 As far as the focus, because our feasibility had to do more with the business side of growing elderberry. I'm Chris Patton. I'm the Managing Director of the Elderberry Cooperative in Minnesota, and I've been farming for 40, 50 years association, and he has grown raspberries, strawberries, currants of all different kinds, and he has exported them all over the world. So I was very lucky to find him about five years ago when I decided that I couldn't be a farmer. I had to market elderberry or there'd be no other elderberry farmers because if you can't sell your product, it's not going to yield what you need in order to justify it commercially. And so I also, at this time, I'm responsible for selling elderberry 400 now, and I need about 4,000 in order to make any money. So because I'm the wholesaler, we pay the farmers better than we pay me. And that's kind of where we are right now. With the elderberry, it is growing very fast. And since I, I guess in the last five years I've probably talked to about 60,000 people about elderberry because I do spend a lot of time in the stores talking to hundreds of people going by, as well as the state fair and some other things like that where you can reach some high numbers. And what I have found is that there's many people who don't know what an elderberry is. So I'm starting with some pictures because I think that's a good idea. In fact, I guess it was Friday, Friday night, well I have some words before pictures, but I mean, I was talking to this one man, he didn't know what it was. And then his wife sort of piped up, oh yeah, they were all along the edge of the farm, I killed them all. I didn't know they were worth anything. So that's a perfect reason as to why I'm here to talk about elderberry. Between those thousands of people I've talked to, I've heard a lot of stories from folks who would say, oh yeah, my grandmother or my mother used to make me go out and pick this stuff. And we all come back with these purple fingers, but she'd make this great jam or pies or different things like that or some would combine it with choked cherry and some would do it with apples. I mean, you wouldn't believe all the stories I've heard, the old elderberry stories. So I wanted to start out here because the plant is very flexible. Now there's an awful lot we don't know about the elderberry. What we do know as far as commercial production is largely thanks to the University of Missouri. We've had a few folks from Missouri here this morning because they got curious about, well, you know, maybe there's a crop in this and it seems to grow well, it's wild. They did a number of studies. They've identified a few varieties and issued a few varieties that have a few beneficial characteristics for commercial use, a little ripen more easily, a little bit bigger barrier things. But I have a sort of always in talking to farmers and we've got about three to four dozen growers of different states of commitment that our cooperative works with and they include Iowa growers, Wisconsin growers, as well as Minnesota growers. And you can use it. The nice thing about elderberry is that it doesn't need to be a primary crop. There are a few people that think of it as a primary crop, but in the most sense it is going to be like a third crop or an additional crop. And that sort of harkens back to the traditional use of elderberry as something that was growing around the edge of the field that the people would harvest for their own benefit. And so this is where it naturally comes about around the habitat. You know, they thrive best in full sun or partial shade. They will tolerate black walnut. There's a number of interesting characteristics about that. Long streams, flood plains, openings in the wooded canopy, disturbed sites along road sides, railroad tracks and things like that. In fact, so many consumers have been used to being able to collect it wild that when the state starts spraying more intensively, they run out of their source of elderberry, which has helped as far as developing the market. We were surprised at how many people would come, consumers would buy elderberry straight off our farm. And of course, we get a little bit better price that way when you sell direct to the customer. Now I do want to say before I get any further, everything here is already online, so you don't have to take extensive notes. If you search Minnesota Elderberry, our cooperative website comes up first. And I have all of our past grants, presentations, how to find it in the wild, some recipes, you know how to grow it, I've got the three pages, three different sections on the health benefits, notes from the first international symposium and everything else is online. And I do that because when I talk to consumers and tell them some of the things that you don't have, you know, a lot of time to give them footnotes and all the details, and I can't remember all the technical stuff, I'm not a microbiologist, but I can tell them the general story and if they want more, it's all online. And they can research it to the heart's content, and so that keeps everybody happy. So this is, so it is flexible. And I want to get back to this as I get to the end because there is some very exciting developments taking place at the University of Minnesota, having to do with their erosion control, the riparian buffers and some of the other stuff there where I think we are going to start seeing a lot more work on Elderberry in the academic world. And I'm very happy about that. I am, we already have a commitment from Agroforestry. We are going to develop an extension service program for Elderberry through the University of Minnesota. It can, Elderberry can be used in marginal land. The plant is tough. It is hard to kill, but it's like any other plant or crop. If you have better soil, better conditions, you're going to get a better yield. So in some academic areas, they have estimated yield up to 12,000 pounds an acre. We typically tell people 4,000 to plan on. We are seeing many farms that get consistently 6,000 pounds or slightly more. But they will go in secondary soils. They have a wide spreading root system. That root system needs the micro-rising. It needs that forest or kind of litter and compost and things like that. And until you get that established, the plants don't do as well. And they struggle a little bit getting started in clay. But what I found with our own experience in Scandia where we're growing, and our first Elderberry went into the worst soil, wasn't planned to be used for anything. It got run over by volunteers with trucks, didn't get watered and everything. The stuff's still there. And we'll get some pictures. Yes, I know. Okay, so this is, you get an idea here, the flower. This is what the berries look like. Out those are tiny berries. I can get about three on my little fingernail, usually. And those are the larger ones. This is now Paul. For 40 years, he's been there and he doesn't spray. It's all natural. He's built up his humus. I mean, you drop stuff in the soil and it grows. You may not see this the first year if you try to do Elderberry. As my son and I, we were planning it. This is how it starts out here in the field. There's a couple pictures of it in the wild. That's from along Minnehaha Creek in Minneapolis. It's there. And it's the easiest time to identify wild Elderberry in your area is during the June time when these flowers are out there. And some folks at the University of Missouri have counted 69 native pollinators on Elderberry. They do not need honeybees. I have seen some, but usually honeybees will choose something else. This is that neglected soil. It wasn't planned. Our first planning, this is Paul here. You can see it's right next to the trees. And that was then compared. He had done some others here with his Johns. These were the Missouri, Bob Gordon and Wildwood. And this he did with plastic. We don't recommend that. I'm not going to give you an awful lot on the horticultural thing because they like to sucker. And the plastic, they can't get through there. And so it's better to use a heavy compost or something that's going to degrade. This is Terry Durham. Not for him, I wouldn't be standing here today. I heard him at Moses in La Crosse in 2010. When I was looking to buy some 60 acres, I was planning to farm. And I needed a way to pay for it. And I thought Elderberry might do that. But when I went down to the workshop and I asked him, OK, Terry, I put in 20 acres of Elderberry. And I go all this stuff. You're going to be able to buy it all, right? And he hesitated just a little moment. And so I realized we needed more marketing effort. And I had to shift my own planning for my own life because I'm not independently wealthy. And I was going to have to make that farm actually pay. So anyway, so Terry is there. And then this is Terry and I and Madeline Monchalogo. She is the lady who founded Sambucal as a researcher in Israel and was a person responsible for creating the market and doing some of the initial research on Elderberry's antiviral characteristics. And her products are all over. She's retired now, does archaeology. And the old city of Jerusalem south of there and the city of David. I was digging there in the 70s. And so we had a nice conversation, sort of the balance in life. I started in archaeology. And now I'm doing elderberry. She started in elderberry and is now doing archaeology. So that was a very nice discussion. We had that in Hebrew. And then we were talking to the Egyptian guy in Arabic at the International Symposium. So it's just a little side color. This gives you a little bit of idea of what you can be faced with when it comes harvest time. This is a lot of berries coming through. And on this particular one here, you can see this is planted at the same time, but different soils. This is the soil that wasn't intended to have crops. This is the one that had been prepared for crops. You can see that elderberry has a huge, huge variation in how quickly it can grow. I got to watch it. Those speakers can bite back. And here again is Paul and with some of his Johns. Now this is not unusual. And elderberry will grow anywhere from six to 12 feet tall in one year on a primal cane. Now in the wild, they get kind of gangly. I've seen them 14, 16 feet tall and they're sort of broken. They got these long branches going down all over the place. What we have found is that with a primal cane, elderberry, the berries tend to be a little bit bigger. Primal cane being that started from nothing at the beginning of spring. And then whatever grows that first year. And that's basically what you take cuttings from as well is whatever grows in that year. The berries are a little larger and they tend to ripen a little more evenly, which is crucial. In the wild, elderberry likes to have uneven ripening because this is a beneficial for survival, but it's not helpful for our labor management. So we want that. And I'll tell you, I was having to actually bend the plants down to harvest. It is hand harvested. And this gives you a couple shots of Paul's Field. This is just natural grass that came up. This is, these pictures are from one year after we put the ground in that picture with my son in the planter, the water wheel. And so this is kind of how I was looking up that first year. And this last picture is from earlier this year. It's about May. I can see some flowers are starting to come out. And this white clover just came in by itself. Now, the one problem we had is we lost some labor. I primarily show up for things like cuttings and harvest and stuff. And we had some other folks. And the plants grew too fast and started to bend over. So it became really like a jungle this year for the harvest. And towards the end of the year, we couldn't get the lawnmower through there. And that affects things like SWD. We don't spray on the farm. We have more of those little flies at the bottom two feet. And if we see a lot of flies and everything, then we just don't take that. We just cut it. And we don't have enough labor to clean up. We just drop it. For elderberry production, the flies are not such a big problem if we're making juice with it because they have a yeast on it that actually helps with the flavor. But you do get less juice. And the key is, the way we do this is that when we harvest, we de-stem and sanitize and freeze the berries the same day. And the freezing stops any of the growth. And then we use a cold press, bladder press. So, you know, all the skins and seeds and whatever's else there doesn't get into the juice. So we do get a good clean product and it's not as critical for that as it would be for someone doing a u-pick berry. I mean, when you take home raspberries and you see the little worms in there, it takes a different kind of stomach than the typical consumer with an urban background. So, this is another picture of ripening elderberry from this year. And now, I need to get out of here. Oh, thank you. I wanna get to the marketing side. And again, this is all online. I wanna go through it. But one of the advantages that elderberry has is its health benefits and the fact that it has a high amount of antioxidants about three times what a raspberry or a blueberry has more than cranberry. Aronia has slightly more. They're very similar in their profiles. They have these dark anthocyanins, flavanols, quercetin and rootin, which are anti-inflammatories. And overall, the elderberry has been treasured for hundreds and hundreds of years for medicinal or health benefits, both in Europe and in Native American cultures. And it is the sweetest of the super fruits. It has a bricks of about eight to 10, about half of what a grape has. So it is what I call sweet neutral. It's not really a bitter berry, not like a tart cherry or aronia or cranberry or Golgi or any of those others. And so that makes it a really good mixer. It's a berry, street berry flavor. And in this country, we process it different and then they do in Europe and I'll get into that. So basically, this is where we're looking at the commercial opportunities. Is it feasible? We wanted to know if it was feasible to grow and produce elderberry in Minnesota based on what they were doing in Missouri was it possible up here? And so we did have cooperative development services that are study. I had to have somebody in there who'd tell me I was crazy that I would believe before I go off. I mean, I am still getting questions from my wife. Are we ever gonna make money with this? And I said, well, I'm still growing the business right now. And then so this is my company and I market Terry's products outside of Missouri. And then of course I had his information and his experience. And so the basic questions that I get a lot from farmers is okay, will I be able to sell my crop? How many acres? I mean, there's a lot of farmers that are interested in growing elderberry. Maybe I'm too late on this. Do we need more? And what role does the cooperative play? And then is there enough money involved to support a network of state-grower cooperatives? In other words, an ocean spray of elderberry, so to speak. And so, you know, elderberry is a perennial. The plant will live 20, 30 years, they think. I mean, I have a 60-page paper online and you can download PDF, it's all free. That's the most advanced horticultural studies on elderberry to date. So the idea is if this is a long-term commitment, is there going to be a long-term market? Is there a future to elderberry as an industry? So I was attracted to this and felt pretty confident because elderberry is huge business in Europe. It's bigger than blueberries are here. It's huge. And so in over 95% of the elderberry consumed in this country is imported. So this is called opportunity. You know, just even if we can't compete evenly, we can take 20 or 30% of that market, right? And I think we can do a lot better. So this is the co-op development services. It's very hard. The information on elderberry is limited because it is not a major crop. But they estimated about 30,000 acres of cultivated elderberry in Europe. Over 107,000 tons harvested. And 95% of the production is in those countries. And the price is pretty low. Now part of the reason is that in Europe, they harvest the berries and freeze them on the sign. That is on the stem and they don't wash or anything. Then they process them like they would grapes. And so they're doing concentrates, which are heated up to three days, extracts, freeze-ride powders, things of that sort. And elderflowers are a huge business in Europe as well. Now we haven't really done very much with flowers in this country. I did sell flowers to a distillery in St. Paul, 11 Wells. They made a liqueur from it this year. We processed the flowers with beard combs by hand. We've got to come up with a better way to do that so that we can do higher volumes. So in 2015, we estimated maybe 600 acres in production in the United States. And concentrated in the Midwest. And basically, I did a comparison and tried to see if we could get some kind of approximation of what size of market and how many acres could we support of elderberry production in the United States. And it's pretty fair to use Europe in comparing with the U.S. as far as population and state of economy and things like that. So that's what I did. And so how large is our potential market? And I just, since we don't have a huge number of products, I used the leading one that exists, which is Terry's River Hills Harvest elderberry juice. And that's basically something that is recommended for people to consume a tablespoon a day. We're not talking about guzzle and this stuff. Okay. And so I said, okay, so if we use this one product substitute for, you know, there's going to be a lot of different products using elderberry. I mean, I've got breweries that want to make beer with it. I've got wineries that want to do wine with it. I've got a, we're shipping a couple hundred pounds to a specialty jelly and jam lady up in Duluth who's going to do some stuff. So, but you use one to sort of do a market projection to try to get a reasonable size. And so, and I'm saying we don't need it one percent or less. I remind myself as people go by and when I'm standing in high V and they don't want to try my elderberry juice or jelly, although when I turn my back, the jelly disappears very quickly. So, but anyway, for this and then there's about, actually there's 22, but I just round it down because 20 servings, then we get the number of cases and you go look at the numbers. And I came up with this magic figure of 22,500 acres. And that's basically what I need to get in production so I can retire. My father retired at 89. So I still have a few years to go. But you know, we here in this country, the key is that we de-stem and sanitize the berries before we freeze them. So typically what I do is what most American growers do, we harvest the berries until lunch, have a nice lunch and then we de-stem and sanitize in the afternoon and we freeze them that night. At the end of the night, they're all frozen and we freeze them in four-gallon food-grade buckets that's 25 pounds. Sanitation is done in a water solution with a little bit of bleach or peroxide, one of the different peroxides substitutes. And what's nice is that the unripe berries tend to float. We skim those off. They're sold as seconds more for winery or mass production and we have the higher quality goes to consumer. So anyway, so this is a kind of other estimation, intermediate timeframe, 10 to 20 years for this to develop. In other words, I'm not trying to go from 600 acres to 20,000 in three years. We want to do it right. We want to be sure the quality's there, the market's there and their stability. So now I just got a grant approved last fall to work with Frontier Co-op. They import 80,000 pounds of dried elderberries from Bulgaria every year. And they have an interest in replacing at least some of that with Midwest grown elderberries. The problem is that certified organic European elderberries means wild collected by a part-time, semi-employed people who go out when the elderberries ripe in Bulgaria and pick it. Certified organic farming in this country is going to be by folks like you who put out a lot of time and money into creating a certified organic field and harvest. And so can we come up with a way that this was going to make financial sense? We expect we can get some premium on price, just as we heard about ginger previously and turmeric, but we don't know how much at this point. And Frontier's not the only one. There's a buyer in Colorado who wanted to buy one to two thousand pounds a month for me. So we're not in place yet. This fall I got about two dozen emails from Asian buyers, from Korea, Japan, China, wanting to buy elderberries. I'm not getting into export right now, but they're looking into things like these concentrated powders because it's a nutraceutical import, as well as a food grade dye. They used to do all of the stamping of the meat with elderberries in this country, and they use it in other countries as well. So part of what I come up with, I call it networked redundancy. In other words, I'm a great believer in Murphy. If you plan for him, he may not show up. If you don't plan for him, he does show up for sure. And so you need to have things with multiple options. And always, in working with the growers, we emphasize, start slow. Take a huge risk, see if you want to do this. And also encourage them always to look for local markets because we get four to five dollars a pound selling frozen elderberries directly to the consumer. Whereas a winery is going to want two to three. And that's kind of the way it is. And if you're selling directly and it's just the reality of the food business, there's a lot of distribution channels out there. One of the challenges I had is that when I went to co-op partners, they were too busy at the time, they weren't interested in my product. Some people did want it, others didn't. It's a co-op, they all had to agree. And so it didn't happen. So I found a distributor, a family-owned business, and the people that do business with them were happy, which happened to be the food co-ops. But Luns, Firely's, Kowalski's weren't so happy. And Hivee has their own system. They'll do some direct to the store, but it's a hassle. It's very hard on those managers to try to keep track of individual farms. So distribution and redundancy is important. And so I have a handful of small distributors. I've got one in Madison, one in the Twin Cities. I've got a mail order business out of Milwaukee. I have Lomar distributing now for Hivee, but it took me a year to get there. So I'm with KHE distributors. It's a national company. So I just hired a broker with 10 salespeople in the Southwest, California through Colorado. I sent them samples, half of them broke because of the freezing weather. And the post office didn't have heated trucks. But I'm already in 17 new stores. Okay, from this. So the potential is there. The business is there. It can grow. The advantage of grower cooperatives outside of, say, this larger market is, I think it helps to coordinate the research, also helps to support local food businesses more, and can provide options for growers from whom elderberry is not their primary crop. You don't have to worry about marketing it. The cooperative will do that and aggregate your purchase with others so that when we're dealing with a bigger, like, say, if General Mills ever wanted to put elderberry colors in the kicks, you have to have quite a bit on hand to do that. You're not going to be able to support that off of one farm. So that's one of the functions that a cooperative can do. I also recently have been meeting with four or five different departments at the University of Minnesota, and they are really looking at doing a lot more work with elderberry now and research both in the riparian buffers, getting back into the germ plasm. I mean, the genetic, the size of the elderberry genome is about five times that of the human genome. It's five times bigger. But from that, there should be ways to help all of these different things to find natural breeding methods. We can have elderberry that is stronger in the cane for use as windbreaks. We can have those more extensive or rapid root systems for erosion control. There might be a difference as far as some that have better flowers or characteristics that are there. I don't know how I'm doing for time and I'm very happy to take questions. Okay, so the question is with primal canes providing slightly bigger and more fruit and more even ripening, and then maybe less total pounds per plant, just as a note. But it is much easier to harvest. Why don't we cut everything back? Well, in the beginning in Minnesota, we weren't sure their length of harvest year would facilitate that. In fact, we had people growing and saying, I cut it back. It didn't come up. Well, and then my first thought was, well, maybe the roots need to get more established before you do that. Two or three years, and it is a perennial after all. It suckers. And basically, whenever we use cuttings to do it, and whenever the suckers are starting to send up shoots, I always cut off the original cutting right away and put the energy into the new roots. But not all varieties like that, elderberry are determinant and indeterminate like tomatoes. From our own experience, Johns does not like to be trimmed or pruned heavily. Bob Gordon, Wildwood, Adams do great. This year, the growing season was so long that we stuck some cuttings in, in Paul's wonderful soil. And we're too busy to do anything with it, and we harvested berries off of that this year. Buties. The point, it was a long comment, but it was basically the fact that as a perennial, it lends itself to permaculture, planting, agroforestry, and there are many different strategies in there where elderberry can play a role, and multi-tiered and under-tiered, yes. And that's one of the beauties of the plant.