Berry Rich in Hype Becomes a Cash Crop

This used to be the dead season, a time between citrus and tomato harvests when idle farm workers had little to do but wait for towering afternoon thunderstorms to rumble in from the Everglades and clear the air of dust. But no more.

Fired up by a crop reputed to be a sexual stimulant and a remedy for enlarged prostate glands, roadside buyers line New Market Road, standing behind hand-lettered signs reading “Se compra bolita” and waving stacks of cash at pickers who cruise by in trucks and vans loaded with sacks of splotchy yellow berries.

“Twenty-four cents a pound,” the buyers were calling at one point last week, citing that hour’s price.

The bolita--”little ball” in Spanish--is the berry of the saw palmetto, a low-growing, shrub-like palm that may be the most common plant in Florida, and is, after an act of the Legislature, the state’s newest cash crop.

Raw, the ripened olive-sized berries of the saw palmetto are virtually inedible, with an acrid taste that a European sailor shipwrecked in Florida in the 1600s described as being like “rotten cheese steeped in tobacco juice.”

Dried and processed, however, so that its extract can be swallowed as a capsule or drunk as a herbal tea, the saw palmetto is finding an enormous market. About half of all men older than 50, for example, have benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), a noncancerous condition that can inhibit urinary and sexual function.

Scientific evidence of the saw palmetto berry’s effects is scarce. A recent pilot study of 50 men who took it, conducted at the University of Chicago School of Medicine, found that about half reported at least 50% improvement in symptoms involving urinary problems, according to urologist Glenn S. Gerber.

“Some of that could be the placebo effect,” Gerber said. “But my patients use it and think it’s the greatest. I’m encouraged enough to pursue it further.”

Some scientists and physicians have expressed doubt about the reputed benefits of saw palmetto, citing a lack of rigorous clinical studies. But Gerber points out that American pharmaceutical companies--a chief source of research funding--are unlikely to sponsor studies of saw palmetto because several synthetic drugs used to treat BPH are already on the market.

Even without scientific evidence of its efficacy, however, saw palmetto is a hot alternative medicine riding a wave of word-of-mouth publicity. Many think that wave is going to build.

“As the baby boom generation reaches that 50-plus plateau and becomes worried about their prostates, interest in saw palmetto is just going to grow,” said Jeff Mullahey, a range scientist at the University of Florida’s research station here who has been studying the plant. “I think this is going to be a substantial business.”

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Just how big that business will be, however, is not known. This year the harvest is expected to yield about 2,000 tons of dried saw palmetto from berries picked in Florida, most from open range land in the southwest and central parts of the state, and dealers estimate the value of the crop at about $50 million. From local processors, manufacturers of dietary supplements here and in Europe buy both powdered and oil extract from pulverized berries.

Drug companies in France and Germany use saw palmetto in a drug that has been prescribed for years to treat BPH.

In the U.S., the extract is turned into capsules that are sold in health-food stores under more than a dozen brand names.

Nine years ago, Nature’s Herbs, a Utah dietary supplement company with $22 million in sales last year, stopped making saw palmetto products altogether because there was no demand. But after a three-year hiatus, the company resumed marketing the capsules, and, for the last three years, Saw Palmetto Power--gel capsules in varying strengths--has been the best-selling of its 350 products, according to marketing director Grace Lynn Rich.

Saw palmetto cannot be prescribed as a drug here without years of clinical trials and approval from the Food and Drug Administration. But companies such as Nature’s Herbs can claim on their products’ labels that it “nutritionally supports healthy prostate function.” Depending on strength, prices for a 30-day supply range from $14 to $21.

“I take it as a preventive, and I’ve never had a problem,” said Gerald Gettel, a pharmacist in his mid-40s who set up Saw Palmetto Trading Co. to get in on the boom in berries.

Consuming saw palmetto berries as food or for their medicinal benefits is not new. According to Bradley C. Bennett, an ethno-botanist at Florida International University in Miami, pre-Columbian inhabitants of South Florida, and American Indians who came later, included the berries in their regular diet. In the early 1900s, Miami settlers mixed juice from the berries with carbonated water and sold the result as a drink called “metto.”

In the lore of folk medicine, the fatty acids in saw palmetto berries were believed to act as an aphrodisiac, diuretic and sedative. The fruit was also eaten to treat diarrhea and bronchitis and to aid digestion.

Local dealers such as Marlin Huffman, who runs Plantation Medicinals Inc. in Felda, Fla., have been selling saw palmetto, primarily to European drug makers, for about 40 years. Buyers from European drug companies visited Immokalee annually to make contracts with suppliers, and a few local farm workers made extra money picking the berries in open range land.

Two seasons ago, however, a scarcity of fruit and a spate of publicity about its supposed health benefits sent prices soaring to $3 a pound, and people who previously had picked fruit only from supermarket bins found themselves risking sore backs and even their lives to harvest bolita. That summer, Mullahey said, three people reportedly died of rattlesnake bites and a fourth drowned when he tried to cross a drainage ditch with a 100-pound sack of berries on his back.

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Prices of $3 a pound are unlikely to be seen again. But this season’s price has been creeping up, from 12 cents a pound in early August to 25 cents late last week.

For the farm workers, even that price is enough. “We weren’t doing anything now anyway,” said Frank Nunez, a labor contractor who had parked a flatbed truck by the side of the road and was paying freelance pickers for thousands of pounds of berries. “We can make some money, and so can the pickers.”

The Florida Legislature’s declaration of saw palmetto as a cash crop means that penalties can be levied against those convicted of poaching and that the Department of Agriculture can assist with marketing the crop at the growers’ request. So far, that has not happened, said Ted Helms, the department’s marketing bureau chief. “But this is undergoing rapid growth,” he said of the saw palmetto trade, “so I’m sure the day is coming when they will come to us.”

In the meantime, the trade in bolita remains fluid and profitable. “In the past, most of the scientific study of the plant was aimed at removing it from range land,” said Mullahey. “Now I hear about people who cleared their land to plant citrus and wish they left it in palmetto.”