The Sustainable Herbs Program Learning Journey

by Ann Armbrecht, SHP Director

In September 2023, the Sustainable Herbs Program convened the first SHP Learning Journey. For 3 ½ days, 22 stakeholders from the botanical industry explored the people, places, and plants that are central to the herb trade from Appalachia. Though based in Appalachia, the issues we explored: the challenges of wild harvesting, low prices for raw material, over harvesting, care for migrant farmworkers, care for the soil, are common in the herb trade as a whole.

And so our goal in the Learning Journey was to approach these seemingly intractable challenges in the botanical industry in a different, more systemic way. We hoped to inspire change by listening to the voices of those we don’t always listen to: the people at the edges of the system, the places we visited, and the plants. Beyond analytics and industry interests, we wanted to open our hearts and connect with the earth. In this way, we hoped to tap into the inspiration and courage needed to act.

Care, Curiosity and Respect

The Learning Journey built on the Sustainable Herbs Program Learning Lab, which has been meeting for two-years, and has been co-facilitated by Julie Arts, Senior Faculty from the Presencing Institute, a model of awareness-based systems change. Not everyone on the Learning Journey had been part of this Learning Lab, but the core group has developed a way of relating to each other and the plants that is based on care, on curiosity, and respect. And this culture informed that of the Learning Journey.

The Learning Journey took months of planning: from planning the site visits and the structure of those visits, to planning the meals, the hotels, who would drive the vans and how we would all meet up. Julie and I gave careful thought to the structure and rhythm of each day, balancing time for reflection, time with the plants, time for small group conversations, for large group discussions, and for meaningful conversations with those we visited in the region.

On the night before we began, we gathered on the roof top of the Bristol Hotel. Guido Masé, Principle Scientist and Chief Formulator at Traditional Medicinals, invited everyone to begin the journey by arriving in this region. I invited them to listen. To hear beneath the words spoken. To see beneath the obvious. We each shared our intention for our time together.

Who We Were

Participants in the Learning Journey included those responsible for sourcing and purchasing and for sustainability at herbal products companies. Funding from Virginia Tech and a planning grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission through their Appalachian Regional Initiative for Stronger Economies (ARISE) program allowed us to invite individuals working for primary processing companies (companies that purchase and process wild harvested and cultivated medicinal plants) in Peru, South Africa, and Nicaragua. And a member of Solidaridad, an international NGO working with smallholders around the world, also joined the journey.

What We Did

We gathered early the next morning to climb into vans for a day of field trips exploring the issues around wild harvesting and forest farming botanicals harvested from Appalachia. Half of the group visited the Appalachian Herb Hub, a non-profit center that offers basic processing (drying, cleaning) for herb farmers and marketing and outreach to help them secure contracts.

The other group visited the homestead of ethnobotanist and forest farmer Ryan Huish and his family for a plant walk. This visit ended with Ryan’s four children playing music for us in a forest grove.

 

In the afternoon, we had a round table discussion with five wild harvesters and David Wallace and his partner who are trying to set up a regional processing center in an abandoned school in Cleveland, Virginia. John Munsell from Virginia Tech and Robin Suggs from the Herb Hub have begun offering what they call the Point of Harvest training, a peer to peer compliance and training program to provide more support and resources for the wild harvesting community in the region. John Munsell had outlined the key tenets of this training program before we arrived so that while visiting the region we could hear the perspectives of those who have experienced the program.

Issues around Wild Harvesting

This discussion focused on the need for higher prices to be paid for wild collection, how the price point hasn’t changed in years, about sustainable harvesting practices, and about this history of extractive industries in the region. The collectors focused on how the Point of Harvest training program was a way to begin to address these challenges.

The roundtable was a highlight of the Learning Journey because of the information shared and, as importantly, because it gave an opportunity for wild harvesters, those at the very bottom of the herbal sourcing network, to speak directly to brands and processors from around the world. Unlike most site visits that herb companies make, we weren’t there to fix things or make recommendations, we were there to learn.

After the discussion, we drove up a steep rocky road to a cabin where David spent time as a child. We then divided into smaller groups and walked into the woods with wild collectors. My group was casually walking up a logging road, talking with Donny Collins from eastern Kentucky. I asked him if this is where he would come to dig plants. Without hesitating, he replied that no, he wouldn’t find anything along a logging road! I asked him to take us where he would go. He headed straight up the steep ridge to our right. He had what looked like an ice pick to keep his footing. We did our best to follow along, grabbing onto saplings and trees to get up over the steepest parts, feeling in our bodies just a bit of what it is like to walk through steep hollows of central Appalachia.

If I Had 20% More Courage, What Would I do?

After another evening in Bristol, the next morning we drove to the farm at Gaia Herbs. When we arrived, we took a silent walk to the creek flowing through the Gaia farm to greet the land. During our day and a half at Gaia we had dialogue walks with one other individual, discussions about migrant farmworker rights and challenges, and solo plant walks. We helped harvest gingko leaves, journaled, and had large group discussions about what we were observing.

For the last session together, we gathered in a circle and answered the question: What can we do together that we can’t do alone? This question was followed by the question: If I had 20% more courage, what would I do?

Scavengers

Carol Collins, a wild harvester from eastern Kentucky who put her children through college with the sales of wild harvested Appalachian herbs, talked about how some diggers are scavengers, taking whatever they can to make a quick buck.

“First the timber companies extracted timber from this region. Then the coal companies extracted coal. And then the pharmaceutical companies came,” Lori Briscoe, an herbalist and founder of Appalachian Teas & Botanicals in Bristol, Virginia, told us during the roundtable discussion.

“This community doesn’t want to feel like the coal companies are coming back but companies need to demonstrate that the herb industry will act differently. If this medicine, these plants go out into the world but don’t heal our communities, that is sick and twisted.”

In the van afterwards, Trent McCausland, Vice President of Global Sustainability and Transparency at Nature’s Sunshine, reflected on the differences between scavenging and replenishing, not just in harvesting plants. But, he asked, what did that look like at each level of the value network for sourcing herbs? What does it mean to ask, are we scavenging or replenishing in the work that we do?

Trent created this graphic to share his reflections:

Planting Seeds

What seeds are we each planting, wherever we are in the value network?

How can we create a community of accountability among each of us? Ben Levine, Co-Founder and Chief Herbalist at Rasa asked, where we can share what is hard and not working and also be challenged to reach higher and do more than we could on our own? How can we work together to build a different model, one that is actually built on respect and care, each step of the way?

Ben shared his learnings from the Learning Journey in this graphic:

After I returned, I read through something I had written right before the Learning Journey, about how my hope was that we could create a space in which each participant could fully be who they are. So much richness flowed from our week together. And though there are many reasons for that richness, I think the main one is that we each did just that. We let our guard down and were present as ourselves. From that we were able to connect in a real way with the people and places we visited, with the plants, with each other, and with ourselves. And from that, we each began to tap into what we need to have 20% more courage.

Creating the Conditions for Change

An underlying premise of the work I do at the Sustainable Herbs Program is that the challenges the herb industry faces are too big to tackle alone and that we need to come together in pre-competitive collaborations to address these challenges. On LinkedIn, someone recently posted that pre-competitive collaboration is a false theory of change. I don’t even know what that means. Yet, I do know that during this Learning Journey we touched something within ourselves and with each other that I haven’t experienced before in any circle I have entered in my work.

I don’t know yet how that translates into any theory of change. But I know that it has changed me. It has changed the urgency I feel. The sense of possibility. My sense of confidence and ability to at least do something. My sense of connection with those in my work I can reach out to when I feel that confidence lagging or am not sure what next to do. The change felt deeper than any new information or another article or resource guide.

On this Learning Journey, we helped create the conditions needed for change to happen. Like any change, what matters now is the steps we each take individually and collectively toward shifting this industry, from one that is yet another extractive industry to one that brings healing to everyone involved, to people, to the plants, and to the planet.

Walking the Path Together

The call to action, Lori said in the round table discussion in Cleveland, Virginia, is that we need to learn to play a new game. “The old game doesn’t work anymore. I don’t think it ever really worked for anyone,” she added. “We learn to play the new game by walking the path together.”

On December 7, we will hold a Sustainable Herbs Program webinar with SHP members sharing their experience and perspective on the Learning Journey and the Learning Lab. We also will introduce the next round of the SHP Learning Lab, which will begin in January 2024, and discuss future Learning Journeys for SHP members, two of which we are planning for 2024. We hope you will join us!