Dollars to boost ginseng

Friday, March 4, 2011

by PAT CURRIE

It may not look like much, but the $63,000 federal investment announced Friday to boost sales of Ontario-grown ginseng in Asia might leverage a much brighter future for about 140 Norfolk County farmers.

"I’m very pleased," Doug Bradley, chairman of the Ontario Ginseng Growers Association, said Friday after Diane Finley, minister of human resources and skills development, made the announcement in Simcoe, once the heart of Ontario’s lucrative "tobacco belt." Finley was subbing for federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz.

Bradley said only about 6,000 acres are planted in ginseng in the county. Ginseng is a four-year crop. Only 1,500 to 2,000 acres of the root are harvested each year but prices have almost doubled to the $18-$22 a pound range in the past three years, meaning the latest five-million-pound crop had a value of some $100 million, he said.

Bradley, a former farm-equipment dealer, got into growing ginseng in 1986 "when there was something like a gold rush going on" as dozens of farmers abandoned tobacco and shifted to other crops including ginseng.

"Now the amateurs have been weeded out," he said, leaving the survivors to benefit from a five-year marketing program their association has signed with Ottawa.

Aimed at greater penetration into the huge market in Asia – initially in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China – where ginseng is highly prized as a natural boon to healthy living, the program has an annual budget of $120,000 financed 50-50 by the federal government and the ginseng growers association, he said. BF