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Every fall, hopeful foragers throughout the Appalachian Mountains don heavy work pants and sturdy boots to climb into dark, steep, moisture-laden coves in hopes of finding Old Man Sang.
The name is slang for ginseng, a perennial plant with a gnarled and bulbous root prized for its medicinal properties. A staple of traditional medicine and tasty addition to many recipes, the plant can live to be 80 years old, but grows so slowly that it takes five to reach maturity. Demand is so high that it has largely been wiped out in Asia, sending prices for American varieties up to $1,000 a pound. This worries conservationists that overzealous diggers could squeeze them out of existence by harvesting plants too early and too often.
“When it became really valuable, it was just too many people going to the same land over and over again,” said North Carolina ethnobotanist David Cozzo. “There was never a chance for it to recover.”
Although native to much of the eastern United States, ginseng is most common in Appalachia and the Ozarks. The risk of overeating is particularly high in Kentucky, West Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee, something one expert on the subject attributes to the high unemployment and widespread poverty found there. In response, the Forest Service took the step to limit harvesting on public lands. Although Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests are closed indefinitely in the wake of Hurricane Helene, a federal ban on harvesting the carrot there will remain in place for at least another year. Getting caught digging up the plant, which is found primarily in deciduous hardwood forests, can result in a $5,000 fine and six months in federal prison.
The Forest Service said the ban, which starting in 2021can last up to a decade. Taking such a step requires balancing the preservation of a valuable resource and respecting a practice that is intertwined with the region’s history. “Singing” is a way of life for many people, one that has supplemented rural incomes for generations, especially in areas dependent on the volatile coal industry.
The Appalachian relationship with East Asian markets spans 200 years. The Cherokee, who used the root medicinally, took advantage of the globalizing world that colonization brought them into and start sending ginseng root to China by the mid-1700s. Revenue from such deals helped the tribe buy back a small portion of its ancestral lands in the 1870s, establishing the trust on which the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians now lives, said Cozzo, who is also the director emeritus of the Traditional Cherokee Artisan Resources Program is. .
Formerly addicts, unmarried women and even entire villages cultivated ginseng in the forests of Appalachia throughout the 19th and and early 20th centuries, harvesting the roots along with things like cohosh and mayapple and establishing a thriving industry in places known for lumbering and mining. Even now, Cozzo remembers talking to high-altitude miners who used their fall trip to pay for their children’s school clothes and other expenses. Historians have sought to correct the stereotype of the ignorant, backward poacher, and have attributed some responsibility for ginseng’s decline to poaching and habitat destruction fueled by the coal and timber industries.
In some communities, miners and their families supplemented their incomes by foraging for ginseng and other forest products, especially as work-related disabilities such as black lung disease took hold. “These guys that got black lung from the mines, they might go out in the morning if it was still cool and they could breathe,” Cozzo said.
A 2020 Smithsonian Oral History Project features people from around the region describing what they hunted and sold what they hauled alongside furs and skins to support themselves during unemployment or retirement and to supplement the wages of full-time work. One participant, Carol Judy, a miner and environmental activist who sang in the mountains surrounding the coal mining community of Eagan, Tennessee until her death in 2017, is described as a believer in the power of agroforestry to provide for struggling communities to meet their needs, especially in light of coal’s decline. A friend recalls Carol Judy’s hope to promote a food culture that “looks seven generations ahead and seven generations back”.
John-Paul Schmidt, an ecologist from the University of Georgia who has studied the factors that contribute to overharvesting on public lands noted that stress on the plant’s numbers often correlates with high unemployment and low incomes, especially in southern Appalachia. This, he said, suggests that poachers forced by necessity will find ways around a ban. A wiser policy, he said, would be to explore financing education and pathways to sustainable forest farming, something many poachers already practice. “There is a real missed opportunity to really promote active wild cultivation of these plants,” he said.
Many old-time diggers, especially indigenous people, have spots that they tend to. Cozzo’s oral history tells of people returning to the same spot every five to seven years, giving it plenty of time to recover. Careful harvesters save the seeds and plant them an inch deep, making them more likely to sprout. “Old timers knew this, and they managed the forest, and they managed the forest,” Cozzo said.
Greater education around sustainable harvesting is needed, especially as diggers are less likely to have a long-term relationship with the land and more likely to be driven by the value of the root. “All it takes is one generation to skip to know how to do things properly,” Cozzo said.
The hope behind the ban, Forest Service botanist Gary Kauffman said, is to give these fragile plants time to thrive, especially older specimens that are key to the root’s survival. “It’s the older individuals that produce more seed and actually regenerate the plant,” Kauffman said. The Forest Service monitors more than 100 ginseng stands across Nantahala and Pisgah national forests. It also works with a seed nursery at the North Carolina State Extension to increase the number of seedbeds in the biodiverse, nutrient-rich soils in which ginseng thrives.
Sustainable harvesters know to look for plants at least five and ideally older than 10 years with clear signs of maturity: red berries, stem scars and three to five leaflets. Healthy ginseng communities consist of about 50 to 100 plants, Kauffman said, but many have closer to 25 — a good base for growth, but not enough to allow harvest. That has the Forest Service thinking its conservation efforts could last at least a few years, and possibly longer. This can frustrate diggers and herbalists, he said, but it is necessary to protect a historically important plant.
“It’s very important to look at that and try to preserve something of that culture,” Kauffman said. “To think about how we can preserve it in the future, so that our children and grandchildren can also go out and see ginseng, and maybe harvest some ginseng in the future.”
