Reputed Aphrodisiac Has Florida in Frenzy

A secret to sexual prowess, some in the Far East believe, is the berry of the saw palmetto. This year’s berry crop was not, however, satisfying.

So an uncommon urgency has besieged South Florida. Even though the plant grows in abundance from South Florida to southern Georgia, there haven’t been enough berries to meet demand.

Year in and year out, from July through September, energetic locals, if they can abide thorn-scratched hands, have made pin money by harvesting the berries for about 10 cents a pound.

But this year for some reason the plants’ reproductive mechanism faltered. Flowers began dropping off in May. Too early. The result has been only a quarter of the usual crop--and a huge demand.

Prices soared. Here in Immokalee, where the saw palmetto flourishes and the annual harvest begins, berry prices went to $1 a pound, then to $2 and, for one brief spurt, to $3.50. Homes emptied on weekends as entire families beat the bushes feverishly to make as much as $200 to $300 a day.

When they had stripped the plants along the roadside, they foraged in the boonies. Four pickers were killed by rattlesnakes. Another drowned trying to swim a canal with a bucket of berries. As the price went up, they took to cutting fences and driving pickups and family vans onto private ranches.

“This is getting serious,” said Jeff Mullahey, a University of Florida range scientist at an agriculture research station outside Immokalee.

“Ranchers are up in arms. Cattle are getting out on the road and getting hit, and the farmers are being held liable for damage to the cars.” Besides, he said, “the ranchers want the berries for themselves. They’ve been hiring migrants to pick them.”

One migrant, Conrado Bravo from Guatemala, pulled up a leg of his jeans to show off shiny new black cowboy boots. He said he made $102 for an hour’s work.

“It’s been like Christmas for me and my wife,” he said. “There’s new clothes for the woman. We’ve never had it so good.”

The berry market has expanded over the last decade beyond consumers who seek its benefits only as an aphrodisiac. European pharmaceutical companies also have been buying them to make an extract for a prescription drug to combat inflammation of the prostate.

The drug is not available in the United States. But Stylianos Mamatas, a representative of the Pierre Fabre drug company in Toulouse, France, comes through Immokalee every year to line up a supply.

Mamatas said his company began buying saw palmetto berries 18 years ago when the drug, which went on the market in Europe in 1981, was still in research. He said a German pharmaceutical company also produces the drug.

The berries are dried, then sold either for export or to U.S. health-food stores, which offer the crushed berries as a food supplement.

A Boone, N.C., company, North American Natural Resources, was able to buy only about 450,000 pounds of the berries in Immokalee this season, said Clayton Miller, a buyer who spends three months each year in Florida. He said he bought about 2 million pounds last year at 32 cents a pound.

Miller said he aimed to move on to the Daytona Beach and Tampa areas to meet the berry demand and then, following the harvest northward, on into Georgia.

Such an urgency seems odd to most Floridians, at least those with an uncomplaining pancreas and satisfied libido. Floridians mostly regard the plant, berries and all, as a nuisance.

The saw palmetto’s scientific name is Serenoa repens, a gently poetic description of something that restores tranquillity. Not to most Florida homeowners. They call it “the plant from hell.” Developers bulldoze thousands of acres of saw palmettos every year.

A garden jewel the saw palmetto is not. It grows as high as six feet with long, narrow, stiff, fan-like leaves. Around the base of the leaves, guarding the berries, are saw-like, razor-sharp thorns.

Coiled into that thorny fortress, according to range scientist Mullahey, may be diamondback rattlesnakes. He explained that they have found dry refuge there above the soggy mire of heavy spring rains.

“One migrant worker reached in to get some berries and the diamondback bit him”--the ranger placed two fingers just below his ear--”right here in the neck. He died very quickly,” Mullahey said. He knows of at least three other victims.

Mullahey has tacked on the wall of his office the skin of a 7-foot diamondback that he killed one day in the woods near Immokalee.

Buyers say the Immokalee area is the most productive for palmetto berries on the East Coast. It is a town of 17,000 near the Seminole Indian Reservation in the Everglades surrounded by vegetable farms, cattle ranches and a few citrus groves. At about 20 feet above sea level, it is one of the highest points in South Florida.

The town could pass for rural Kansas with palm trees. It features feed stores, general stores and farm-equipment lots. Berry buyers have set up operations in tomato packinghouses since the next tomato crop will not arrive until November.

For now, town gossip centers on palmetto berries.

On one recent weekend, when the fluctuating buying price was at $1 a pound, Jennifer O’Bannon, her husband and 17-year-old son Patrick, managed to gather $100 worth before their hunt was dramatically interrupted.

They discovered that wild boars, who reside in the brush hereabout, also have a fondness for palmetto berries. They discovered this while Jennifer’s two menfolk were out of her vision.

“I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them,” she said. “I heard Patrick yell, ‘Hog! Huge hog! Look out! Here he comes!’

“Those guys were practically walking on those palmettos coming out of there,” she said. She touched her jeans just above the knee. “That hog was this high.”