Planting The Seeds Of Business In Trout Lake Valley -- Herb Farm Grows Into A Success

TROUT LAKE, Klickitat County - Back when most Americans still considered medicinal herbs on a par with bubbling cauldrons and magical spells, Lon Johnson crumbled the rich, volcanic soil of the Trout Lake Valley between his fingers and felt the future.

That was in the early '70s, and Johnson knew two things: He wanted to farm, and the U.S. herb supply was woefully inadequate. Today, the American Herbal Products Association says Johnson's Trout Lake Farm is the largest organic herb farm in the country, shipping out 2 million pounds of herbs a year.

Although Johnson initially hankered for a cattle ranch, he changed his mind after a stint as an herb buyer for Celestial Seasonings, one of the country's first herbal-tea companies. He discovered the herbs available to the U.S. market were the dregs trickling in from Europe, where tradition and attitude had long supported a prosperous medicinal- and culinary-herb market.

The opportunity was hard to miss.

So Johnson pulled out an atlas. He pored over soil, climate and topography maps and finally chose five sites to visit. The third was Trout Lake Valley, a place so beautiful it collects cliches.

With Mount Adams towering to the north and Mount Hood anchoring the south, the valley lies north of Hood River in Washington. White Salmon River runs through the land that marks a transition from the wetter climate of the west with its hemlocks and spruce to the drier sage-and-oak landscape of the east.

When Johnson arrived to look the valley over, "the clouds parted and there was the mountain. Trout Lake was it."

He never visited the fourth and fifth choices. He bought 80 acres and planted his first crops of mint, catnip, comfrey and red clover in a valley where dairy cattle outnumber people.

Back then, the closest most Americans came to medicinal herbs was the spearmint in their chewing gum. In the following two decades, though, people have begun to take a more active role in their health, a trend that has fueled the fitness boom and slowly carved out a niche for natural medicines.

Although not yet precise in its tracking of sales, the many-tentacled medicinal-herb industry estimates market growth at 20 percent to 25 percent a year, said Mark Blumenthal, executive director of the American Botanical Council in Austin, Texas. Experts put this year's figure at $2 billion in sales.

As more and more people open their medicine cabinets to herbal remedies, Johnson and Trout Lake Farm are ready to supply them. From dandelion to valerian, the farm grows 38 herbs on its 1,400 acres in the Trout Lake Valley and the more arid climate of Grant County, east of the valley. An additional 30 come from other sources, including 12 contract farmers around the world.

During summer, the farm's 68 year-round employees swell to 200 as harvesting and milling reach their peak. Fresh herbs go directly from the fields to big-as-a-barn dryers. Semitrucks haul the dried herbs to milling machines, which are housed in a scrupulously clean, cement-floored wing of the farm's headquarters and other facilities in Grant County.

Once there, the machines, sealed to prevent cross-contamination, cut and sift the herbs into different grades. Some are ground into powder for capsules, some are left fresh to be turned into medicinal extracts of echinecea and valerian by the farm's sister company, Flora Laboratories.

But the majority are dried, bundled into 30- to 40-pound, polywoven bags and shipped off to processors, where they can end up in anything from tea to cold-and-flu remedies to salad dressing.

Not all the herbs supplied by Trout Lake Farm are medicinal. Many, including peppermint, cilantro, parsley and dill, are sold primarily for culinary purposes, including bulk sales in health-food stores.

Peppermint is the company's top seller by volume, followed by echinacea, catnip, burdock and feverfew.

No matter where they end up, Trout Lake herbs never see the bad end of a sprayer. Johnson went organic from the beginning, not the usual practice for large-scale herb farming, according to Blumenthal.