 So I'd like to welcome everyone to the session entitled Elderberry, a rapidly growing specialty crop industry in the U.S., Midwest. And we're actually going to have several speakers, about five today, and they will go ahead and give their talks in six sessions. So if you could hold your questions to the very end. This is a videotaped session, so we need everyone to speak into the microphone if you have questions at the end come on up to that one there and go ahead and ask. And Michael Gold will be our first speaker and I will go ahead and turn it over to him. There are handouts coming out, too, as well. Oh, my name is Catherine Bonnert, by the way, I'm the moderator. And I work for Lincoln University under the 2501 program. So welcome. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you, Catherine. Thank you to North Central Regents there for supporting our project. We're real excited about Elderberry and, as Catherine mentioned, this is going to be a team effort because working with Elderberry is, in fact, a team effort. So we're going to have little vignettes from different experts. Terry Durham, are you in here? See that hand raised up, the man standing up in the back there. He's one of the primary Elderberry groves here in the USA. And so the expertise in this room, if we don't know the answer to the question, then the answer isn't known at this point in time. I think it's safe to say. So this is, we're just trying to give you a real flash sense of what's going on in the state of Elderberry here in this part of the country. So I'm Michael Gold. We're also going to have Pat Byers, who works for Extension at the University of Missouri, Andy Thomas, who works at the Southwest Center as an assistant professor in horticulture at the University of Missouri, Ina Chernushko, who's a marketing specialist for the Center for Agroforestry, where I also work, and Larry Godsey, who's an economist in the Center for Agroforestry, where I also work. So others listed on that list, again, are Terry Durham, who's a grower, Francisco Aguilar, who's an economist in the Forestry Department at the University of Missouri, John Brewer, who's an Elderberry winemaker in Wichita, Kansas, and Park Bay, who's an agricultural lender. So why Elderberry, why the interest in Elderberry? There's a lot of different potential applications for Elderberry as an ornamental for wildlife habitat as a food source. You can plant it in low-lying wet areas, riparian, as a riparian buffer. It's a nice perennial crop, it enhances ecosystem sustainability. And very importantly, we all believe it's a family farm income opportunity, and that's one of the things we're very excited about. It's a versatile food source for juices, jams, jellies, wines, beverages, fudge, and all kinds of other kinds of products. And there's also research going on in terms of its medicinal properties, boosting the immune system. It's high in anthocyanins, it's high in antioxidants, it's high in flavonoids, and a whole bunch of different vitamins, A, B, 6, C, and iron, and especially in comparison to other similar colored berries. So what I want to do is just quickly give you an overview of this SARE project, and then we'll roll into the different experts to talk about different facets of the elderberry. One of the things that we know that got us excited about this is that the demand for the fruit and the flowers of elderberry is increasing from a whole bunch of different sources, from winemakers, from jelly processors, from juice processors, as well as from the nutraceutical companies. The demand in the United States at present is being met by imports from Europe, and we feel that we have a real good opportunity with domestic production to substitute for that import, and I think that's very important. And also important is that global prices are pretty high and demand continues to increase for elderberry products. So just a quick flash background, and some of my colleagues are going to pick up on this, but elderberry research began about 15 years ago in Southwest Missouri and also at Missouri State University, and two of the key individuals are in this panel today, Andy Thomas and Pat Byers, and some of the things that have occurred leading up to our current SARE funding, they had multi-location, multi-year evaluation of native, local elderberry germplasm, and they compared that to some of the varieties developed up in the northeastern United States and Canada, such as Adams York and Netzer from the 60s and the 50s and earlier years, and they've been looking at a whole variety of different elderberry traits to assess the different native germplasm, including phenology, when is it flower and fruit, and what's its annual behavior, what's the growth like, when is it harvested, what's the yield, looking at different aspects of the flower and the fruit, the quality of the fruit as well as looking at resistances or susceptibility to disease and insects. There are two new varieties that Andy and Pat have developed that are known as Wildwood and Bob Gordon, and there are also important cultural studies, so ways that we can commercially raise elderberry where it's much more efficient than doing it sort of like grapefines where you just pick off the old wood every year, there are more efficient ways to do this. Two key individuals, again I already mentioned Terry Durham that began to work with Pat Byers and Andy Thomas, one was Dr. John Brewer who is the largest elderberry winemaker in the country located in Wichita, and also Terry Durham who's located here in Boone County, and I believe Terry has the largest elderberry acreage in the country already near Heartsburg, Missouri, so these are the folks that really have led the charge and one of the reasons why we've really got a very active and dynamic group of elderberry activities and growers here in Central Missouri. So John Brewer has Wildwood sellers based out of Mulvane, Kansas, and last Friday one of our Sare activities was to have an elderberry winemaking workshop. John Brewer makes all kinds of wines from very dry to very sweet and we had a chance to taste just a few of those last Friday. There's John giving his presentation here in town and this is one of the wines that he sells. This is a whole bunch of images of Terry Durham at his Eridu Farms here in Boone County, Missouri. You can see raising the elderberry plants in the greenhouse, how the plants look like on his farm, and some of the processing and Terry's in the middle there with some of his value-added product. As I said, Terry has been very key in hosting elderberry field days, working with growers, stimulating interest in acreage planted among growers, and producing and marketing value-added products and I want to put a plug in for tomorrow because Terry's offering an elderberry short course here at the small farm trade show, so if you want to go more in-depth on elderberry tomorrow, you'll have an opportunity to do that. A little bit more background about our project. In contrast to Europe where elderberry is relatively well-known, it's not really well known here in the United States, and so this is one of our tasks, is to increase the familiarity with elderberry. Catherine, just do jumping jacks when I have, I have three minutes right now. Okay, that's fun because I've got a lot of slides. All right, we know that there's a lot of information that's lacking and that's one of the things that we're doing across both the biology and the economics of elderberry. Again, there's active research at the University of Missouri by Andy Thomas and Pat Byers. They've got the new cultivars developed and we also have a lot of active market and economics research. Some of the outcomes of our project that we expect, one is to support the establishment of existing growers and new elderberry growers or clusters of growers. We also need to provide decision-making information to help landowners make that no or no-go decision on elderberry production so they can reduce their risk in getting involved in this. We also want to expand elderberry value-added production and support the growth of regional agritourism. These are a couple of things that we have produced in the Center for Agroforestry, growing and marketing elderberries in Missouri and we'll hand out a copy of this guide and it's also available on our Center website as well as more in-depth elderberry market research which you can find on our Center website. Some other outcomes. We're going to increase knowledge about the elderberry market and future trends, increase knowledge about consumer preferences for elderberry. Larry Godsey is going to talk about an elderberry financial decision support tool which is really something that you can take to the lenders to try to get a loan and to really plug in your own individual information to decide what elderberry costs and benefits will be for you. We hope to increase coordination among players in the industry and ultimately increase consumption of elderberry with resultant positive human health benefits and I wanted to mention that there is a National Institute of Health-funded study that includes elderberry ongoing at the University of Missouri and finally the bonus coming in 2013. We're hosting the first international symposium on elderberry both for researchers as well as landowners here in Columbia, Missouri at the Stony Creek Inn. All right so that's the quick overview and I want to now slide on to some more in-depth discussion with Pat Byers. Thank you Mike. Well as a horticulturist I recognize and those of you who are growing out there also recognize that one of the most important aspects for success on a farm is to select those cultivars that are adapted to your particular environment and early on as Andy and I worked with elderberry one of the things we realized is that there was a huge huge pool of elderberry germplasm that had not been explored. Basically we're talking about the elderberries that are native here to the Midwest. Up into the work that we began most of the cultivars that were available were developed in the in the ameritimes of Canada or in New York and the climate there the growing conditions there are very different than what they are here in the Midwest and the other thing that that that we recognize too is the the importance of testing and and as we went through these projects as we we work towards developing cultivars suited for the Midwest we tested these elderberries widely and and we learned from this research that elderberry is somewhat site specific that what does well on my farm in Green County may not do well in your farm in northern Missouri or or your farm in Illinois your farm in on the west coast so there is a need for wide testing of elderberry cultivars and that was part of our project but basically what i'd like to do is walk you quickly through the elderberry cultivar picture as it is today talk about our work with developing elderberry cultivars and then finish up with some thoughts and where we may be going in the future. So again the perfect elderberry cultivar we'd love to have an elderberry cultivar that is widely adaptable we'd love to have an elderberry cultivar that is self-fruitful we're interested in productivity we're also interested in the plant itself and how it grows we need cultivars that will fruit on new shoots because as you'll hear one of the projects we're investigating is efficient harvest of elderberries and then we'd love to have elderberries that have genetic resistance to insect and disease problems well the reality is we don't have any perfect elderberry cultivars we think that we're making progress but there's still huge room for development as far as as cultivar development goes. We're also of course interested not just in the plant but in the the flower and fruit because those are the marketable parts of the plant and so we're interested in all these things that you see here characteristics related to the flowers but also characteristics related to the the individual fruits and the fruit clusters. Now the oldest cultivars that are currently available are Adams one and Adams two and they're still probably among the most widely planted elderberry cultivars both were selected from wild elderberry plants in new york back in the 1920s and over the years there has been a blending of those two cultivars and there are some experts who don't consider them distinct anymore but at least originally they were distinct and you still see both of them offered in in the nursery trade. A cultivar called easy off was developed again from unknown parentage likely selected from the wild also in new york but to our knowledge that cultivar has been lost now you still see it mentioned in the literature and it's also mentioned as a parent for some of the cultivars to come but we've not been able to track that particular one down. York this is a cultivar also developed in new york it was the result of an organized breeding program the idea being to develop and improve cultivar through hybridization and it was across of Adams two and the one I mentioned earlier which is easy off has large clusters the berries are large. It's a little bit later than Adams one and Adams two and there's some obvious advantages to being able to spread out the harvest season on elderberry which too is one of the goals in our particular development program and it has large the plant itself is large and productive so we're getting a little bit closer to what we might consider an ideal elderberry and we feel that york has performed reasonably well here in Missouri but again there's still room for improvement. Then there was a whole series of cultivars developed in the Maritime so specifically in Nova Scotia and the first one that came out was Johns this was an old old cultivar that had been growing as a backyard plant for many many years and eventually was named and released by the Kentville station and then a group of cultivars were developed at Kentville these included Kent Nova Scotia and Victoria and you can see their characteristics up here and they do they do quite well in the northeastern U.S. and in the Maritimes but have not performed as well under our midwestern environmental conditions as we would like. So again the concerns that that Andy and I had as we begin to develop the elderberry development program in the the late 90s was for this industry or for an industry to develop and for it to progress and and for us to see improvement we needed to have cultivars that were adapted to growing here in the midwest. Those cultivars that were currently available come from a narrow genetic base they're not all that well suited for growing here and we knew this because we had trialed these cultivars for a number of years at a number of locations. We had some questions about the actual identity of some of these you know these cultivars have been available for many years and anyone who's grown elderberries know that they sucker profusely and plants that are close together in time will lose identity as the plants grow together so we were concerned about that. There seems to be a widespread issue with virus infection in many of these older cultivars and as I said before they just didn't do all that well in here in Missouri. So our solution was to to begin a program one of the projects in our program to develop better cultivars for the midwest and as Mike mentioned two of those have been named and released and those are Wildwood and Bob Gordon and I'd like to briefly describe those for you. Wildwood was released in 2010 this was a plant originally found in Oklahoma it was found near Ufala and it was found by Jack Millican who was married to John Brewer's mother so there's a connection there between Wildwood sellers and Wildwood elderberries I'm sure you figured out. We began testing it in 1998 and tested under several test names. Here's a picture of John and and and Marge Millican and again I have to really give them a an appreciation debt of gratitude to these these two folks because they've been huge supporters of our program. Wildwood is a large plant it's a tall shrub it breaks bud fairly early in the spring about the same time as Adams 2 blooms in June. One thing when we're thinking about these particular plants we're obviously interested in the fruit but we're also interested in the flowers because that's another potential market for elderberry and in the case of Wildwood the florets are easily removed and they can be dried as a product. We don't know specifically if it's self-fertil if it needs to be cross pollinated but in our trials it has been a prolific producer of fruit and it does set fruit quite well. There's an example of a flower cluster on a first year shoot on Wildwood and again that's a huge cluster that's my hand they're holding it. Harvest season is a little bit later than Adams 2 generally by about two to three weeks and also later than Bob Gordon the second one that we've developed so again our goal is to lengthen the season and we feel that we have with Wildwood again late July here in Missouri. It's interesting because it does rip and shoot so are a period of time although if it's managed and I'm sure we'll hear about this as a plant that's annually renewed the harvest season is condensed down to about three weeks. If you don't prune them you've got a longer harvest season. The simes present in an upright fashion and this is a bit of a disadvantage because upright simes tend to be more heavily bird predated but we haven't seen any major problems from that but just again something to be aware of. The clusters are loose fairly large clusters especially on unpruned plants you know a I'm sorry unpruned plants an 83 gram cluster is a big cluster of berries and it does sometimes produce secondary clusters so you get a second harvest or a later harvest off of these plants. And just a shot to show you what Wildwood looks like in in our evaluation trials. And there's an example of a cluster on a plant that had been pruned back. The berries are dark purple they ripen uniformly and they're resistant to shattering again which are things that we were interested in the individual berries are quite large. We did notice some yield variability again the effect that that elderberries seem to be site dependent and this was certainly the case with with our trials in Mount and Grove of Mount Vernon with this particular cultivar. And as far as juice characteristics it was quite well suited for winemaking and also for use as a jelly or something along those lines. Rated as slightly to moderately susceptible to leaf spots we did notice areafied mite injury which we'll hear more about too but it didn't seem to be significantly worse than Adams too. The second one is Bob Gordon and Bob Gordon was released in 2011 and it was originally found near Oceola, Missouri on the farm of Bob Gordon. And here's Bob and his wife Kay. It's not as large a shrub as Wildwood it's smaller in stature a little bit later bud break same bloom time again the florets are easy to remove and make a very nice dried product and again as is the case with Wildwood we have some questions about pollination. Similar harvest season to Adams too so it's definitely earlier than Wildwood mid-July in Missouri. Same harvest procedure as far as when the the clusters ripen and again about a four-week period of ripening if you don't prune them back. One thing that's unique about Bob Gordon is that the simes are held in a decumbent position and they're less attractive to birds at least in our experience so this this might be an advantage from the standpoint of bird predation. The simes are large compared to Adams too and again 126 gram sime is a pretty good sized sime and about 2.3 kilograms per bush in our trials and here's a picture of Bob Gordon in the field again notice how those simes are kind of hanging down that's the characteristic makes them less attractive to birds and there's a close-up of a of a sime of Bob Gordon again the berry quality is very nice dark in color ripen uniformly and they're resistant to shattering a little bit smaller berry than than some of the others we've tested and again yield variability noted between our test sites. There's what Bob Gordon looks like harvested in a lug and again good quality as far as the juice characteristics that would make it quite suitable for winemaking or for processing into jelly. Again it was ready to slightly susceptible to both mites and to leaf spot diseases and it seemed to be more resistant to these problems than Adams 2 and 1 study and then very similar to Adams 2 and a second study. As far as the future this work is ongoing we've just completed our most recent trial looking at elderberry selections and we feel we have some that that may be suitable for for release as improved cultivars but keep in mind it's a it's a long-term process to develop cultivars we want to be sure that they're adequately tested to make sure that they are indeed suited to our environment here so again stay tuned there will be more coming from that particular project. Here's our contact information if you'd like more information on the development of cultivars please contact us we'd be happy to speak with you. Okay I'm Andy Thomas with the University of Missouri based in Mount Vernon in southwest Missouri and Dr. Gold and Pat have kind of covered a lot of this so I'm going to just give a background that update on some of the research that's kind of been accomplished and underway so a little background I've always had kind of a personal interest in native undeveloped fruit and nut crops so this just I started my job in 1996 and Patrick and I went to a meeting in 1997 in Wichita where we met John Brewer it was a small fruit meeting and they served John's wine at the meeting and we tasted this wine and it was really good this is elderberry wine and we asked John where are you getting your elderberries for this wine and he said oh we just walk along the railroad track and we we pick fruit and Pat and I looked at each other and thought we can grow this this is a really you know maybe a great opportunity so that's kind of where our thinking began about that time the Center for Agroforestry began kind of they were very supportive of of developing elderberry as a crop Patrick and I began presenting some of this interest at conferences kind of like this asking folks like you do you have any elderberries that your grandmother has grown that we might you know collect and begin looking at and several of people did and I'll mention a little bit later we did we have a collection of about 60 varieties so we began getting a few grants which we'll talk a little bit about and then Terry Durham has already been mentioned several times as this thing developed Terry was showed a lot of interest early on in our program and of course several years later it's it's really blossomed so the initial research was mostly at Mount Vernon and Mountain Grove, Missouri I don't know if you all are from Missouri but Mount Vernon is in southwest Missouri Mountain Grove is in kind of South Central Missouri. Our first significant plantings were about 1999 and I mentioned these these selections that we we collected we ended up with about 60 of these including the varieties that Patrick mentioned from Canada and New York we began evaluating these and in about 2000 we planted our very significant pruning study and again I have the Agroforestry Center supported this financially it was just tremendous we didn't have much funding yet for this so very very grateful to that a couple years later 2003 our first cultivar trial was planted so the pruning study was a six or seven year study and it's since been published and it was kind of a groundbreaking study that showed that elderberry can be harvested by cutting it to the ground every year making it very simple to prune and harvesting very large clusters I think it kind of turned the tide on on for the way Terry grows elderberries so I'm not going to go into detail on these grants but we then starting about 2004 started getting some grants so that as the entrance grew in elderberry it was it was tremendous getting some grants small grants to start with and as you can kind of see they got a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger this this is the SAR grant that this conference I don't that is kind of supporting this conference here today and then in 2010 I worked closely with the group of biochemists at the University of Missouri and botanists at Missouri Botanical Garden as a team we obtained a tremendous grant from National Institutes of Health which I'll talk a little bit about in a few minutes and I still want to down here University of Missouri Agroforestry Center has continued to support us during all this so until the the big NIH grant we haven't had a lot of money but we've had enough money to kind of float this program and then last year we got some more grants for the for the symposium that Dr. Gold mentioned I'll talk a little bit more about that so again their interest is out there these are not huge grants but $60,000 is a lot of money that we can use to put on this symposium so I won't go into great detail here at all but a lot of studies have been completed some of these have been published we we published a paper on antioxidants and medicinal compounds in the non-fruit tissues that's the flowers the leaves and the stems and I'm working very hard on a paper right now on the antioxidants in the fruit hopefully this will be published next year I know there's a lot of interest in that we had we've completed two cultivar trials and the varieties that Patrick mentioned the Wildwood and Bob Gordon were published out of the results from those studies the pruning study I mentioned we've done a fair bit of juice analysis and some kind of preliminary DNA analysis just to kind of understand the genetic diversity in elderberry a lot more work to do in those fields and I put this slide in because meanwhile we're growing we're doing these projects we've never actually done a real research study in propagation but guess what we've learned how to propagate and grow these things we've learned a lot about pests and diseases we've gained a lot of experience and then meanwhile a lot of growers had started growing these things so the body of knowledge is really increasing it's all you know coming together and really benefiting this and the guide sheet did you all get this this handout this this looks maybe simple but this in my opinion was a monumental work to put this thing together and it's a very comprehensive it's about a what 12 pages a 12 page guide on growing and marketing elderberries in Missouri and everyone here helped so this is really I really am proud of this so everyone should get one of those it's on the website that I messed my slide up so that's the guide sheet I'm mentioning so and then other ongoing studies more studies on antioxidants and the nutrition of elderberry what's happening is is the wine in the jelly industry has kind of started this but what is happening now is the dietary supplement and nutraceutical interest is really overtaking that for example the leaf elemental profile we need as horticulturists we need to be able to sample a leaf in July and determine does this thing is it is it lacking in phosphorus or potassium or nitrogen this is a very understudied crop underdeveloped so there's a lot of real basic things to learn such as the basic soil fertility we we have started now a very simple nitrogen fertility study it can't get any simpler than that but it's so important for farmers if you're not putting enough nitrogen on you're not getting your maximum yield if you're putting too much on you're wasting money and harming the environment so we really need to to know these very basic things Patrick mentioned the cultivar screening also the winemaking I'm I'm mentioning here the University of Missouri has what's now called the grape and wine institute and they're they're not real hot on elderberries they're very much a grape wine group but guess what they're making elderberry wine now they went to the workshop that Dr. Gold mentioned and I'm bringing them 80 kilograms of fruit in two weeks to make elderberry wine so it's it's it's it's happening okay briefly I'm about done the National Institutes of Health funded this center it's called the it's University of Missouri Center for Botanical Interaction Studies I mentioned it also includes Missouri Botanical Garden and it's a five-year grant 7.7 million dollars elderberry is one of five species there's medicinal species that are being studied and most of the experiments involve mice and it's a it's a attempt to really get to the bottom looking at cancer stroke and infectious diseases using these mice what is elderberry capable of doing and it's still we're really in the heart of this grant there there's not a lot of results yet probably the most interesting results so far is on stroke and I don't understand what all they're doing but there's very positive results from mice that have been either treated with elderberry before a stroke or after a stroke so I'm not a biochemist I can't understand that but it's very positive results so stay tuned on the rest of these hopefully in the next year or two there'll be a lot more of this results coming out Dr. Gold mentioned the international elderberry symposium which again it's next summer here in Colombia it's being organized under the auspices of this international society for horticultural science and there will be it's kind of a two-part symposium the first three days and it's June 9th to 14th the first three days or a scientific symposium we have researchers from Denmark Germany Israel Portugal United Kingdom Egypt Canada I'm forgetting some of course United States coming so we're really trying to bring these people together all from all over the world who are studying elderberry farmers are invited to this but then also there will be a kind of overlapping and then after it two days of a farmer's forum so there'll be a lot more information about all that and there's a web mic show the website so I'm done I just wanted to show these partners I'm not going to go go through them lots of people involved in the development of elderberry here in Missouri and I have a pretty picture to finish so thank you taking wild elderberries for about 10 years one of the challenges is just the huge variability and I'll go to a bush and it'll have elderblow and ripe berries on the same bush at the same time and the weather seems to this year there was almost nothing as far as a wild elderberry crop are you breeding for more stability in the harvest and uh well did you hear the question I mean Patrick may have addressed this but unevening ripening in the cluster is a very deleterious characteristic we don't want that we want all of the berries to ripen in the cluster at the same time so you can just pick them all at once so the answer is yes I mean that's a very very important characteristic of of selecting varieties and this the drought this year was just horrific on an elderberries love water so this was a really difficult year for for even irrigated crops so okay I'm Ina Chernoushka I work with a center for agroforestry I apologize for my accent I hope you can understand me uh so we are shifting now to the market studies uh when we started to work on elderberry at the center for agroforestry product cultivar and production research was underway you just heard about that from Pat and Andy they were working on elderberry but there was not much information out there about the market and the market potential and what consumers want to to see in elderberry products what what do they prefer so we applied to this sergrant and through this sergrant we got funding to conduct uh uh research on the market and it's the first one uh in the US for sure so we designed a study uh to that was like a two-step study we sent a nationwide survey to 159 people that we identified through internet search because it was no information who is growing what is growing so through internet search we put together a database of people that were involved in anything elderberry and we received 74 responses and we followed up with in-depth interviews to get more detailed information about the market about these people what they grow and uh how how are they involved in the in the elderberry industry so when we designed this study we tried to find out who is out there what are they doing related to elderberry what are they buying what are they selling uh how do they get along along along to each other if they compete if they cooperate and uh how difficult it was for them to establish an elderberry business and what were the opportunities or challenges so oh yes so what we found out from the survey from the survey that we distributed nationwide was that elderberry's new industry is very new small we kind of knew about that because we didn't know of too many people that were involved in the elderberry industry and most of the respondents were part-timers or hobbyists so they only added a part something elderberry to their business like a winery that was uh doing grape wine but also fruit wine and maybe elderberry wine or nurseries that were growing many plants but elderberry one of them some elderberry growers and uh like that but besides that there were there are some entrepreneurs some big some people that actually invested in the elderberry business and they were 100 elderberry and uh they have a very hard job is uh to to grow the the industry and to educate the consumer and to focus not only on their slides on their business but to focus on the whole industry and help it grow some of the results because i don't have too much time i will just go very quickly through some of the results that especially the interview helped us better understand what motivated people to to start an elderberry business and some mentioned that the increased increased interest in the new locally produced foods was one of the drivers that made them start elderberry and that elderberry is a native plant that can be grown sustainable and in sustainable agriculture agricultural systems the ones that were more involved in the business they really want to grow the business to develop new elderberry products and to grow the industry the hobbyists were more like or i try to experiment and see how it's going but those that are really involved really want to to do something um we try to identify some challenges finances is one of them you need some capital to start an elderberry business uh not yes not a lot but you need uh you need some and one of the challenges was how to obtain credit because elderberry is not so known and banks don't know about elderberry and they don't are reluctant to provide funds supply is not enough supply if you want to plant now acres of elderberry you cannot buy those plants and especially the cultivars that pat mentioned if you want to to pick from the wild uh they are inexperienced speakers some of them and it's not enough anyway lack of information on production but we are working on that we now have the guide which provides information on that side uh very labor intensive if you want to to do value edit edit there is no processing plant challenges regarding sales and marketing and being so small it it's hard to get into the distribution distribution system some distributors require uh uh larger volume and especially in the wine industry people mentioned all kinds of regulations that make it difficult for them so we mentioned some um some of the problems with on the supply side uh you can do some product you can make some products out of concentrate but concentrate you need to import from Europe and it's harder to harder and harder to obtain and it becomes more expensive there are all kinds of products that are being sold from plants to wine to syrup many many that came up in our surveys that our respondents produce and the good sign is that everybody said that demand is increasing for elderberry products I put here some quote demand more than I can supply that's a good problem to have and demand is increasing and chefs are interested in in this area uh we also wanted to see if okay I want to buy elderberry but can I buy something else it's uh if I want to promote elderberry everybody's going to to go to to buy elderberry or there are other products that can be substituted for elderberry and of course they are but however elderberry has very unique properties the health benefits the flavor taste history tradition everybody remembers uh grandmas elderberry jelly or elderberry pie and uh grandpa's elderberry wine and we also wanted to see if there is if they feel that there is competition and most of them said no uh demand is high so we we have enough uh it's not not problem for for growers for winemakers they cooperate they create the festivals together value-added producers create their own niche markets and differentiate their product from from another from the other ones there is some competition for dietary supplement producers because of Europe and products from Europe and some leading brands that got some recognition but they still they don't see don't see it as a threat so this is what I had we have the whole report on the website looks like that well I'm uh I'm the cleanup batter for this group I hope you've enjoyed the presentations about elderberry and uh I'm going to talk a little bit about economics um there's been a lot of talk about cultivars and markets and things like that but I'm the guy that they usually come up and go well can I make any money doing this and I'm going to tell you the the standard economics answer is it depends it really depends a lot of people come up and say how much money can you make growing elderberry well it really depends on a lot of things and and because it depends on so many things I've made a career out of developing models that add all the different uh scenarios into it and what I'm showing you here is an excel spreadsheet based decision support model financial model for elderberry that's based on uh based very heavily on Terry Durham's elderberry plantation or his operation and how he would recommend that we do this it has costs and everything in it I usually design these things um so that a landowner really doesn't have to know much about how to do it we give them we give them the exit or the guide sheet and this model is based a lot on the guide sheet so this model is available free to anybody that wants it it's at our website center for agriforestry.org you it's like I said it's an excel base so you can download it onto your computer open it up run your numbers but I'm just going to quickly go over this so you can see what basic assumptions are in this model I developed the model into three main parts establishment costs management costs harvesting and marketing costs and then down here in the little green box at the bottom this is where all the good numbers come back you know the positive returns and all that kind of stuff I also understand that some people don't understand finance but they do know that if I invest a dollar today how long will it take me to get that dollar back that's really what they want to know so I might be talking net present value and I might be talking internal rate of return I might talk modified internal rate of return and some of you may know what I'm talking about but really what really makes sense to the landowner is if I put a dollar in today how long will I get that before I get that dollar back and on top of that how many dollars will I make on this that's really what they're interested in so that's what this model presents and basically the the the design of this model is it's all based on drop downs and defaults if you don't know what I mean by that I'll just show you every one of these white blanks up here in this model in the yellow area of this model already has defaults in there so you don't have to know how to do site prep we give you four options for site prep that are the common options like disking up a field or disking up a field and putting round up on it to kill the weeds you know getting the site established that's all in there in fact all you got to do is select the option that you want and then the cost will automatically go into the model for that option you don't have to know what it cost you because I've already put that in there for you now this model has all these options for you another option that we have is spacing a lot of people go what's what's the optimum spacing for elderberry well it depends it depends on all your other assumptions but I'll tell you what in this model you can plug in a couple of different spacing options and see which one returns the best return that you want in this case I've got it we've got it set up as a 4 foot by 12 foot spacing 4 foot between the plants and 12 foot between the rows or 2 foot by 12 foot that's why we've got it set up I think terry recommends a 4 by 12 is that right terry for plants that's what he recommends is a 4 by 12 so you can play with this however you want we also have irrigation or non-irrigation we have organic or not organic in terms of how you establish this setup we even have planting cost are you going to plant it by machine are you going to do it by hand all those are included in the analysis of this model we even have fertilization the recommended fertilization rates and the cost to doing that you don't need to know what it costs to apply the fertilizer we've put it in there for you so all you have to do is select the management technique that you think you're going to use and it'll kick out the number in terms of return for example right now we have a site prep it's herbicide with disking I think we got a 4 by 12 spacing yeah 4 by 12 spacing we're mulching with plastic mulch and we're putting irrigation tape down with the mulch and I believe again that's I'll look at terry Durham I think those guys will do that or will show you how to do that the mulch and tape irrigation tape and they we also have planting stock is going to be cuttings and these are selected varieties hand planting fertilization and permanent grass cover between the rows that's all set up in your establishment okay management options most of the time we talk about management options and what are we going to do around the trees while we're going to compost a pre-made compost you can also change that to I think we've got wood chips every one of these options has another button down there called user defined if you if you're doing something that we hadn't thought about you can modify this model very easily by putting in a cost that you know of and put it into the model and it'll calculate right into the model just like everything else and these models are unique because they have production growth and yield included with the finances and what I do for growth and yield is I estimate what I consider to be a yield for elderberry over time I kind of draw a timeline out and say okay in year two they're going to produce this much and year three this much and I do that for I think this model goes out to 25 years and then what I do is I I create a I plot a trend line on that which gives me an equation I plug that equation in but before you think that I'm being very optimistic on these models I also plant plug in a random number generator to cover the the chances that maybe one year you have a bad yield or one year you have drought and that's all programmed into the model so all the risk is also programmed into the model but if you look at all these things going up to harvesting and marketing decisions right now we have it set for hand harvest all those costs are included we know how much you can harvest per acre you know in an hour and then we have the an expected rate of return right now I've got it set for the basic rate of inflation three percent so you're at least earning the rate of inflation on this particular scenario and then I have an expected price per pound plugged in and I'm using a dollar per pound which I I think is a little bit low on what what the current market is but let's let's just pretend it's a dollar a pound um what it says in this model is that if you put in all these assumptions with this model your net present value or your return on this you're going to initially plant 907 elderberry plants on an acre you're gonna your revenues your present value of your revenues is 81 thousand dollars per acre a present value of your cost is 26 thousand dollars per acre the net present value of this scenario is 54 thousand dollars per acre your rate of return or actually your investment return rate is 18 percent see if the stock market can beat that I don't think it can right now and the internal rate of return is pretty high we're saying 65 but I that's pretty high and then more importantly when you invest in this you'll have your dollars paid off in three years your initial investment will be paid off in three years with this particular system that's your initial investment to establish this will be paid off in three years and from then on it's all profit to you does that make sense to you okay and so we also do something so we can compare this annually with annual row crops we call it an annual equivalent value if we were to invest in this get the same net present value equally over a certain number of years that annual equivalent value for this was $1967 we kind of try to compare that to what is a annual acre of corn provided to you or what is an acre of soybeans give you annually and as you can see that's probably three times what an acre of corn would would pay you so this model is available online if you have any questions with this model or if you don't think it fits your scenario you're welcome to call me I think my number is on the handout or my my email is on the handout you can call me we can modify these very quickly it's designed to be modified for everybody's scenario very quickly and we can sit down and go through your actual system and and see what the what your expectations should be now I want to emphasize this is not a promised dollar amount I can't I can't go to the bank and say this is what the the guy at the small farm trade show told me I was going to make on this this is an estimate based on a certain number of assumptions which are all listed right here on this front page if you have any questions we can go through it I know what you're talking about the question is I have different tabs across the bottom for most people who just want to get in here and get a quick look the management input tab is the main the main interface with this if uh if you want to look at the cost budget in other words if you want to go to the bank and to borrow money the bank was going to require you to do a business plan and here is your enterprise budget for your business plan it's all there you just print it out take it to the bank if you want to do uh if you want to modify any of the stuff that maybe you maybe you do site prep different than anything I've considered you can go in here under user defined put in some other cost in the yellow that's based on your site prep situation and that number will automatically go into the model as your site prep cost you can do that with any of the costs that I have in there if something's different than what I have is a default you can modify it any way you want as long as it makes sense now with any kind of model it's uh what we call garbage in garbage out so if your assumptions are incorrect the model is going to be incorrect but these assumptions that are currently in the model are based on the most current practice and most current costs and most current production yields so I consider it to be fairly accurate because of the bird issue has there been any work done with covering the area I mean it had to be somewhat contained but yes the question was uh you know the issues with birds have you we done anything with covering yes we have looked at netting plantings and anytime you net a planting it adds a an extra layer to management it is an effective way to protect the crop but you have to weigh the cost of netting and the cost of a labor to put it up take it down against the the the value of using that practice and at least in research plots we had to do it because we were interested in collecting meaningful data in a commercial field I'm not sure that the numbers are there to make it justifiable now with some crops like blueberries or or wine grapes yes we commonly net those crops with elderberries you know it is a practice that's available to protect the crop this summer we we netted some of our elderberries and I bought bird netting it was about three hundred dollars for a thousand feet and that would cover the whole row and it took us quite a while to figure out how to get it on there we ended up using coke bottles to cover steel posts and string and twine and it was we got it done and it certainly protected but of course then when you harvest you had to get the thing off and now I've got this giant netting I have to store somewhere so it's pat said it has its plus and minuses but we we did do it we'll keep going until you cut us off by the way I find this fascinating how often do you update these cost figures in our dude at this website is there similar models for different crops I just want to say I just got that this is the last question so okay go ahead okay the question is how often do I update this this model we just came out with a year or two ago it hasn't been updated but it's the cost haven't changed that much I want to point out that this is returns to labor to to management and land as well that's what these returns are I do have another model for a chestnut a Chinese chestnut I have a model for black walnut for nut production I have a model for pine for pine straw loblolly pine I have one for jatropha if anybody wants to raise jatropha for oil production but that that was for Mexico but these models most of these models except for the chestnut model these are online at our website you can go to our website and pull these up and they're free and if you have a if you want to play with them if you find something that you have confusion with just give me a call about them because they're kind of a hobby for me too well thank you all for for coming you should from the information passed out have all of our contact information and we're happy to speak with you down the road so thank you very much