 
Deep in the Maryland woods, under thick tree cover and
hidden in plain sight amid the forest undergrowth, Larry
Harding grows his prized crop. Harding’s strain is
well-known for its special potency and, come harvest time,
he parcels it out and offloads it to connoisseurs overseas
for top dollar. Poachers are a constant threat, and Harding
says he patrols with his 12-gauge. Back in 1993, the Drug
Enforcement Administration raided his compound, overturning
barrels and interrogating Harding about money laundering.
Harding lawyered up, won a settlement, and went back to
harvesting. Depending on the weather and the market, he
makes between $250,000 and $1 million a year. It’s not what
you’re thinking. Harding grows ginseng.
At a time when the Chinese are getting rich exporting to
Americans, Harding is a counter-trender: an American getting
rich exporting to the Chinese. In the world’s most populous
country, ginseng (from the Chinese ren-shen, meaning
“man root,” due to its multi-limbed, manlike shape) is like
coffee, Viagra, and Prozac all rolled into one, with a
dollop of quasi-religious mysticism on top. People take it
for everything from depression to arthritis to impotence,
and they’re willing to pay a premium for it. A single
thousand-year-old root was recently auctioned off in China
for more than a quarter-million dollars, and in 2005, two
Korean businessmen bought a set of six roots for $120,000,
purportedly to heal their mother’s bad knees.
As China becomes more affluent, an emerging middle class is
claiming a ginseng supply once divvied up among the elite.
The increasing demand bumps the value; it’s now common to
sell ginseng for up to $1,000 per pound. While China has
about four times as many citizens as the United States, it
has about half the arable land, and a large portion of that
is farmed by hand, so meeting the demand needs all the
help—i.e., imports—it can get. Right now, the United States
exports a little more than $50 million a year in ginseng,
but as word spreads and prices skyrocket, expect that to
balloon.
The Harding farm is in Garrett County, about as far west
into Maryland as you can go before it turns to West
Virginia, a few miles past the 450-foot-long ark being
rebuilt by the United Church of Christ and just north of
Negro Mountain. It’s one of the largest ginseng farms of its
kind in the United States, according to Harding, though
corroboration on this point is hard to come by.
Harding, 50, has been growing ginseng for almost 40 years
now, from seed originally gathered in the wild by Kenneth
Harding, his father. Kenneth Harding was an enthusiastic
hunter of wild ginseng, as are a lot of the old-timers
throughout Appalachia. Called ‘sang’ or ‘seng’ in backwoods
vernacular, it’s a root that Americans have been collecting
ever since a Jesuit monk recognized a patch of it next to
his house in the 1700s. (Native Americans had used it for
centuries before that, for everything from apoplexy to
headaches.) Daniel Boone and John Jacob Astor made fortunes
off it, George Washington mentioned it in his diaries, and
many historians contend that the ginseng trade funded the
American Revolution. Today there is still a hardcore group
of wild ginseng hunters, most of them old men who’ve been
doing it for decades, as much for the thrill as the money.
Which isn’t insignificant—one veteran hunter, Roger Welch of
Kitzmiller, Md., found a freakishly large 1-pound root last
year worth thousands of dollars. “One Chinese buyer called
me up after he read a news story about the root and said,
‘Name your price,’” says Welch. “But I haven’t sold it yet.
I may donate it to the Smithsonian.” Welch, who is retired,
walks the woods a couple days a week and brings in between
10 and 15 pounds a year. At the current $1,000 a pound, you
do the math. It’s not bad for a part-time hobby. His best
year ever, he got 17 pounds.
The Harding farm is a testament to agricultural adaptation.
Seventy acres of rocky land is covered with thick timber, a
series of sloping planes divided by creeks and washouts.
Traditional row-by-row, combine-driven farming would be
impossible here. Even if you clear-cut the forest and
cleaned out all the rocks, the slopes would just wash away
in the first hard rain. But ginseng can grow only in the
shade, generally on or near a slope, and it thrives in the
presence of certain trees and weeds. And since the root
absorbs nutrients and toxins alike from the surrounding
soil, overseas buyers strongly discourage the use of
pesticides. In many ways, ginseng is a farmer’s dream come
true: It grows on otherwise unusable land, fetches
exorbitant prices, and requires little or no maintenance.
“What I do is, I prepare the beds by clearing away any
fallen trees and rocks, and then in the spring I plant the
seeds or rootlets,” says Harding. “Then I straw them over.
Once they come up, all that’s left is basically to monitor
them and spray them every two weeks with fungicide.”
Even such modest intervention, however, degrades ginseng
from its truest, purest form. The most valuable grade is
“wild” ginseng. Known by its gnarled, striated appearance,
and often decades old, it’s considered the most potent and
is most coveted by buyers. Thirty-year-old wild root brings
in several thousand dollars a pound. Also keeping the price
way up is the fact that ginseng is notoriously hard to find
in its native habitat, even for seasoned hunters. Each wild
root represents hours and hours of hiking up and down
heavily forested, bear-infested mountains squinting into the
underbrush. Not the easiest way to make a living, though it
probably beats working in marketing.
The lowest grade is cultivated ginseng. This is grown in
rows in a field, under special perforated tarps that
reproduce the effect of hardwood canopy. Harvested after
only three years, these roots are swollen from fertilizer,
and their smooth, light skin belies their untraumatized
upbringing; it’s sort of like the root equivalent of
private-school students. Most ginseng buyers believe that a
difficult life, as exemplified by a twisted, scarred root,
makes ginseng more potent, and these cultivated roots fetch
only a few hundred dollars a pound. On the other hand, they
take only three years to grow, can be mass-produced, and, at
$350 a pound, a thousand pounds an acre, is still more
profitable than anything this side of marijuana or poppies.
In between the real stuff and the tarpaulined ginseng is
“wild-simulated,” which is what Harding grows. This is
ginseng grown under tree canopy and amid native undergrowth,
in a cultivated-slash-uncultivated setting. These roots,
harvested after five to 10 years, fetch about half the price
of a wild root—around $500 per pound—though in many cases
you can’t tell them apart. (Harding never mixes roots,
though he says the practice is common among poachers.)
Harding’s had his wild-simulated roots tested for potency
and says they compare quite favorably to wild roots.
If there’s a catch, it comes on the back end. The downside
to planting on steep timberland is that you have to harvest
by hand. While Harding doesn’t have to put down huge outlays
on equipment, he does have to hire six to eight men every
year to help bring in the crop. And it’s hard work. Digging
by hand, sometimes literally, often in ankle-deep mud,
sifting through upturned earth for the valuable root, braced
against a tree so as not to tumble downhill—this is
agriculture as it was practiced pre-Industrial Revolution.
“[The harvest] is extremely labor-intensive,” says Harding.
“I’m out there literally on my hands and knees from about
August until it snows over.” Once winter puts an end to the
harvest, Harding dries his roots in a specially constructed
high-circulation drying room, packs them into hundred-pound
barrels, and ships them off to Thurgood Marshall
Baltimore-Washington International Airport, at which point
his product is passed along to buyers all over the world.
Some of it goes directly overseas to China or Korea, and
some goes to American dealers who sell it off to their own
contacts. At the latest market rates, each barrel goes for
about $50,000. “I’m doing very well,” says Harding.
I came across the Harding ginseng farm online when I was
doing ginseng research for personal reasons. A few years ago
I’d hit a long stretch of sickliness. In the space of less
than a year, I had bronchitis, sinusitis, pharyngitis, mild
pneumonia, several cavities (one of the first signs of
immune deficiency), and several severe colds. My immune
system seemed to be compromised, but I couldn’t figure out
why.
I remembered my mother—who’s from Korea—taking ginseng for
various ailments when I was growing up, so I decided it was
worth a shot. I went to the YES! Organic Market, bought a
bottle of ginseng capsules, and started taking two a day.
That was three years ago, and aside from two bouts of the
flu, I’ve been completely healthy ever since. In my mind,
the before and after is too dramatic to be attributed to
anything but ginseng.
But while I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles that ginseng does
indeed work, there’s always a scientist lurking in the wings
with a clinical refutation. The medical establishment is
decidedly lukewarm about the effects of ginseng. While one
trial indicates that ginseng helps fight cancer, another
indicates it actually increases mortality. One experiment
finds that ginseng increases stamina in long-distance
runners, another finds it does nothing for elderly couch
potatoes. A major university releases a report stating that
a series of experiments found no evidence of ginseng’s
reputed healing properties, but in the fine print it says
that due to the high price of ginseng, the experiment
actually used an entirely different, cheaper root. The
anecdotal evidence is dramatic if inconclusive; hens that
receive ginseng lay more eggs than their un-ginsenged
counterparts, rats ejaculate like fire hoses after taking
ginseng, a 70-year-old woman’s breasts became “swollen and
tender” after taking ginseng. She stopped, and her breasts
returned to normal old-lady breasts. She started taking
ginseng again, and they swelled up again. In one study of
men with low sperm count, ginseng increased their little
swimmers by 30 percent. Monkeys given ginseng pellets
exhibited “increased vocalization…hyperactivity, as well as
weight loss.” Irradiated rats that received ginseng lived
three times as long.
Deirdre Orceyre, a naturopathic physician based in Falls
Church, figures among the believers. “Ginseng is a chi
product,” she says. “It boosts energy, the immune system,
and white blood cell count. It can also speed healing. It’s
an adrenal adaptogen that boosts cortisol production. It’s a
lot like caffeine, but it stimulates different
neurotransmitters. Ginseng is very subtle.”
An adaptogen is a substance that boosts the body’s response
to stress, enabling one to, for example, run farther or
faster. Cortisol is a hormone released when you’re under
stress to augment your immediate reactions, but sustained
exposure—as in the chronically stressed-out—has been
suspected of causing brain damage, cancer, and, worst of
all, weight gain!
Chi,
in traditional Asian medicine, is the energy that sustains
life. Of course, one of the most common motivations for
taking ginseng is to increase the type of energy that
creates life. Over dinner one night I asked my girlfriend to
think back to when we first started dating. I began taking
ginseng about a month into our relationship. Does she
remember any change in the firmness of my erections around
then?
“I refuse to answer that question,” she says. “So what
you’re saying is that my erections were incredibly firm and
robust right from Day 1?” She stares at me blankly for a
moment, shakes her head, and then goes back to her meal.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” I say.
Larry Harding, for his part, has no doubt whatsoever that
this effect is real. “All my kids were born exactly nine
months after the ginseng harvest,” he says. “That isn’t
coincidence. The guy who works for me on the harvest, his
last son was the same—nine months later. Believe me; it’ll
make you into a real big man. A bigger man!” I seem to
remember some positive effects in that direction, but then
again there are few things on earth more susceptible to the
power of suggestion than an erection. Harding is also a
believer (though obviously not unbiased) in the more
generalized benefits of ginseng. Some ginseng growers insist
that taking the stuff would be like “eating money.” Harding,
on the other hand, is a steady consumer of his own crop.
When he finds an especially nice-looking root, he soaks it
in a large jar of moonshine, shaking it vigorously every day
for a month to make a potent tincture. He then adds a
syringeful of the solution to his coffee each morning. “It
definitely gives me a little boost,” he says. “If I don’t
have it once a day, I feel kind of slow.”
Each ring on a ginseng root indicates a year of growth;
these specimens are about 30 years old. (Photograph by
Darrow Montgomery)
The Harding farm is located off Highway 74, through the town
of Friendsville (population 550), and down an unmarked
turnoff. An access road meanders between Harding’s very
large, very loud dogs and his very large, very nice house
before descending into the ginseng plots, where it forks and
reforks into a series of bewildering switchbacks and craggy,
axle-snapping ruts. This stops some, but not all, thievery.
In recent years, as the Harding farm became more successful
and ginseng prices shot up, poaching became more and more of
a problem. Harding once caught an acquaintance in his
mid-80s making off with an apronful of his prized seed, and
regularly comes across holes in the ground where roots used
to be. Harding has had to become more vigilant in recent
years to protect his livelihood. And when he comes across
thieves?
“Shoot ’em and bury ’em,” he says, most likely joking. “The
law favors poachers anyway. Another grower around here came
home one day to find people digging up his prize patch. He
got out his shotgun and held them there while he called 911.
What did the cops do when they got there? They handcuffed
the grower, for holding the poachers there at gunpoint, some
nonsense about kidnapping.”
Harding also has problems with deer eating his crop, though
not as much as other farmers. Where most farmers simply kill
any deer that come around, Harding befriends them. He shows
me a photograph of him kneeling next to a baby fawn, his arm
around its neck, and says that the local deer come into his
house to play with his kids and even sleep on his sofa
sometimes. He’s also fashioned a vaguely Pavlovian way to
keep them from eating his cash crop. Once a deer becomes
comfortable around him, Harding will present it with a
handful of ginseng berries and a handful of carrots. As the
deer eats the carrots, Harding pets it and speaks in
soothing tones.
“Then I’ll slowly show it the ginseng,” he says, chuckling.
“It smells it, and then right when it goes to eat it, POW! I
smack it upside the head! Do this a couple times, and pretty
soon it won’t come within 10 feet of a ginseng plant without
getting all jittery.”
Each spring when deer hunting season rolls around, Harding
outfits all his favorite deer with bells and fluorescent
orange vests, in hopes of saving them from local hunters.
None have survived yet.
Crop protection takes on added urgency if you consider that
it takes years, decades even, for your efforts to pay off.
Harding never harvests his crop before the five-year mark,
and often waits eight or 10 years. Once you get going, you
can stagger your plots so that in any given year you’re
taking roots out of the ground, but those first five years
of waiting scare away many a prospective ginseng baron.
Also, ginseng sucks so many nutrients out of the ground that
after a harvest, the soil is often left sterile, incapable
of sustaining plant life. Harding learned this the hard way.
After his first record-breaking harvest, he sunk a huge
portion of his profits into immediately replanting his
plots, only to find that nothing came up. “That was rough,”
he says. He’s since found that the soil replenishes itself
after about 10 years, and he rotates accordingly.
The Cherokee had a ginseng-hunting tradition where they’d
leave the first three plants they found, and only harvest
the fourth one. While the motives behind this tradition have
been lost (darn genocide!), one of its main effects was to
maintain a healthy ginseng population. Unfortunately,
American ginseng hunters have no such tradition. Nor did the
Chinese, which is another reason they buy so much of
ours—theirs is mostly gone due to voracious harvesting.
Years of rising prices and rampant overharvesting have
decimated the wild ginseng population. Many states have
cracked down on ginseng poaching, after years of essentially
no enforcement at all, and others have risen the harvesting
age from five to 10 years. Still, as long as there’s a root
sitting in the ground that people will pay thousands of
dollars for, people are going to dig it up, legally or
illegally, whether from their neighbor’s backyard or a
national park.
Here I speak from experience. As someone who’s too
antisocial to hold down a real job and whose pants are too
tight to be a credible drug dealer, the idea of a
thousand-dollar root somewhere out there proved
irresistible. After returning from Harding’s farm, I was
determined to make my fortune in ginseng. Since I don’t have
a car, my ginseng-hunting options are limited. However, a
little Googling led me to a U.S. Geological Service project
documenting all the plant species in Rock Creek Park and
wouldn’t you know it—ginseng was on the list.
Just to clarify what exactly I was getting into, I thought
I’d call the Rock Creek Park ranger’s office and ask a few
questions. “Would it be illegal to dig up a plant and take
it out of the park?” I asked the receptionist who answered
the phone. She made a sound like a spit-take. “I’d say it
would probably be very illegal. Is it a common plant?”
“It’s more of a rare and endangered plant,” I said. “It’s
also valuable.” Silence. “Let me transfer you to our rare
plants person.”
The rare plants person was not in, and I got his voice mail.
I decided to take this as a sign that I should summon up
some good ol’ American can-do spirit and just get out there
and poach! I went into the woods on a footpath and before
long I was in the forest. The sloping ground and thick tree
cover looked promising. The first thing I remembered about
ginseng hunting is that it’s almost always found on the
cooler, east-facing slopes. I didn’t have a compass on me,
though. What else? Ginseng grows around hickory trees, and
near a plant called bloodroot. I don’t know what a hickory
tree looks like, and God knows what a “bloodroot” looks
like. Reddish, I’m guessing.
My enthusiasm for poaching was lessening by the minute, but
I remembered one of the ginseng hunters saying that ginseng
is always found in the nastiest, thorniest, thickest areas.
With visions of top-shelf liquor dancing in my head, I
plunged into a nearby thicket and began descending a tangled
slope. I was seeing plenty of plants, but they all looked
exactly the same. In the meantime I was getting whipped in
the face repeatedly with branches while a swarm of
mosquitoes injected every square inch of my exposed flesh
with, I assume, West Nile virus. Also, the forest was darker
than you’d think, and since I was wearing sunglasses (I’m
one of those assholes who wear sunglasses all the time); I
had to waddle forward in this kind of stooped-over posture
to make out anything at all. Even then, I couldn’t see much.
I could’ve been standing on Chandra Levy’s corpse for all I
knew. Man, this poaching was harder than I thought. Wasn’t
there a baby seal I could club or something?
After about an hour of this futility my back hurt, I was
covered in sweat, and I decided to quit. I’ve always said
that you can’t knock something until you’ve tried it, and I
can now say that being a ginseng poacher sucks.
Harding’s entrepreneurial spirit, however, thrives. He is
now trying to sell a juice made from the ginseng berry, a
red fruit that appears on the plant in late summer and has
traditionally been used for seed, if at all. The small body
of research concerning the ginseng berry has found that it
contains many of the active ingredients found in the root
and that it may be an effective treatment for diabetes and
weight loss. Harding says he has several loyal customers who
swear by it.
“One woman who buys it says she doesn’t even need to take
insulin no more,” Harding says. “And there’s my best
customer—he started taking it and lost 60 pounds without any
other lifestyle changes. When he got down to his target
weight he stopped taking it and right away gained back the
60 pounds. Then he started taking it again and lost the
weight again. Now he takes it religiously. If he travels, I
have to overnight it to his hotel wherever he is.”
This client, who Harding says is some kind of big-time
businessman, saw the billion-dollar potential of a
mass-marketed ginseng berry weight-loss supplement and,
through a doctor friend in Baltimore, set up a 60-subject
double-blind scientific trial to verify his claims. But at
the last minute, Harding balked at supplying the juice. “I
don’t take any partners,” Harding says. “I’d rather make
nothing than get ripped off.”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
SUNDAY
ONE OF AMERICA’S GREAT NEWSPAPERS
ROOT
SELLERS
Ginseng, a shy Western Pennsylvania plant, is revered around
the world -- and grown locally
Sunday, November 07, 2010
By Ben Moyer, Special to the Post-Gazette
  
The root of American ginseng
is prized for its
legendary medicinal and
aphrodisiacal powers.
Larry Harding embodies age-old claims about his product and
his passion. He moves through the woods with lithe
self-assurance. His grin comes easy; his speech is energetic
and intense.
"I've used ginseng almost every day since I was a kid," said
the fit 53-year-old. "We just got finished hunting bears the
whole season. The younger guys were amazed at how I get
around this rugged country better than they do."
Harding's rugged bear haunts are the steep hollows above the
Youghiogheny River in Maryland's western panhandle -- the
same forested slopes where he learned to dig ginseng nearly
a half-century ago. Those forays led to his being the
second-generation proprietor of Harding's Ginseng Farm (www.hardingsginsengfarm.com),
perched on a northwest-facing ridge crest above
Friendsville, Md. Harding still digs and deals in wild
ginseng, but his farm is the largest grower of "wild
simulated" ginseng in the Appalachian region.
American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius), especially the root,
is prized for its vaunted medicinal and aphrodisiacal
powers. Its Latin genus name "Panax" shares the same
word-root as "panacea," a remedy for all ills -- a cure-all.
Native Americans used it. Chinese, Koreans and other Asians
coveted an Asian variety (Panax ginseng), whose wild stocks
became depleted after about 5,000 years of harvest.
When 18th-century settlers penetrated American forests and
found a plant similar to the one so esteemed in Asia, they
developed an export market second in value only to fur. That
market survives today, though beset with a scarce wild
resource, overdue harvest regulation and inferior root grown
fast under artificial conditions. This fall -- the annual
"selling season" -- diggers can expect to pocket about $630
per pound of dried wild root.
Harding says that, today, wild ginseng roots are generally
about 10 to 30 years old when dug from the mountains. Asian
buyers know and pay more for old, wild roots, distinctive in
their wizened, gnarly appearance and the "age tassel" that
displays the plant's age through scars left behind by each
season's stalk.
"The old-timers," Harding said, "found roots 50 and 60 years
old."
Harding's late father, Ken Harding, started growing ginseng
in the Maryland Mountain’s more than 30 years ago in a way
that mimicked the plant's habits in the wild. Instead of
planting in cultivated ground under shade thrown by tarps or
plastic, the Harding’s learned to grow their plants under
the natural shade of the woods.
"The main difference is the shade and how the soil is
prepared or not prepared," Harding said. "The key is to let
the ginseng compete with the rocks and tree roots for space
and nutrients like in the wild. That gives the root shape
and character."
Harding never harvests his crop before it is 6 to 10 years
old. By then, Harding said, it is similar in appearance and
properties to wild ginseng. "Cultivated" ginseng, grown
under artificial shade and dosed with fertilizers for fast
growth, produces a smooth, uniform root dug after three
years. Maryland regulation requires Harding to identify his
ginseng as "wild simulated," which commands less per pound
than roots that are actually wild, but far more than
"cultivated."
"If we can grow a high-quality root, we should get a
high-quality price and hopefully take some of the pressure
off wild ginseng," Harding said.
Hope, and state regulatory programs, may be the best things
going for wild ginseng.
"[Wild ginseng is] declining in a big way. If someone knows
where a plant is, they're going to dig it, and these
mountains once had remote places that aren't remote anymore.
There's ATV trails all back through there now," Harding
said, his arm moving across an arc of hills.
Still, digging ginseng -- "sangin' " as it is widely known
in Appalachia -- is not likely to attract hordes of new
participants.
"I'm still getting the same folks bringing me ginseng that
have been coming in for 45 years," said Dorothy Butz, owner
of Westmoreland Fur Post near Twin Lakes Park outside
Greensburg. "It's like hunting or fishing. They've been
doing it their whole lives and now they're bringing their
grandkids."
A licensed dealer, Butz buys wild root from 17 Western
Pennsylvania counties, but does not blame diggers for
ginseng's decline.
"It's never the digger that wipes it out," she declared.
"It's clear-cutting woods and ripping the tops off of
mountains. One of my best diggers always brought me 20
pounds a year, but he came in here this year and said a
housing development wiped out his best spot."
Butz dismisses the influence of weather and supply on
ginseng's price.
"What a digger gets is driven by the stock market," Butz
said. "If the Chinese have money, the price goes up."
"Years ago, diggin' sang was a good side income for these
mountain folks," Harding said. "Maybe they dug enough to pay
their taxes. There’s still people who pay for Christmas with
ginseng. It's learned up through the families, passed
through generations."
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