He and a fellow plant lover were hunting ginseng in a forest in central Pennsylvania that was soon to be bulldozed for condominiums. They make it more valuable,” said Eric Burkhart, a Pennsylvania State University botanist and renowned ginseng expert.
“You want the whole thing, including all the little hairy roots. It takes skill and patience to extract the roots intact.
The plant grows tightly rooted to steep, rocky hillsides in mountain woodlands thick with snakes and black bears, often in patches of briars and nettles that shred clothing and skin. If collecting wild ginseng sounds easy, like casually plucking hundred-dollar bills from the forest floor, it’s not. “It’s called wild-simulated,” Harding said, “because we plant the seeds in the forest.” ‘You want the whole thing’ That’s why his crop is so heavily targeted by poachers. Only connoisseurs can tell the difference between wild ginseng and the ginseng that farmers such as Harding produce. More than 45 percent of wild American ginseng, gnarly and twisted from growing between rocks and thick tree roots, goes to Hong Kong, where the roots are sorted, graded, and shipped to China or other parts of Asia, retailing for an average of $8,000 a pound. Used in commercial goods, from face and body products to sports drinks and even cigarettes, cultivated ginseng sells for about $250 a pound in Asia, according to the latest market analysis by the International Ginseng Institute in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Wisconsin’s ginseng board reports that one county in the state now exports more than a million pounds of the cultivated root each year-95 percent of U.S.
Farmed ginseng has a smooth, parsnip-like appearance and is considered far less potent than its wild counterpart. Unauthorized use is prohibited.ĭuring the late 1800s, as prices for wild ginseng soared and supplies diminished, Wisconsin farmers began cultivating it in fields. The legendary frontiersman Daniel Boone made much of his fortune from the ginseng trade in the late 1780s, hiring sang collectors, or “sangers,” to mine for golden root and shipping barge loads to a market in Philadelphia. They gravitated to Appalachia, where the Cherokee were using the root as a tonic for colic, colds, and other ailments. Within decades, the plant became scarce in Canada, and traders looked to the United States for other sources of wild ginseng. After wild American ginseng was discovered near Montreal in the 1700s by a French Jesuit priest, Canada began exporting it to China. It became scarce there as far back as a thousand years ago, spurring a cultivation industry in China, Korea, and Japan. “The days of finding large roots are pretty much gone.” Roots of the rootĪsian ginseng has been consumed in the Far East since ancient times. Fish and Wildlife Service in Pennsylvania. “Anyone in the trade will tell you that compared to when they started, it’s getting harder to find these plants in the wild, and the ones they do find are smaller,” said Randy Cottrell, a special agent with the U.S. wildlife managers worry that wild American ginseng could be on a path toward extinction, although other than common anecdotal reports of ginseng being more difficult to find, no one knows exactly how much exists in the wild.
Today demand in China is so great that U.S. Photographs by Greg Kahn, National Geographic
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