As Prices Sink, Farmers Plow New Ground

Like some mad, tie-dyed wizard conjuring life from a clunker of a Tin Man, Herb Bartels tinkers here and tinkers there, adjusts a clamp, unkinks a pipe, then fires up three huge propane burners--and stands back, grinning, to smoke a cigarette and wait.

A scent seeps out. First just a whiff, sharp and woodsy. Maybe the faintest bit sweet? The Tin Man contraption lurches into action. It pumps out oil, in clear elongated drops. Down a steel tube and into a plastic jug, the oil drip, drip, drips.

It smells of Christmas trees. Lots and lots of Christmas trees. A forest in every drop.

In this alchemy, Herb Bartels sees the future.

Or, at least, he hopes he does.

Here on his rocky, rundown farm in rural Missouri, Bartels is distilling pure oil from a truckload of pine tree boughs. In the stainless steel still he built himself, he’s steaming the scent--and, he believes, astringent, medicinal properties as well--out of the pine, concentrating all that goodness in the oil that drips into his jug. He’ll sell the oil, and the water he used to distill it, to local herbalists who will use it for aromatherapy.

This is a small business now. But Bartels is not alone in predicting it will grow.

As conventional commodities like soybeans and hogs bump from one disastrous price low to the next, small farmers around the country need new ways to stay in business.

They’re grabbing at all sorts of schemes. In Colorado, they’re raising elk for the velvet in their antlers. A South Dakota cattle rancher markets her home as a bed-and-breakfast. Nebraska growers, believe it or not, are trying their hands at wine. A Kansas couple shaped a cornfield into a maze that tourists pay to wander.

And across the country, some farmers--not many, but an ever-increasing few--are grasping at the booming industry of healing herbs. Not that they plan to rip up all their corn and plant yarrow. But the soaring popularity--and price--of these herbs seems to some a good sideline bet.

There’s echinacea, a bristly purple pompom of a flower with roots reputed to boost the immune system. Like St. John’s wort and ginseng, it’s used for medicinal purposes and is increasingly popular. Farmers in corn-belt Nebraska are growing it; they’ve even started a marketing co-op. There’s lavender, too, touted as an ingredient in eczema ointments, scalp tonics and sunburn-soothing gels. Scores of California farmers have paid $100 apiece for open-air lectures on distilling lavender and other flowering herbs.

Here in Missouri, meanwhile, Bartels has planted eight acres in melissa, or lemon balm, a bushy plant with a zesty citrus smell so potent it’s hard to decide whether to rub it on a salmon dinner or scrub the kitchen floor with it.

Like the pine and cedar trees that grow wild on Bartels’ farm, the melissa can be distilled into two much-sought-after aromatherapy products: “essential oil,” which is the highly concentrated essence of a plant, and “hydrosol,” which is the water used in the distilling process.

If he gets his still going full-time, Bartels predicts, the melissa crop could bring him $10,000 an acre, compared with $400 for corn. Pure melissa oil, after all, retails for $35 a milliliter. Mention those figures to a farmer barely breaking even on soybeans and see if he doesn’t snatch up some melissa seeds.

“This type of farming is going to be the thing of the future,” Bartels predicts. “It should be the thing of the now.”

“It will happen,” agreed Cheryl Hoard of St. Louis, president of the National Assn. of Holistic Aromatherapy. “It isn’t just a maybe.”

Certainly, there’s a market.

No longer relegated to the New Age fringe, herbal remedies like echinacea are increasingly popular. Aromatherapy is now so mainstream that Donna Karan and Clairol market essential oils. There are aroma sprays for everything; you can spritz your musty towels with Clean Wet Laundry Smell or wash your streaky windows with a formula made from pure distilled cedarwood. And for every ailment, there’s a purported aromatherapy cure. Bald? Try rosemary. Constipated? Use mint. Juniper whisks away body odor. Cypress supposedly is good for bed-wetters. Sandalwood takes care of frigidity.

Dismissing aromatherapy as hokum, some mainstream doctors say there’s no way nice smells--or even tinctures of herbal oils--can cure true medical problems.

“Aromatherapy is at best a relaxation technique and at worst a waste of money,” said Dr. Stephen Barrett, a Pennsylvania physician who devotes his spare time to tearing down phony medical claims on his “QuackWatch” Web site.

On the other hand, smells have been shown to affect human behavior, even if it’s just because they’re relaxing. Inhaling green apple scent eases migraine headaches, and sniffing bananas curbs the appetite, according to Dr. Alan Hirsch, a psychiatrist who heads the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago. Smells can also influence sexual arousal, Hirsch says; his studies have found that men respond best to a combo of lavender and pumpkin pie scent, while the unlikely duo of cucumber and licorice candy seems to do it for women.

In the end, no matter how many physicians pooh-pooh it, the aromatherapy industry continues to grow; based on a small, informal survey, Hoard estimates it at $400 million a year, “I ought to be able to get a piece of that,” Bartels says.

Yet to do to so, he’ll have to break new ground.

The U.S. has traditionally manufactured only two essential oils in bulk. Citrus oil, pressed from the orange and lemon peels of Florida and California, is used to flavor sodas. Peppermint oil, distilled from plants grown mostly in the Pacific Northwest, flavors toothpaste, gum, candy and pharmaceuticals.

Virtually all the more delicate oils used in aromatherapy are imported: Sandalwood from India, jasmine from North Africa, rose from Turkey and Bulgaria. Many of the most popular--and most lucrative--plants do grow quite well in parts of the United States. Yet they require intense labor to cultivate, since there are no automated machines to plant, weed or harvest helichrysum, say, or yarrow.

Given the expense of American labor, “economically, it’s a disaster” for U.S. farmers to try to compete on a large scale with producers abroad, said one broker who imports oils from around the world. “It’s only feasible from one perspective,” he added. “[Retailers] can see the plants growing and can see the oil being distilled. You know what you’re getting.”

That’s an advantage herbal farmers hope to exploit.

They also aim to create a niche market for hydrosol, which isn’t often imported because of its weight. Advocates claim the water used in the distilling process picks up microdrops of beneficial plant oil, along with a gentle scent. They market the hydrosol to bathe in, drink or mix into cosmetics. And they get good money for it: An acre of lavender yields just $100 worth of oil, but up to $4,000 in hydrosol, said Jeanne Rose, a San Francisco aroma therapist who teaches farmers to distill.

Despite such seductive numbers, few growers view herbs as the mainstay of the 21st century family farm. They don’t expect lemon balm futures to trade on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. But they do consider herbs a good way to diversify. And, they hope, to dodge bankruptcy.

Doug Marcy, for instance, is experimenting with echinacea and other herbs on his 2,000-acre cattle ranch in western Nebraska. “There’s no way traditional agriculture could sustain this place,” he explained.

Marcy said he can make, on average, $8,000 off every acre of echinacea. That’s 20 times what he could earn on corn or soybeans. Still, he has a hard time persuading his neighbors to give echinacea a shot. They too well remember other fads, like rearing pot-bellied pigs, that suckered farmers in with unbelievable returns before crashing them into ruin.

“There are so many snake-oil salesmen,” Marcy said.

To hedge his own bets, Bartels, 41, has kept his full-time job as an engineer even as he seeks to build up his farm. It’s only on weekends that he fires up the still, watching warily as the temperature inside climbs to 212 degrees--hot enough to squeeze oil from flowers, roots and even wood.

Demonstrating the process on a recent Sunday, Bartels drew a knot of interested farmers. He warned them the business is all trial and much error. There just aren’t agricultural advisors well-versed in ilang-ilang, an herb. There’s no federal price support for growers of melissa. And the local John Deere outlet isn’t yet marketing stills.

Nonetheless, some seemed eager to give it a go.

“We’re growing corn and soybeans and getting nothing for them,” said Ann Harmon, who has tinkered with stove-top herbal distilling and hopes one day to expand. “It might take a whole generation, but as farmers, I think we need to find alternative crops,” she added. “So that we can stay farmers.”