Farmers in the ”far east” of England and the Netherlands grow ginseng

NPH inc. has been working together with thirteen Dutch farmers for several years now
to cultivate the medicinal ginseng plant (panax quinquefolium) in the Netherlands and has recently started a cooperation with a UK grower at Stratton Farm. NPH also initiated the cultivation of the Asian ginseng (Panax C.A. Meyer) which will be harvestable very soon.
NPH is a full subsidiary of the Dutch Cooperative Sugar Beet Growers Organization (CSV) and the North Brabant Christian Farmers’ Union (NCB). NPH was originally set up in 1986 to stimulate the marketing of by-products, such as lime fertilizer and cattle fodder, that occur during the refinement of sugar beets to make sugar.
In 1993 this same NPH was put in charge of the cultivation of ginseng, in 1994 the trade in ginseng roots and products was added to its responsibilities and in 1995 the agency for the cultivation of chicory joined the list. The chicory roots are processed by Sensus, a full subsidiary of Cosun (formerly known as the SuikerUnie or Sugar Union), where the roots are refined to make fructose and the low calorie food fiber “Inuline”.
The CSV, being a cooperative member of the cooperation Cosun, owns shares in Cosun and therefore delivers all the sugar beets from the individual members to Cosun. CSV has approximately 1750 members. The combined organization of CSV/NPH with all its activities has an annual turnover of more than 25 million US dollars, which also has a positive effect on the solvency and liquid assets.

“More than five years ago the project office of the NCB and what was then the Platform for Agricultural Market and Product Innovation (PAMI), an organization in which the provincial government and the agricultural businesses worked together, came to the NPH with a request to initiate the cultivation of ginseng,” says Quirien de Bekker, secretary of the CSV board of managers. And that’s exactly what happened.
In 1993 the NPH sowed two fields of ginseng, with a combined area of 1 hectare. CSV chairman Theo van Esch: “We wanted to discover whether ginseng would flourish under Dutch conditions and at the same time we wanted to show others where the possibilities and difficulties lay in ginseng cultivation.”
A year later, in the autumn of 1994, 10 farmers sowed 10 fields of ginseng, a total area of 5 hectares. The risk for the venture was shared between the farmers and NPH. To cover its risks NPH received subsidies from PAMI, NCB, the Rabobank project fund and the ministry of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Fishery (LNV). In the autumn of ‘95 another 4 hectares of ginseng was sown, in the autumn of ‘96 almost
6 hectares and in the autumn of ‘97 an additional 4 hectares.
The UK grower at Stratton Farm, owned by father Peter and son Simon Tunnard, started ginseng cultivation by themselves in 1995.
They increased their venture by seeding about an other acre each year. Through a mutual contact they got in thouch with NPH in the Netherlands. It turned out that both NPH and Stratton Farm had the same worries about the marketing side of ginseng. Therefore they decided to join together at the beginning of 1998. Processing of all the roots is centralized by NPH in the Netherlands and the Tunnard’s are responsible for the growing and marketing in the UK.

Large sums of money are needed for such a venture, making such a step unfeasible for an individual farmer. Another prohibitive factor is the fact that there is much we did not know about the cultivation and processing of ginseng in Europe. All the know-how necessary for growing and processing this crop has from the very beginning of the project been acquired through our own experience and intensive research.

Ben Schepens, project manager of the ginseng project, describes the planting cycle: “Autumn is the time to sow. The seed is then a year old. The sowing takes place on seed beds with a machine we developed ourselves. After sowing, the seed beds are immediately covered with straw. Unfortunately, we had to learn by experience that ginseng seed must never dry out.. During the winter a shade screen is built over the beds.
This provides shade in the spring when the plants come up.” Schepens continues, “In the course of the past 5 years we have tried to mechanize the cultivation as much as possible. We’ve been quite successful in doing that. We have had to invest quite a bit in research and development of machines. An advantage to this was that we learned a great deal about the very specific needs of ginseng in the process.”
Tunnard adds: “And luckly for us in the established cooperation we are able to benefit from the experience and knowledge that is gained by NPH in the Netherlands”.

Ginseng grows originally in dark forest areas, so it cannot bear much direct sunlight.
“The cultivation of ginseng is quite different from any other crop we know in European agriculture,” says Tunnard. “In the course of the project we have therefore learned to approach the needs of ginseng from the point of view of a woodlands situation. So we create for ginseng a climate that even enables us to grow edible fungi in the open field. This is, after all, the climate that is most favourable to the natural growth and development of ginseng.”

Favourable circumstances.

Our experience has proved to us that the self developed Western growing conditions, under which we grow ginseng in the Netherlands and the UK, are highly favourable. “The soils we use retain moisture reasonably well, it has a relatively high percentage of organic material and is rich in a wide range of nutrients,” explains Van Esch. Schepens adds, “We are lucky that the participating farms each have a slightly different type of soil. By testing the fields and crops frequently we have in a very short time span been able to gain a lot of knowledge and experience about the effects of soil and fertilization on the quality and growth of ginseng roots. This enables us to ensure that the crops in the different soil types are of a consistent high quality.”

De Bekker: “At this time the cultivation in the Netherlands is a joint effort between NPH and about thirteen farmers. The farmers invest their labour and NPH invests material and research in the venture. In the UK the total investment for cultivation is done by Stratton Farm.
NPH is responsible for the coordination of the whole project. The project has been set up so that each farmer sows ginseng every year, therefore after four years the ginseng can be harvested annually. Only when the first 4-year cycle is complete does the cultivation begin to offer prospects to the participating farmers.”

Van Esch explains NPH’s standpoint, “All the farmers have different sandy soil, but they are situated fairly far apart in the region, so that we are able to test the possibilities in lighter and heavier soil types. In this way we also spread the risks of the production in Europe.”
He judges that 11/2 - 2 hectares of ginseng in a cultivation cycle provide a full-time work load for one man year round. There is also contract work involved: making the seed-beds, mulching the newly sowed beds with straw and harvesting.
After harvesting, the roots are put into cool storage immediately. “After that,” Schepens informs us, “the roots are sorted according to thickness during the washing process. They are then dried in specifically controlled conditions in a newly developed drying machine. After being dried with utmost care, the roots are sorted once more and processed as necessary, so that the end result is a marketable product.”
The drying process must be carried out with the greatest care in order to preserve the medicinal qualities of the root. On the world market the buyers judge the product mainly by sensory perception; by its form, shape, interior and exterior colour, scent and taste. In the meantime NPH has already launched itself onto the world market. “Our roots have been well received on this very traditional market, and the quality of our product has earned us very good reactions,” says Schepens. That encourages us to expand our worldwide market even further.

Quality products

This Dutch company has been producing Euro Ginseng products by a network of specialized companies for four years now in the Netherlands. For the past three years NPH brings capsules on the market under its own brand name: Euro Ginseng, which have been made from locally grown ginseng roots. The amount of effective ingredients (ginsenosides) in the capsules is standardized to a very high level. “We wanted to have the marketing side of the business included from the very beginning of the project, in order to safeguard the offset of the harvest as much as possible. Mostly we are working with agencies around the world in order to get onto the international market as firmly as possible with our Euro Ginseng products.” says De Bekker. “The test phase of our new product, Euro Ginseng ointment, has completed about a year ago and has given very good and objective results on all kinds of skinproblems. We launched the ointment in the market at the end of 1997. Now, at the end of 1998 we are introducing our newest product: Euro Ginseng slices. With these ± 1 mm thin slices made from the whole dried ginseng root people can see that Euro Ginseng stands for quality, because they can see and taste the ginseng root in an easely usable form”.

Schepens continues, “For some time now we have also been working together with the Dutch firm Sensus in Roosendaal to develop a semi-manufactured product for the food and drink industry. This powder, which is easy to dissolve and can be delivered in an extreme high percentage of active ingredients, should enable us to tap into a large potential market in the western world.”

Tunnard expounds, “We only put ginseng products of a very high quality on the market. We hope this will help to improve the image of ginseng. In general it is important in the western world that people be able to see the beneficiary effects of ginseng within a reasonable period of time, and that these effects are measurable or clearly noticeable. Only then do we have a chance of long term success.”
“Ginseng is an expensive product,” admits Van Esch. “But in price per active ingredient we are the least expensive on the European market.”
The Dutch Consumer Organization had laboratory research done to test the amount of active ingredient in a large number of ginseng products that were available on the Dutch market.
“The quality of most of those products was piteously low, which certainly is not good for ginseng’s image,” says Schepens heatedly. Tunnard: “The quality status of the ginseng products in the UK market is about the same”. Schepens continous: “An additional problem is that there are great differences in the methods used in different parts of the world to analyse amounts of ginsenosides, in order to determine the percentage of active ingredient (ginsenoside).
A couple of years ago we completed a Dutch project in which we worked together with the privately owned laboratory GAS and a couple of universities in Canada. For this project we received financial support from the Dutch Committee for Agricultural Innovation in North Brabant (LIB). An enormous amount of work was done to arrive at a worldwide quality control standard that would be uniform and trustworthy.”
“We know that our Dutch HPLC-method doesn’t give the highest absolute test results. We total the percentages for 7 different ginsenosides, ignoring the “pollutants” (molecules that react like ginsenosides but are not) in our test results. Many of the other testing methods include these pollutants in their results,” Schepens explains. “Experience has shown that the analysis results from abroad, using another method of analysis, often gave a test result that was twice as high as the results with our method, even when the same root was used for testing. This leads to difficulties when marketing. For that reason we advise potential clients to test a sample of our roots or products with their own test methods.”
The amount of active ingredient is the only objective method to measure the effectiveness of the product.

Van Esch: “Our approach to the market is quite different from that of the trade in traditional health products. We want to maintain a long term market and therefore we must deliver the best quality for the lowest possible price.”
De Bekker completes the story, “Disappointment in the use of ginseng products is almost always caused by the fact that people have been sold products of inferior quality, or because they fail to follow the instructions stipulating that ginseng must be taken daily for a number of consecutive weeks or months.”


August, 1998.