Ontario ginseng: an obscure treasure
According to Statistics Canada, millions of dollars worth of crops are harvested from the fertile land of southwest Ontario. Among those successful crops, Ontario ginseng may be one of the least known of all. Still obscure to many westerners today, ginseng has been obsessed over by eastern cultures for centuries, and Ontario ginseng has grown from a niche crop to one of the world’s leading products within a few short years. And because there is so much demand this year, most ginseng has been purchased even before it’s harvested.
FAMILY HISTORY WITH GINSENG
While conducting a tour at a ginseng farm in Scotland, Ont., Diana Yeh, the vice president of Great Mountain Ginseng Co. Ltd. recalls her first memory of migrating to Ontario and growing ginseng. In 1972, Yeh moved from Taiwan with her husband and their infant son. At that time, her parents-in-law were one of the earliest Chinese growers in Ontario.
“They worked for the local farmers without charge for three years, to learn to grow ginseng. Eventually the farmer agreed to give them the harvest of one-fourth of an acre,” Yeh said.
In 1976, the Yeh family founded the Y.E.Ginseng, the predecessor of today’s Great Mountain Ginseng Co. Ltd. in Canada. Today, the company, claiming to be “the first Chinese- owned and operated company to establish a major commercial ginseng agri-business in Ontario”, runs as an Ontario ginseng grower, exporter, wholesaler and retailer, and has nine retail stores across the country.
Although Ontario has fertile soil, growing ginseng is a risky and costly process. In the first year, ginseng grows to about the size of a human finger. Following is two to four years of maturation with flowering once a year. Plucking the flower will leave a hole at the root tip that shows the age of the plant. However, the last thing growers want to see is their years of work damaged by pests and diseases.
“The red root disease spreads really fast. My father-in-law once stayed up all night to figure out a solution. And he had to uproot a whole ginseng to prevent it from spreading to the others,” said Yeh. The disease will lead to deeper colour of the root. Once the quality gets worse, the price will drop.
Besides natural challenges, human behaviour plays a crucial role in the market. In the late 1990s, due to the tobacco-planting decline, many farmers began growing ginseng as the harvest techniques share a similar drying requirement. Unfortunately, oversupply of ginseng and low selling prices phased out many growers.
This year, Yeh says the ginseng yield continues to shrink due to the atrocious weather in the last three years. There was drought in the summer of 2011 that dried up the plants, and the excess of rain in 2012 flooded the roots. This summer, insufficient sun prevented the ginseng from growing larger. As the yield is expected to be much lower, the price of ginseng will increase significantly.
In recent years, farmers in northeast China began growing Jilin ginseng, which puts Ontario ginseng into a tight spot. “Surprisingly, North America is the biggest market for the ginseng from China,” said Yeh.
Jilin ginseng roots are largely exported to North America. And they are fobbed off as Ontario ginseng and sold at a lower price. Because of this, it is believed that some restaurants that use ginseng as an ingredient in Toronto are using Jilin ginseng to lower costs.
To cope with foreign imports, Yeh emphasizes the uniqueness of Ontario ginseng, “Once a professor told me, Ontario ginseng has a kind of ferment. When you leave them in the sun, the Ontario ginseng will turn sour but the other kind will not. In this way, you can tell which the real Ontario ones are,” she said.
According to Yeh, it is the ginsenoside of the Ontario ginseng that makes the product stand out. For years they shipped their product to Taiwan and worked with institutes of biotechnology to develop new products such as a face cream that contains extracts of Ontario ginseng launched this year.
Besides overseas competition, Ontario ginseng is also facing the return of locally grown tobacco. Due to the drain ginseng has on the soil, it can grow only once on each piece of land. John Lessif, the mayor of Tillsonburg Ont., points out that tobacco is making ginseng a less attractive crop for farmers.
“What is concerning to ginseng growers is that growing tobacco is becoming more popular. So there is a little bit of concern, not so much of running out of agricultural land, but who uses it for what,” Lessif said.
Nowadays, Ontario ginseng is more than an ingredient, it has been reinvented in several different ways. Lijuan Wang, a tourist from China, spent over five hundred dollars at Yeh’s ginseng farm tour. Her trophies include fresh ginseng to make soups, bag-packed crumbs for tea, soft and hard ginseng candies and the newly developed ginseng facial cream and masks.
“Ontario ginseng is a kind of ‘must-have’ souvenir when we visit Canada. And we are excited to see the new developments as a smart way to preserve this valuable plant,” Wang said.
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