Ontario's herb growers share a small but valuable niche market

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Though exact figures are hard to come by, one estimate is that it is between $10 and $20 million. And research is ongoing to enlarge it

by MIKE MULHERN

Connie Kehler, the executive director of the Saskatoon-based Canadian Herb, Spice and Natural Health Product Coalition, can take you on a tour of the entire country and tell you the strengths of each province.

For example, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are big producers of fiddleheads. In P.E.I., it's hawthorn berries and rose hips. In Ontario, there is a wide, hard-to-pin-down range but there is also a lot of research being done. Yet, if you want to know how many farmers are planting how many acres of what crop and earning how much from it, that information just isn't out there.

"It really is frustrating for people who are used to doing agriculture and counting this stuff, because those figures aren't available and they aren't going to be," Kehler says. Partly, it's because people move in and out of the herb business fairy rapidly as the market demands. Partly, it's a matter of business preservation.

"A lot of these are niche markets, sometimes very profitable, sometimes not. Four producers can fill a market, depending on how organized they are, but in about three phone calls, if that information gets out, they can lose it," Kehler says.

Sean Westerveld, herb and ginseng specialist for the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA), puts a $10-$20 million price tag on the Ontario herb industry. He can't give an absolute dollar value for it, but he does agree that markets are small and producers are guarded.  "If a producer has a good market somewhere, with a buyer, they don't want to advertise it," he says, "so there is a lot of secrecy that way."

Westerveld says more organization might be helpful to producers and he believes the long-term prospects for that are good. One of the bright spots in Ontario is the research being done at the University of Guelph's Simcoe Research Station, where 120 different herbs are planted in test plots. The OMAFRA herb demonstration garden established in 2010 with a grant from the Norfolk Soil and Crop Improvement Association, includes culinary herbs, English and European medicinals, native herbs and berries grown for the health market, among others.

Westerveld says the Simcoe plots are being used to note winter hardiness and pest stress. "We will have quite a bit of information from the plots on just what pests show up and what kind of production issues or challenges growers might expect." 

Information drawn from the research plots will be available next year on a new OMAFRA crop opportunities website. It will contain information on a number of crops, including herbs, both culinary and medicinal.

OMAFRA is also working with the Ontario Lavender Association. Westerveld says 27 different lavender varieties have been tested on six grower sites across the province to evaluate flower characteristics, oil characteristics and winter hardiness.

Anita Buehner, chair of the 21-member lavender association, says the association recently got $41,000 in research funding from the Sand Plains Community Development Fund. The fund is a federal program set up to help five counties – Norfolk, Oxford, Elgin, Middlesex and Brant – replace their tobacco economy. Buehner says the money will help with the variety trials.

"Because of our climate," Buehner says, "we are looking for plant hardiness. After that, we are looking at plant shape, the structure of the plant, the colouring of the flowers, the amount of bloom on each individual stem." She says samples will be analyzed this winter at the University of Guelph to determine chemical components, oil production and profile of the oil.

Lavender in Ontario, Buehner says, is a small, niche agritourism industry. Oils are used to scent made-on-the-farm bath products. Flowers, the source of the oil, are also used in salads and dried for herb mixes. Buehner hopes the research will narrow the choice for growers down to four or five ideal varieties for Ontario.

The University of Guelph is also the site of a human nutrition study to see whether spearmint tea has a positive effect on those suffering from osteoarthritis. The study is just getting underway and the university is still seeking people with osteoarthritis of the knee as study subjects. Results should be known in four or five months.

The human study follows earlier trials on horses. Results of the horse study indicate that spear shows promise in reducing inflammation and pain and perhaps slowing the progression of arthritis, which is common in horses.

If the study shows positive results, there could be more demand for the variety of spearmint developed at the university, which has a high concentration of rosmarinic acid, a powerful antioxidant and anti-inflammatory. That demand could lead to grower opportunities for Ontario farmers. BF