Revolutionizing the American Elderberry Industry: A Journey with the Midwest Cooperative

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Chris Patton of the Midwest Elderberry Cooperative. The Midwest Elderberry Cooperative works to organize American elderberry growers for advocacy and developing systems improvements to help bring the American elderberry to the market. To learn more about their work, check out Midwest-Elderberry.coop.

Andy:

Chris, thanks so much for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit about the origins of your organization, the Midwest Elderberry Cooperative?

Chris Patton:

Well, back in 2011, I attended what was then called the Moses Conference at the end of February, and it's one of the largest organic agricultural conferences held in La Crosse, Wisconsin, every year by the Midwest Sustainable Agriculture Society organization. They've changed their name to Marble Seed now if you want to search for it, but they have a big conference every year, and they bring speakers from New England, from the West Coast, although mostly from the Midwest, and at the time, I was looking to buy some land and grow my own food because I didn't trust the stock market and I didn't have a lot of savings.

Anyway, I could buy a used truck with what I had saved. And I figured, ok, I'm going to need to try to do some things, and my oldest son was interested in that way, and so that's what I was looking to do. And I figured, ok, I'm going to need to try to do some things, and my oldest son was interested in that way, and so that's what I was looking to do, and I'd taken some classes and then started. That was a little inefficient, so I started going to these conferences, and at the conference, I heard Derry Durham, who was a longtime organic farmer from central Missouri, talking about American elderberry, and he made the big case for that.

You know it's been used going back to Hippocrates, who wrote a whole book on it, and it's been a continuous commercial crop, very valuable in Europe, since about that time. But it wasn't here in this country. It was basically, you know, used by some hobby farmers and herbalists and things like that. But it wasn't a commercial crop, and there's a lot of potential value to it because not only does it have a lot of health benefits, it's also very good for the environment, and there are good economic opportunities as well. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that even today in Europe, the alabaster is hand-harvested. Now, they process it with machinery. They have established infrastructure.

We don't here, and that's probably the primary reason why I started the Midwest Alabaster Cooperative a year later. I decided I wanted to get into this first. I looked at it, and I was living in Minnesota at the time, and I said, okay, Terry, I'm looking at 60 acres, and I can put 20 acres into Elderberry. I said if I do that, how am I going to get my berries to you to sell them? Because they don't last long once they've been picked. We tend to freeze them right away to keep them. And he hesitated just momentarily. He said yes, he would, and I said that was too long. And so I went back to my tent, and I wrote a one-page contract on my lap pad, and I said let me try distributing the products you're already making in Minnesota because there's a lot of food co-ops in Minnesota. And that's kind of how I got started.

A year later, I was there working the same conference with him at his booth, and I met Paul Otten, who was a longtime farmer who lived north of the Minneapolis-St Paul area you area. He's 10, 12 years older than I am, but he'd been an organic farmer for 40 years and a specialist in berries. He was interested in adding some elderberry. We ended up farming together.

He wasn't planning on it, but I had a lot of cuttings. He said we'll find some room, and so we ended up growing elderberry together on about an acre and a half of the 40 acres or so that he farmed because he had a CSA and he had a lot of other berries. You know he had raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, currants of all different kinds. You know, he's a past president of the American Bramble Association, very, very knowledgeable and experienced, and his basic belief was healthy soil makes for healthy people, and so philosophically we were very close, and I learned a lot from him, and because he had that experience, I felt we could go ahead and establish a cooperative, you know, relying on his experience, to be sort of like the farmer, uh, mentor and uh, you know, I have more of an organizational background in administration and I'm almost an accountant.

Andy:

It's a dangerous phrase, almost an accountant.

Chris Patton:

Yes, I make it easy for accountants. Let's put it this way: We needed to get some grants from a farmer he knew who worked in that area to see if this was feasible for other people and to try it out. That's kind of how we got started. We did some feasibility studies, worked with the farmers in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and got it up and running.

The co-op was running, and eventually, we got a grant to actually do some real cooperative legal work, rather than what I was able to pull out of some templates to get things started. And so we have a pretty good organization, and we were growing berries and having educational seminars, and we had a lot of success with people who wanted to grow on their own and make their own products and sell them or sell directly to the public, and to this day I would say that's still the most profitable and successful aspect of elderberry.

And a lot of what I do now is actually supply frozen berries, frozen juice, dried berries, freeze-dried berries, and things to hundreds of small businesses across the country from several dozen producing growers, although I work with over a hundred farmers from coast to coast. Interesting. So that's kind of how it's been, and over the last, oh, I'd say four or five years, I've shifted towards trying to get the infrastructure in place for more commercial production on a larger scale because that's the only way I'm going to be able to hire someone to replace me and that's the goal.

Andy:

Yes, I'm curious. You said you formalized the cooperative. I'm not going into too much granular detail, but I'm really curious. Did you set it up as a C Corp subchapter T, which is the cooperative corporation?

Chris Patton:

Well, ok, so Minnesota. You know, these cooperative structures are very state-oriented.

Andy:

Yeah.

Chris Patton:

And so Minnesota is a very friendly state for cooperatives.

So, even though I live in South Dakota now, and there's another story that'd be too far off track, family is part of it, but I'm still working, primarily in Minnesota, and because the state's been very supportive, and we've also had good support with some USDA and NRCS grants, but they have what's there is called the 308B cooperative and a corporate structure, and this allows for us to have shares, basically non-voting shares for investors so that growers can retain control of the cooperative.

So, from the beginning, the whole idea was that we wanted a cooperative. We wanted the growers to retain control of the vertical integration as much as possible. You know the means of production, and we need it also to band together in order to get the research and organization because this is something that basically comes up from farmers, people that don't have money, and although most of the government's agricultural program goes to big corporations if you can find it, there is some money out there for the small guy, and that can be very useful and very helpful to get the pump prime. And that's been basically my approach, you know, in working with the government on this. I said you help us get started. We won't need to be here every year asking for a handout, because we do believe very strongly that there is value in this crop.

Andy:

So, you guys are a formalized cooperative in the sense that each of the growers has some stake in the greater project. It's not like when I know some people use co-ops as like this kind of umbrella term for we're going to share this one processing resource or marketing resource, but that, you know, by definition, that's not really a cooperative, even though you are cooperating. So you are formally like more of that cooperative.

Chris Patton:

We are a co-op, but we're an open co-op. This means it's unlike some of the dairy co-ops and grain co-ops, where you have to sell everything to the cooperative, and the prices are fixed. It's kind of like growing chickens for Hormel or Jenny O or somebody. No, it's not like that. And so our members do vote for a board. We have an elected board and members all get one vote. They own a share of $500 for an equity share.

And then we have a second class of what we call distribution rights shares. And this is where, once we have a commercial capacity in place so that I have enough volume of buyers that I can go and make commitments to growers to buy their crop in advance, then I have, through the distribution rights shares, a way to do that. So they would pay by one share for every pound that they agree that they must sell to the co-op and the co-op agrees we must buy, and the pricing on that would be determined by all the growers that own distribution rights shares. And then they would participate in the profits and losses of the wholesale ingredients that we made and sold with those particular shares. And then we would still retain the capacity and opportunity to buy from outside growers and outside members if we needed to and to sell likewise.

But co-op members have priority in everything. So, I've got some members in New Jersey, New York, Florida, and California, and they run short of berries almost every year. So, I'm shipping them berries first,, and if we have a bad year,, they get it before the general, uh, rest of the businesses or whatever.

Andy:

Do you have any thoughts of maybe I should have done this differently, that differently in terms of the structure or voting rights or any of those types of things? Has it felt solid?

Chris Patton:

We've had a good experience. Now, the thing that we haven't been able to do is because we've been really scrambling and it's kind of like to have the right culture for that, for it to continue. That takes work, and so one of the projects that I've got lined up for this year is to begin a program and to get some help in order to teach co-op leadership and, to, you know, expand the concepts and understandings of what it is a cooperative and how it works and everything with the growers. Because here again, you know, I'm in my mid-seventies, thankfully, mortality is the reality and you know, when I started this at 62, my goal from the beginning was to replace myself with at least three or four other people. I think it takes six. But for that, we have to make it a commercial success, and we are at the point of transitioning to that.

Now, our legal structure. Our attorney was actually one of the leading co-op attorneys in the country, and you know, ocean Spray was one of his clients, and he said oh well, you want to be the Ocean Spray of Eldorado. And I said well, that puts it pretty well.

Andy:

They're not too far from me, so I figured you'd relate to that.

Chris Patton:

So we've got a real legal structure. I'm not worried about that. It's the people side of things, you know. I seem to have this position as a person to be cooperative, you know. But not everybody's that way and we have generally had in the elderberry world rather good relationships between the different farmers and a lot of sharing and openness.

This isn't always found in agriculture, and part of that is because Terry Durham has started all of this, and I and Terry's recruited far more growers than I have. But you know, we have sort of impressed on people this, and we've also told people, told people, you know, this is a new thing, and we'll do what we can to help you, but don't go starting out too big. Make sure that you know you want to do this. Start small, and get used to the plan. I did a presentation years ago. Years ago, I titled it the Zen of Elderberry.

You've got to sort of emotionally get into this because it's a different kind of farming, and I do a lot of work with agroforestry councils. You know, we have online meetings with people all over the country and things, and one of the things I can say is that we are a little bit ahead of the rest of the agroforestry folks as far as marketing. Now we are behind wild blueberries. They've been established for quite a while, and they're a good example of what we want to do for Elderberry, and we're getting there. We're getting there. I think pretty soon we'll have the means to increase the volume of production. We are actively involved in national trade shows.

I've had people I've talked to for four and five years, and now we're at the point where we can actually maybe start sending them samples and then providing a certain flow of ingredient wholesale ingredients and then at the same time then encourage farmers to establish their fields because it takes two to four years to establish an elderberry orchard.

Andy:

Yeah, which, comparatively for agroforestry, is really quick.

Chris Patton:

Right, right. So you'll find I've got people, for instance, that were attracted to like chestnuts, but they've got elderberry too, for that very reason, because you can start getting a return.

Andy:

Yeah, and I got to imagine up there. There must be some influence from Mark Shepard and some of the work he's been doing. He’s got some really interesting ideas about how to scale some of these crops, and I think being that close to his work would be inspiring enough to get people to want to jump in on something like elderberry.

Chris Patton:

We are trying to commercialize elderberries. Two challenges exist. One is that the industry is very established in this country—it's a more than 100 million dollar business. You'll find elderberries and other ingredients in American products, but they're all imported.

American elderberry can be found in some smaller products, regionally produced, you know, by farmers, or sometimes maybe a couple of farmers working together, but you know, if you're buying elderberry generally in a product or in a supplement, that's an important ingredient. So it's an established market, and what we have to do is let people know that American elderberry exists, and we have to have the ability to provide the ingredient formats that they need for their existing processes.

And then the advantage we have is that American elderberry is different than the European. It doesn't have the glycosides or protocyanides that we have to worry about, and so you can eat it raw, and it has better taste, I think, for that same reason, and so we have a taste benefit. The thing about that is because the European elderberry doesn't taste that good. They don't make a lot of products where taste is a factor, so that's an opportunity, and I sell to a lot of kombucha people and brewers and things like that and wineries, and the taste there really does come through.

The color is good and strong. Although the American elderberry is a little more stable in its coloring and has a greater variety of antioxidants or flavonols than the European elderberry, the European elderberry mainly has four primary nutrients that are desired. We have those four plus three additional and some indications of additional anti-cancer properties not found in Europe. So we do have some things there. The problem is that it takes a lot of money to establish that in the marketplace with the research.

Some things there. The problem is is it takes a lot of money to establish that in the marketplace with the research. And because elderberry is a wild plant and we don't have, uh, people out there with patents on particular breeds or anything like that, the financial background to fund that kind of resource research papers just doesn't exist unless we can get something from the government and there we're competing with a big farmer and everybody else yeah, that's, that's a lot, and I think with American elderberry um, it's a totally different styling for a plant compared to the European.

Andy:

You can't just say, well, this works overseas, let's bring that here to our elderberries because those are trees, these are like bushes, it's the same thing as filberts and American hazelnuts.

Chris Patton:

Let me back up a bit because elderberry is what they call an oligo species. It varies greatly, and so it's called Sambucus nigra canadensis, and it naturally goes from the Rockies to the Atlantic, down into the Gulf and Florida, and up into Maine and Canada, but it's a different plant wherever you go practically. I mean, we have commercially produced a number of identified cultivars out of the Midwest that are grown successfully in California, New York, Florida, Alabama, and Tennessee. But you know, your native species are there and there's a lot really that we have yet to discover about that.

I've talked to some growers that really have some plants that produce fabulously along the Great Lakes that are different than what we have. I've talked to growers in New Jersey years ago. He said well, how can you sell elderberry flowers? They don't have any aroma. Well, in the Midwest, they do. In the Northeast, apparently, they don't, at least most of them don't.

I guess I can't speak for all of them. I wasn't really doing elderberry when I lived in the Northeast, and I didn't have any on our property, so you know, I just didn't run across it. But that's just the way it is. Then you've got the market aspect of it and those challenges there.

Then there are the technical challenges because it's so labor intensive, and so on that end, we got a grant, and it's not for the total thing, but it has made a difference so that we could work on an idea that some farmers had to improve the destemming that is, separating the berries from the sign and we are hopeful that that will work out and actually be a continuous flow destemming machine that will produce anywhere from one to two thousand pounds an hour of destemming, which will greatly reduce the labor costs and help us to be competitive with the European imports and still deliver profits to the farmer and not be forcing the soil.

Andy:

Yeah, that'd be awesome. Elderberry products do occasionally appear, but they don't usually specify, so I assume they're probably always European.

Chris Patton:

Yeah, mostly you'll see concentrates and extracts and there's nobody doing that with American elderberry. Yet we are at the point right now where we're getting to do some sampling and we've been focused a little bit more on getting some powders launched. I do have an NRCS grant for some whole berry juice and pumice powders. It's large enough so that we can produce a thousand pounds which will give us some decent sampling in order to develop commercial relationships and work with a couple of co-packers so that we can, you know, begin to supply what would be for us a large buyer but, you know, in the whole market not so.

Andy:

Yeah, Baby steps right.

Chris Patton:

Yeah, well, that's the whole thing. I mean, because you fall, you pull out of the market, or you fail to supply, and you're gone. So you know, I had people three, four years ago looking for 100,000 pounds. I didn't have it. And so they go off, and they do something else. I go to a trade show, Expo West, one of the largest natural foods trade shows in the country, and I had some elderberry juice and poured it, like in a ginger ale or something else. People said, “Oh, this is a great idea,” and you know, but I didn't have it to sell to them. And you know, a year, two years later, they've got a flavor with elderberry and using the European imported concentrate. So that's kind of what's been happening so far.

Andy:

I think there's a real opportunity because people do value local foods, and I think the narrative is changing. I'm actually really interested in the farmers that you're working with. Working with, if you feel like the type of people that get into elderberry farming reflect the general population of farmers that you otherwise see at trade shows and things like that. It is such a unique crop that you have to have a very specific reason why you'd want to get into it.

Chris Patton:

I would say anybody growing elderberry is very environmentally conscious. I would say probably over half of them are motivated because they have a personal health story which is to move them towards that kind of a crop. They have to be a bit of a pioneer, and, you know, out of the average mold willing to do that, many of them are entering retirement. They want something, but that's not quite as demanding as growing tomatoes or cucumbers, and elderberry offers that.

Right now, it's most successful for someone who wants to have an independent farm stand or farm operation. You can have anywhere from two to 40 acres, and you've got different things going on in your farm. You may have a CSA or a roadside stand, and if you can make your own elderberry syrup, jams, wine, or whatever, you can do pretty well.

Andy:

Yeah, I hope so. I would definitely like to see that.

Chris Patton:

That's doing it. I mean, I have seen that in 10 years. I mean I have people that do it and they're still in business, and you know, and they call me for berries when their own crop runs short. You know, and they call me for berries when their own crop runs short Awesome.

Andy:

So, given the dynamics we've discussed regarding elderberries and the cooperative structure, which I think is an unconventional business model, I'm really curious.

Chris Patton:

And I want to interrupt you here. Yeah, one point, one of the things you know, I'm very, very strong on local foods. I mean, I grow a lot of my own food and, uh, there are benefits to our smaller growers that aren't going to be selling everything through the co-op. See, and because, if we can, by being together and working on these scaling up, if we can have better technology for them if we can get some, you know, better research that maybe otherwise wouldn't come around to support what they're doing in their crops, we're going to, we share that with them ,and they get a chance to use that. And I think all of us together help to build market and market awareness. And that's one thing.

Andy:

Elderberry has a better market awareness than, say, aroniaberry or chokeberry or black currents, which are very popular in Europe, yeah, and to your point, like one of the things that, a friend of mine is a book agent and we were talking about publishing something and she was, like you know, it's not a bad thing if somebody else writes a book and it's popular and it's kind of like yours, it means there's an audience for it. Yes, that's kind of how I feel about the European elderberry. It's not a bad thing that people want these products.

Chris Patton:

It means that they want what you also have, right? Don't mistake me in any way. I mean, European elderberry is good for you, you know. If it's processed right, it is very valuable, and there's a ton of research on that compared to the American elderberry. I have a lot of that on our website, midwest-elderberry.coop, and that's that has really, uh, opened the door for us to be able to do what we can do a lot easier than would be possible otherwise. It's just like we don't have to develop a market; we have to get a bit of that market share.

Andy:

And you, you've got the added benefit of saying hey, we're local, we're native, we're supporting native pollinators, we're doing all these things that the european elderberry isn’t for us ”

Chris Patton:

I mean, it doesn't here.

Andy:

I mean, yeah, yeah, over there it is, but not here.

Chris Patton:

The University of Missouri hired some grad students saying they counted sick over 60 native pollinators on the elderberry there in Missouri. So it has, you know, it's got nectar, it's not just the flowers, and it's really good for the soil, health and, in building up the soil, a lot of benefits to the environment as well as to people.

Andy:

Yeah. So I was going to ask, and I'm still really curious about this. You know, given the structure of a cooperative again, the uniqueness of the crop that you're selling, this kind of like a bold vision of how to apply this native fruit I'm really curious about, and you may not want to answer this, so I will give you the out now. Have you seen a really interesting mix of politics? I feel like the cooperative structure inherently will pull people from both ends for different and similar reasons. Because it's both liberating and focused on collective good.

Chris Patton:

I would say absolutely. That is the case and it's kind of like, I don't think I fit in any straight political profile for that reason either. And you know, the thing is, if you have a good cooperative, and I think we have a good one that wants to be better and we're going to work at being better, you're going to balance individual responsibility, reward, and initiative with the benefits of cooperation. And I really am looking forward to trying to achieve that. And I think so far, in our early stages here and getting going, we've been that way. We don't have people that have sustained a lot of losses. We've managed expectations. We are finally making progress.

It's taken a little longer than I would have liked; I can see now. You know, we're looking at the current situation; we're looking at least developing commission-based sales positions to start to help, and I'm not really advertising or doing much. On the website, I've got a new design. I haven't been able to finish editing the words on it, and you know we haven't been pushing that, but we're growing okay.

So far, we haven't outgrown the market, have not outgrown our capacity to supply it, and you know, I think we're in danger of doing that if we don't get some more growers going, in danger of doing that. It's kind of hard because it's a different type of person then makes up most of our membership right now because most of our membership is growing and selling their own products, and I'm not looking to them generally for supplying for a commercial market. It's like you have two hands right, but together, I think it will strengthen the cooperative.

You know. You know my background is in archaeology. I was a professional archaeologist during my 20s, and so I've done a lot of work in the history of civilization, different cultures, cultural development and stability, and the role of food and agriculture, disease, and everything in the rise and fall of civilization. So I see the importance of this, and in sort of modern terms more we look at it as revitalizing rural America, playing a little role, and I kind of like look at it okay, well, the world is kind of messed up place, but we're trying to make our little part of it work, right?

Andy:

We use the term local foods, but I think a better term would be place-based foods. I like it because it's great if you're, I don't know, growing oranges in a greenhouse down the way. But, our food relates us to the world around us intimately. For the first time in human history, we don’t have food from that same landscape around us, and is it also coincidental that we have all these other issues when we're so disconnected from the place where we exist?

Chris Patton:

I really like where you're going with that because, basically, if you look at human civilization, it is an artificial reality created by human beings that requires outside sources of energy to sustain it. And it works as long as you don't get too disconnected from the natural order. And really, in my opinion, we are too disconnected from the natural order at this point, and this is why we need to change commercial agriculture and get it back towards organic, regenerative renewal. And how to do that on scale is a huge challenge beyond what I can do.

For example, one farmer is a several-generation dairy farm. They've only had cows. Well, now they're looking at growing some elderberry. You know, that's the kind of thing I'm doing, and it's a little catalyst to try to let people know that, hey, there are other ways of doing it, of farming, and you can make some money out of it too. And hey, guess what? It's good for your land and good for the environment and the critters and everything else. Good for the environment, the critters, and everything else.

You know, when I grew up, kids wandered, we ate dirt, we, you know, we just it was different. You know, well, of course, I grew up in the country too, so it was a little easier to do that. But when I became a teen, I had to go live in the city because my folks got divorced, and it was a total disconnect, and you know, the civilization was just very different. I had a McDonald's a block away from my house. You know, hamburgers were only a quarter still, but I mean, it was just a totally different reality. But you know, people get divorced and separated from the natural order of things and I think it distorts human relations as well as the economies.

Andy:

Yeah, I wouldn't disagree. You know, a lot of our economic structure is completely contingent on things happening thousands of miles away.

It's totally disorienting to even try to wrap your head around and fully comprehend the consequences of every decision you make to buy this, that, and the other things. If you really spent the time to think about it and fully understood, you'd probably just be paralyzed with fear. Every decision comes with so much weight because of the infrastructure that exists to make the world we live in continue to go around.

Chris Patton:

I've always been more on the idealistic bent of things, but you know it. Basically, in the real world, every decision is not totally black or white. To me, the key is you want to choose the answer that has more life in it than not, and so, and that, to me, is the basis of goodness. And trying to look at the consequences down the line, and not just today.

And you know, I farm that way. I haven't used pesticides around my house any time in my life, really, and you know, and I don't kill bugs unless I know for sure it's there eating, just destroying my plant. You know, life, to me, to a certain extent all life is sacred, even though you know we have to take life in order to live. I mean, plants die for me to eat them, too. It's not just. You know, animals—one of the things.

As an archaeologist and anthropologist background, one of the things that I sometimes would like to remind people of is t, I sometimes You go back far enoughyou know you've got cwe were all ancestry, right? So it's just a question of recent times, at different places, we've come out and become more of a question of when and where we became

Andy:

But those roots and those traditions and things that that we can see in peoples that were Indigenous when, say, our civilization ran into them, can be lessons and examples to us and how to connect. I do think we, as people here in North America who arrived at some point in the last 500 years, have a responsibility to the landscape to honor how it was managed, and we also have a responsibility to ourselves to take a deeper look at our ancestry and understand. My parents are from Italy, and are thinking about why these foods are the foods you eat. To go back to my example of place-based foods. The reason why Italians have the Feast of Seven Fishes is because they live next to the ocean.

Chris Patton:

There's a very rational and simple answer to some of these things. That's right.

Andy:

Why are these certain foods like a cultural part of your diet, a part of your cultural identity? Right, culture really comes down to food because food is the product of the landscape around you. So, wherever you come from, it's a reflection of what that is. And I think we, you know to get back to this point of like being disconnected from the world around us. If you have no context for who you are from, where you've come from, what the landscape has always done, and what kind of fruits it has borne to humans on that landscape, how can you ever move forward without understanding those things?

Chris Patton:

I agree with you, and that's why I grow my food. I grow a little differently here than I did in Florida when I lived there or in New Hampshire when I lived there because I'm in a different area, and I buy from my local farmers for things that I don't grow here because there's only so much I can put on my lot. The city already gets on my case every now and then. But, you know, it's the kind of thing where you got to work with nature and not just totally fight it, yeah, and sometimes it's accommodation and understanding the longer term and how that works.

It's just like, you know if you're starting to grow organic, you know, just the basic understanding. And well, you're going to get pests first before you get the, the insects that come and eat the pests because they're going to come to where the food is, and until the food's there, they're not going to be there. And you know, when I moved, I had to start all over again, and I went through that whole thing all over.

But now you know I'm starting to see a more balanced insect population, and I don't have the issues I used to have, the issues I used to have, and I've got more of the, the hunter pests, you know, the praying mantis, seeds, and spiders and you know all the other little critters that go out there and eat other little critter,s and there's more balance. But it took a few years for that to revive itself on this particular land that before it had just been grass.

Andy:

Nature can do a lot, but you have to give her time. To bring this back to American elderberry, which I think is a very interesting crop for all of the reasons we've been talking about. Where do you see the American elderberry industry 10 or 20 years from now? Do you see it at the scale of the European elderberry, or do you think it's going to be a long fight?

Chris Patton:

No, I think we'll get there. God willing, we'll get there. I'm very, you know. I have to say the progress made in the last couple of years, and I've got some allied organizations to thank that really made it possible in the Midwest that your audience wouldn't be aware of, like the Walton Family Foundation, which they probably would be aware of, that is making a big difference and that's not directly through the co-op necessarily.

We work with an organization called Renewing the Countryside, and the Savannah Institute, the University of Minnesota, the Forever Green Initiative, the Food Investment Fund and the University of Wisconsin, and then Agroforestry down in the University of Missouri.

I've been on calls with UC Berkeley and Davis and different lines because they've got a western elderberry, and then we did some work. There are areas where there's a lot of investigation going on. I still think there's a huge amount that we don't know about all the local variants of or cultivars of elderberry in different parts of the country, and we have had, I mean I did some work also at the University of Vermont. They've quoted me and Terry and they put out a pretty nice, an extensive 98-page document on growing elderberry. I've got it on our website, and I'm sure you can get it at the University of Vermont Extension.

Andy:

I think I downloaded it from you. It's a pretty good read.

Chris Patton:

Yeah and it's a little out of date. We've learned some things since then but it's a great place to start for your area. Everything is different by area, and this is particularly true of elderberry and, and that's kind of why, you know, even at my house, I've got 13 different kinds, just so that I can stay familiar with some of the more popular cultivars used by our growers, and then I've got some wild ones I'm experimenting with.

Andy:

I'm hopeful that the American elderberry will show up in my grocery store. But until then, where can people find your products or buy American elderberry stuff?

Chris Patton:

Well, okay, so you've got to look in your local area. There are. I know in Connecticut there's a fairly large regional producer, and they'll be in, like, the health food stores. I think Wegmans even has some. We do sell ingredients primarily to businesses. They're wholesale ingredients online at midwest-elderberry.coop, but there's a lot of information there. I do have two subdomains, one directed to growers and one on health benefits, that you can link off of that page if you go to the health or the growth tabs. I don't have everything there.

I stopped doing web design about 12 years ago, and I'm just in the process of trying to tool that up to look a little more modern. But it is accessible and there's a lot of information there. I do plan to have a directory. I've got a nice design. Once I do go through and edit because it's too wordy, I've got to cut the number of words down, and I get that up and running.

Then, the next step is I'm going to have a regional directory so that you can look up and find the farms closest to you selling American elderberry and a little introduction to them, what they do and what they end, and a link over to their own website, so I want to have that available to make it easy for people across this country to find the closest elderberry farmers and to support them locally. I think that's extremely important, and then otherwise look for and ask for American elderberry, and you might not get it right away, but we want the people that pay us to ask and say, oh yeah, I've had people asking for that.

Andy:

Do you guys have social media, Facebook or Instagram?

Chris Patton:

Some of the farmers do okay, but none for when I was on Facebook, but I got shut down so many times during COVID by posting academic articles with peer-reviewed references that they didn't want to be published because it said elderberry would help against other viruses but nothing for the midwest elderberry cooperative itself.

No, well, that was a midwest elderberry club that they shut down, and and, frankly, I really need those six people working for me now. If you're going to do social media right, you've got to have somebody to stay on top of it, and I cannot do that, and so I can't do it properly, so I'm not doing it.

I do have plans, and we've got a grant for developing marketing, and we're doing working, reworking our business plan for scaling up, and that's definitely an area we want to pay attention to and, you know, to hire someone, find a grant maybe to help them get started and to focus on that and to build that specifically and to manage it. Now, River Hills Harvest and some of the other growers, Elder farms, and oh I don't know that I forget the name of his name Bill's operation in Connecticut, they do social media and so if you look, if you've got an active farm, they'll do that.

There's another guy in Ohio that's got his stuff in stores and things, and he's been very successful in selling his own products. So you'll be finding their own products, and you know they'll be based on. Some of them might be dried berries, jams, jellies, syrups, and juices. Some are now starting to do, you know, some waters, flavored waters, you know, vitamin waters with elderberry and things like that.

It's growing, and it's going to continue to grow. You just have to look for it.

Andy:

Chris, thanks so much. This has been really interesting. I can't wait to see how things grow with you guys, and I'm definitely gonna be buying some stuff.

Chris Patton:

Thank you!

To listen to this interview, tune into episode #241 of the Poor Proles Almanac.