretty tall, like five feet. It's also got a perk that you can harvest the aerial parts and people use that as dried herbs. So it's kind of a two for one. And then the Ashwagandha here only gets to be about three feet tall. That's kind of its full size. The LA campaign of the marshmallow overwintered fine that winter. It didn't get terribly cold, but I think that was the polar vortex year where we had like a week of really terrible, terrible cold. They came back okay. The LA campaign suffered a little root rot. So we lost some of that, but they came back and did pretty good. We did harvest all of them around October to November with Ashwagandha. You wait till the first frost. It dies back and you can harvest the roots that way. The other ones you just have to dig out. It's best to dig roots, medicinal roots, especially out in the fall. So that's what we tend to do. Processing the roots. It was something else of a learning curve. I did a herbal CSA box in 2021. So there's some other like roots in there, but you can see the LA campaign is like huge compared to the Ashwagandha. They all have their own specific growth habits. And we did end up digging them with like a potato fork instead of trying to mechanize it just because of the way that our beds were set up. I think mechanization is a next step that could be taken with this project. But for the Ashwagandha and the marshmallow and the LA campaign, we took off all the aerial parts. We dug them up, washed them off with just a spray hose gun and let them kind of dry for a day. The Ashwagandha and the LA campaign can actually get too hard. We used like a chipper shredder, like a stand up one. Not super big, but we use that to chop up the roots. If you wait till they're dry, they can be too hard for the chipper shredder to do a good job. So we chipper shredded those. Marshmallows used as a misalageness root. It's used for inflammation. So you don't really want to chipper shred that because it will just get mushy. So we dried it first, took some hand clippers to it, dried it. We have a big herb drying cabinet that's got shelves in it. A space heater and fans for circulation and it's in the dark. So that's how we dried all of the roots. And this is after chipper shredding. And then you can also take it one step further. We did get a hammer mill and we were able to turn it into a powder. So all these value added steps, the fresh root is really great. You can get a really good price for it because it's pretty hard to get a hold of. But the roots are like one or two years shelf stable, no problem. When you powder them, they lose their viability. They end up being more like six months shelf stable. So here's kind of a breakdown of what we ended up getting. The yields aren't huge, but it ends up factoring to being pretty decent per bed as like a supplemental thing on the farm. Especially because you can just plant it and if it's in mulch, you can walk away from it for the whole season pretty much. As opposed to like tomatoes, they have to constantly trellis or something like that. The moisture breakdown, I didn't put on here. But for those curious, it ends up being like a one to three ratio. The LA campaign I believe is closer to a one to four. But as you start looking at the fresh root pound, it is going to go down significantly after it's dried. So some of the lessons and things that we found out, some of those beds end up being about 500 gross off of an 80 foot bed when you sell them fresh, a little lower, like I said, when it's dried. Less maintenance and it adds the diversity and perennials to your farm. I guess the major hiccups that I find is that a lot of the people that are growing these are doing it on a pretty large scale if you're wanting to sell them. You'd have to scale it for it to make sense to sell the dried roots because as you probably know, I feel like the bigger the project, the more the efficiency, so you end up getting more per pound. We do, like I said, a lot of value adding. If that's something that is alluring or interesting on your farm, that's really the way to get your money out of the herbs for sure. But not everyone wants to do that. So it can be a little tricky to find the right people. 35 pounds of marshmallow or whatever. How many plants was that approximately? Well, the LA campaign root is the biggest. And I can remember that each plant was about a pound of root. Marshmallow is a little less. Ashwagandha is even less. The roots only have one year to grow, so they're not as big. Then did you grab the whole root? Yeah, you can just chop it off. You chop it so that you get all the aerial parts off. And then the whole root is usable from there. The three that you mentioned, what are the health benefits? Is there medicinal benefits to those herbs? Yeah, there definitely are. Some of them are more popular herbs. Well, maybe not some of them are more popular, but they're very frequently used in herbalism. So I didn't pick super random ones that people aren't going to want to buy. Marshmallow is actually the plant that traditionally you would make marshmallows out of. But it's like a really demulsant plant that's good for inflammation. Ashwagandha is a, like, nirving. It helps with, like, regulation of the nervous system. And it's also an adaptogen, so it helps with stress levels. And then LA campaign is like a really pungent, spicy root that can help with, like, coughing and things that you, it gets used for, like, lung congestion a lot. Questions? First, where's your farm? Oh, sorry. I didn't even say that. We are located about 20 minutes northwest of Lawrence. Kind of by Perry. So did you let any grow the second year? Yeah, the marshmallow and the LA campaign both went through two seasons before we harvested. And the Ashwagandha, since it's an annual, we just did it twice. Thank you. Your dried root, are you, or your powdered root, are you, how are you packaging it? How are we packaging it? Yeah. Well, I turned the Ashwagandha powder into, like, a hot chocolate mix. Because it can be kind of, it's called, like, the horse herb. It's like, can have a taste that not everyone loves, but you can put it into things. So when we do value-added stuff, we tend towards, like, doing combinations of herbs and things like that. The marshmallow, actually, there's a lot of people looking for it. So we just bag it up and take it to market and people snag it dried at market. And the LA campaign, we used pretty much all of it to make an herbal honey that we sell at market, too. And then did all your sales come through Farmers Market and CSA, or did you use my internet sales? There's a little bit online, but pretty much all the sales of the herb stuff is through our Farmers Market. Next question. Once you call something a medicinal herb, do you need any certification, licensing, anything that, once you're making a medical claim, does that change anything? Well, you probably wouldn't put medicinal herb on the label. And it depends on what state you're in. We're in Kansas, so it has, like, a cottage herbal supplement, kind of umbrella where you don't need to have, like, any special certification if you're working under a certain limit. So you would be careful not to put, this is a medicine on your label, though. There's a lot of information out there about, like, when you start having things at Farmers Market that are medicinal, you would be careful with the language that you use. So if I call it dried marshmallow root, I'm okay, but once I say this, here's the common cold that I'm in trouble. You might get in trouble, yeah. And are you allowed to chop it and dry it and not have that considered to be processed? It is. And that's okay in Kansas? Mm-hmm. Okay. Next, common questions, curiosity. Yeah, just don't give it to yourself. Just throw out. I can't even make sure that I love it so much as a farmer, like, using all of them. Thanks. Yeah. So I have a common in questions. We can chat about it later as well. So I am the life testimony of somebody who has done a lot of Asoganda because I come from a place where it's grown and there's a native of that origin of place as well. So the common is Asoganda is a long history of Kanzhamsams in just a household use where we use as early as one year old people start using that in milkshake or just water. Generally people use it as, it's not a sedative that helps you to sleep, but it's also believed or people find it useful that it relieves your stress and anxiety and just helps you to sleep better. So there are different products that's available in market that can be found in Amazon as well where Asoganda is mixed in, premixed in. It's like what you call, like a gripe water we use here, very similar to that. They use that for babies after one year old, but also the adults use that in a milk, like a milkshake powder, which is not completely Asoganda. It's other as well, including those. That's the common. But the question for you is since this Asoganda, as far as I know, is produced in a very large scale in other parts of the country, like India. And it's a cash crop which is high value, but it's managed very minimally input. There is not a lot of fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, those kind of things going on there. Very minimally managed because it does not require a lot of inputs. It's a very drought tolerant, it does not require a lot of water. So it's a low management crop. And so there's a lot of, you know, this farming is a lot of things. A lot of these farmings are grown in a very discarded land or, you know, poorly managed area. So there's not a lot of inputs going on. So therefore there's opportunity for profit for that reason. But how do you compete with those? Like you're starting right now, right? But your scale is small. But I see those, you know, when you try to scale up, how do you see the market? Because globally if you see, I think it will be hard for you where it's not even native and it's very hard to grow here. And you have limited land and limited resource. So how do you see this as scaling up and competing with them? I don't. I'm not planning to try to like grow the world supply of Ashwagandha. It's more so just like if I want to use it, I'd love to get it locally if I can produce it myself. And there are definitely people who live around here or in the U.S. in general who like want to support herbs that aren't being trucked in from really far away. It's still good quality, you know, but just like wanting to try to get it closer. And I mean, a lot of these herbs are super like they didn't have a lot of pest pressure. They were drought tolerant. They managed themselves just fine. Ashwagandha was actually the most finicky of all of them, mostly because of flea beetles, which we had problems with because of eggplants and other selenacea. But I mean, I don't think that you could grow to the scale to really compete with those markets. I think you're looking at a different market. And also, since you're already in this area, have you thought of other crops like ginger, turmeric? Have you looked into that or interested in those areas? Definitely. And there's other amazing farmers in the area that are growing ginger and turmeric and are doing a great job doing those things. I actually personally haven't had a lot of luck, but I haven't focused a lot of energy towards it either. So I know it's possible and people are doing it in hoop houses and all kinds of stuff. But I've just been focusing on there's so many things I want to grow. I have to stop myself eventually. So in that line, my question was, so how much you want to grow in that area? So just trying to see and test the water or you just really want to grow in that medicinal root sector? How much you know about these new people around your circle that's working on this area? Because most of us do not know, right, this area, how big is this market? Right. Well, I know that I've seen a multiple... So I look more at the US because the scale here is there are some small herb farms, but they don't really grow to produce to sell bulk herbs. I think you'd have to be a farm that was focused on growing bulk herbs to sell in order for that to make sense. I personally manage a whole other side of vegetable production. So I dabble in this because I think it's really interesting and I like sharing the information, but I probably won't ever transition into an herbal farm. I just think that it's like part of the whole, but I think that it would be really cool if somebody did. Like I think the more there is like more people interested who don't have the space to grow 80 feet of ashwagandha, more people that want to consume it than can grow it here. So, but you're right, the price point is different and you're only going to meet that for so many people. Applying for the grant, do you feel like that was part of your success? And wanting to dabble into this herbal aspect of things or do you feel like you may have not gone in that route if you didn't have the grant? I think that the grant definitely helped me understand better about what commitment would be required for it to scale. If that makes sense. So like I hadn't planted an 80 foot bed of any of those I planted an amount, but not quite a full. That's a full garden size bed for us. We do them in 80 feet because of our layout. But I think that to do to scale up, you would want to make sure that you are securing some kind of market like a contract situation. Because having more route than what we had is I mean, that was more than what we since a lot of medicinal things will save for a long time. We could make them into preparations and stuff, but it wasn't necessarily a super easy sale and that's like the hiccup. So being able to have like conversations with like either somebody who is creating herbal products that wants to only use fresh, which there's a lot of them out there or some of the other companies. I think it would be really cool for it to be a collaborative thing, but that becomes much more complicated much more quickly. And what would your top three pieces of advice for somebody that received a grant for instance to be successful on that? Well, grants are really like diverse. So the grant was really great. I felt like it was really easy to apply for and it was a small grant. So it wasn't a big one. But I really encourage anyone to apply for a grant if there's like a focus that they're interested in delving into deeper. Because I think the information helps everyone. But I'm not sure exactly how to answer your question past that point. I was wondering about soil health and the thing that I always hiccup on with the root crops is how much I'm digging up the soil. And they keep being told don't dig up the soil as a general rule. And then here are these crops that I put in that require me to mess with them. And so I'm wondering about what kinds of thought processes or practices you're having around improving that soil or maintaining it or minimizing the digging or what, you know, how is soil health factoring in for you? Yeah. And we actually we grow on a grade. So we have to be really conscious about our erosion control. And that's why I maybe you didn't see in the photos, but we had pretty wide walkways between the crops. And that was both to give them the space that they needed, but also to limit how much space was tilled or worked. I grow a ton of root crops. So I don't have a problem digging a bunch of root crops out of the ground. It's part of part of the season for me. But we, like I said, do compost and we do rotation and we do all those kinds of things. And I haven't noticed like any adverse effects from like harvest, like we don't do a ton of like plowing or anything like that. Which I think the flipping is the what I've heard is the more detrimental versus just like you're just digging something and kind of pulling it out of the ground. So