Under Appalachian Tree Canopy, Forest Farming Enjoys a Revival

Text and photos by Nicole Rasul

Goldenseal root at Mayapple Farms.

Within the quiet solace of the late-summer woods, Rick Felumlee of Dresden, Ohio’s Mayapple Farms wanders his six and half acres. He stops to check on young ginseng plants sprouting from the soil under the heavy shade of tree cover. Nearby, a ramp plant’s green seed nodule sprouts from the earth’s floor. Growing wild, the seeds will eventually  morph into spring’s first promise of green after winter’s long slumber. Felumlee squeezes the nodule between his fingers, allowing hints of allium to waft from the small, green pod.

Felumlee has owned this property of nearly all forested land in the western foothills of the Appalachian mountain range for 20 years. Three years ago, he left a desk job to pursue full-time his burgeoning interest in forest farming. He tends to the land with his wife, Jan, whose off-property employment mostly supports the family, and his two school-age children, Elijah and Emma.

Forest farming has a long history in these parts, much of which has been lost over the centuries despite the fact that the mountain range and its foothills—spanning more than 200,000 miles from southern New York to northern Mississippi—comprise one of the most biodiverse areas in the world. A few practitioners, like Felumlee, are leading a small but growing resurgence of the craft with a focus on cultivating and harvesting native nontimber edible and medicinal species under tree canopy.

Their work is aided by research and nonprofit organizations in the region that are investing in education and resources to increase forest farming in Appalachia’s richly wooded terrain. These entities eye the fledgling industry as not only an economic development lever to lift communities from decades of disenfranchisement—rates of poverty in the region consistently remain higher than the national average—but also as a tool to sustainably manage the region’s vast natural resources.

Rick Felumlee, Mayapple Farms.

Reliance on Native Bounties

“Six years ago, I started looking for things to grow to make money,” Felumlee says about his property. “We have mostly forested land, so we came across ginseng, which grows traditionally in this region. Then we found ramps. We started going to conferences and one thing led to another.”

Today, Felumlee sells a range of native, sustainably harvested products direct to consumer at several farmers markets in the region. Ramps line his table at the start of the season along with mushrooms grown on fallen or sustainably cut timber. He also sells garlic and other edibles as well as potted plants like black and blue cohosh, native to the terrain.

Felumlee says he’d like to add a processing facility to his space to allow for growth in the online, shelf-stable edible and medicinal herb markets. He currently maintains a robust nursery protected by forest cover, and he says he plans to soon start propagating these resources for the sale of live, potted plants to the garden industry.

With an obvious green thumb and a dedication to learning the traditional, nearly vanquished practice of harvesting the edible and medicinal bounty of eastern America’s native woodland, Felumlee runs a farm in stark contrast to the livestock, produce and row-crop commodity producers who dot the landscape nearby in his rural county.

Forest farming requires “a bit of faith and some hope,” Felumlee says with a chuckle while on a walk of his property. As he stops near small, green plants with a smattering of leaves taking shape on the side of a forested hill he says, “planting is a little difficult when you’re talking about something that will be harvested a decade later.” Felumlee looks down at the vegetation underfoot, referencing the region’s most prized and profitable woodland crop: American ginseng.

As a wild variety, American ginseng was a historically valuable species to Native American communities in the region and the botanical grew increasingly threatened after European colonization.

“Ginseng’s biggest pest is humans,” Felumlee says about the extensive overharvesting of the wild variety.

In recent decades, the plant has been listed on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and complicated restrictions have been put in place regarding its wild harvest and sale in the 19 U.S. states that allow foraging. Wild ginseng must be at least five years old to be harvested and most states require the licensure of dealers to move the crop into the global market. Nearly all the American harvest is sold overseas and mostly to Asian markets where the plant’s valuable roots can fetch up to $600 per pound.  

Felumlee says when he first started working his woods, he found only one wild ginseng plant on the property. Since then, he has learned more about the species and now aims to grow his enterprise with a focus on this high-value botanical.

For the past several years each October, the Felumlees and their extended family gather to plant ginseng seed under the forest canopy at Mayapple Farms. They rake the leaf cover, sprinkle seed, walk over it, then recover the terrain with rich, decomposing humus.

This process is called wild simulated planting and it mimics ginseng’s natural production cycle. A long wait then begins, as it can take nearly a decade for the plant’s roots to be ready to harvest and sell. “Ginseng is definitely the most well-known, valuable, sought after herb around here,” Felumlee says about the region. “It just takes so darn long to grow.”

Eyeing a neat wooden box of green seedlings that, at two years old, are tiny in stature, Felumlee says his goal is to take these plants rich in local genetics and use them to produce a seed population that can be propagated for years to come on his farm. Growing this way mimics the wild, organic varieties that fetch top dollar but are now hard to find in open terrain due to overharvesting.

“Right now, most of the ginseng that’s available on the market comes from huge industrial ginseng farms that use a lot of fungicides,” Felumlee explains, referring to large operations mainly in Wisconsin, where 98 percent of American ginseng production takes place. “They are planting ginseng as row crops under shade tarps, sowed really densely.”

Felumlee points to goldenseal, another native Appalachian plant variety increasingly commanding market demand, which also grows plentifully on his property. He digs up a small plant to show the species’ vibrant yellow root structure. Threatened and, like ginseng, listed in CITES, the species is known for its antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties.

“Goldenseal is definitely super-hot,” says Tanner Filyaw, Rural Action’s sustainable forestry program director, who works with woodland owners like Felumlee to develop nontimber forest management plans. Rural Action is an Ohio nonprofit that addresses economic empowerment for the citizens of southeastern Ohio’s Appalachian foothills. “Companies want sustainably grown, certified organic goldenseal if possible,” Filyaw says. He adds that over the last several years the price of the raw root has nearly tripled in the American marketplace.

Networked Development

Through Rural Action’s sustainable forestry program, Filyaw and his colleagues engage with woodland owners with two goals: to promote economic and entrepreneurship activity for a population hard hit by extractive industries like coal and timber over the decades, and to nurture the sustainable use of the region’s rich natural resources.

“Something that’s really important to us and our partners is the sustainability of plants and helping to reduce pressure on wild populations,” explains Filyaw. “We want to create income opportunities for landowners, but also help to preserve and protect forest cover. What we offer is an alternative forest management strategy.”

In recent years, other groups working across Appalachia’s wide terrain have also committed to forest farming and, like Rural Action, have the goal of not only boosting incomes but protecting the region’s biodiversity. With funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Appalachian Beginning Forest Farmer Coalition, founded in 2015, is at the heart of this work. The entity engages with a vast network of growers, nonprofits and universities to expand knowledge and access to resources for forest farming practices reliant on nontimber woodland products. 

Filyaw says that over the last few years companies focused on the production of natural supplements and cosmetics have increasing turned to the region to source inputs.

“Mountain Rose Herbs is the poster child,” he says about the Oregon herbal company. “They’ve really gotten behind forest farmed products. They are paying growers top dollar and they are packaging and marketing their goods in a way that supports forest farming.”

According to the American Botanical Council’s 2018 Herb Report, the American herbal supplement market grew to over $8 billion in sales that year, a record increase of 9.4 percent over 2017.

Additionally, with new certification programs for forest farmed edibles and medicinals coming online—like the Forest Grown Verified program administered by United Plant Savers—there is an increased professionalism in the industry. These initiatives award sustainably grown and harvested products that are farmed with traceable origins.

Filyaw says that he envisions the sector will continue to commercialize through a growing reliance on contract farming.

“Companies are really starting to look at contracting out for a certain price,” he says. “They are really starting to get behind forest farming in a big way because wild harvesting is not sustainable. They can’t sell a product from detrimental origins to a conscious consumer base.”

Sylvia Crum, director of communications and development at Appalachian Sustainable Development (ASD), a Virginia nonprofit that works on economic empowerment and healthy living initiatives in central Appalachia, , sees a similar trend in her region.

Like in Ohio, the nonprofit is increasingly hearing from private-sector companies seeking goods farmed from the forest understory. Historically dependent on product from overseas, some of which is laden with heavy metals, these manufacturers are looking for American inputs from transparent and trusted sources as the market grows and consumers become discerning.

ASD founded the Appalachian Harvest Food Hub in 2000, and the entity remains a pillar of the organization’s work, which has significantly empowered fruit and vegetable producers in central Appalachia. Working as an aggregator, over the last 20 years, $23 million in product from local growers has moved through the Hub for sale to nearly 4,000 retail outlets from Maryland to Georgia. Crum says her organization’s aggregate  model is one of the longest running rural food hubs in the United States and has been critical in providing valuable resources to growers such as processing support, food safety training, and access to vital sales markets.

“We recognized that farmers who were traditionally growing tobacco were losing their allotments but they wanted to stay on family farms in central Appalachia,” says Crum regarding the Hub’s founding and its work with growers in 15 rural counties in Virginia, Tennessee and West Virginia. “We started teaching producers how to grow fruits and vegetables, which morphed into providing training and technical support so farmers can access lucrative retail markets.”

Since 2017, ASD has operated the Appalachian Harvest Herb Hub as part of the aggregate sales model, which focuses on incorporating valuable herbal and medicinal products from nearby forests. In 2019 alone, the organization reported that more than 500 farmers participated in training related to the Herb Hub model and more than $50,000 in product moved through the resource.

“In central Appalachia there’s not always wide-open area to grow food,” Crum says. “Some land is steep, there’s a lot of shale rock, a lot of forest canopy. But there are a lot of valuable native botanicals that grow in the understory.”

With access to a USDA-regulated processing facility and premium sales markets, Crum says the future is bright for the herbal sector as manufacturers increasingly seek Appalachian harvested products. “We’ve got partners that are saying, ‘If you can create a network and grow it, we’ll buy from you in 2021, 2022 and 2025’,” Crum says.

In a region whose resources once predominantly benefitted economic interests elsewhere, the lush rolling hills covered in tree canopy now sprout dollar signs, somehow without sacrificing sustainability, in harvesting the forest’s bounty.