[MPWG] Cultivation of Medicinal Plants

[ForestRuss at aol.com]

MPWG:
 
I am very actively growing woodland medicinal herbs on our 700+  acre Tree 
Farm in central West Virginia.
 
Much of my effort has been to try to coincide different forest management  
practices and harvest treatments to create optimum conditions for enhancing  
growth, development and natural regeneration of native forest understory  plants.
 
Although we have several hundred acres of native black Cohosh and native  
populations of Goldenseal and American ginseng as well as several hundred  
species of plants in abundance on our property that we are monitoring, managing,  
transplanting and salvaging, most herbalists I come in contact with want to  
refer to the medicinal commodities that my forestland produces as  "ethically 
wildcrafted."
 
As "wildcrafting" becomes a term that is likely to have increasingly  
negative connotations in terms of being an environmentally sustainable endeavor  I am 
concerned that I am going to have a more difficult time  marketing 
commodities from my property under a designation which largely  denigrates the time, 
effort and expense I am putting into the  process.
 
 I am also concerned that to produce medicinal plants under such a  natural 
forest situation would carry a lot of baggage if it becomes stuck  with such a 
designation as "ethically wildcrafted" as that designation could be  used to 
imply that most wildcrafters are have no ethics.
 
 
Russ Richardson
Crummies Creek Tree Farm
PO Box 207
Arnoldsburg, WV 25234  


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