Description
By Jeff Carpenter & Melanie Carpenter
Trade paperback book
ISBN 9781603585736
416 pages, 8.00 x 10.00″
Both a business guide and a farming manual, The Organic Medicinal Herb Farmer shows you how to successfully grow and market organic medicinal herbs, as well as culinary herbs and at-risk native herbs.
Using their Zack Woods Herb Farm in Vermont as a backdrop, successful small-scale herb farmers Jeff and Melanie Carpenter cover the basic practical information any grower needs to get an organic herb farm up and running, including:
- Size and scale considerations, including farm layout and design;
- Soil and plant conservation;
- Field and bed prep, as well as plant propagation;
- Growing and cultivation methods, including tool selection;
- Harvesting, postharvest processing; and,
- Value-added products, business planning, and marketing.
The Carpenters also provide readers with fifty detailed plant profiles, going deeper into the herbs that every farmer should consider growing. In an easy-to-understand, practical, and comprehensive manner, you will learn how to focus on quality over quantity, and keep costs down by innovating with affordable equipment, rather than expensive technology. Market farmers who have never before considered growing medicinal herbs will learn why it’s important to produce the herbs domestically.
The Organic Medicinal Herb Farmer makes convincing case that organic medicinal herbs can be viable and profitable crops to grow. The Carpenters also demonstrate the incorporating medicinal herbs into existing farm operations can increase revenue in the form of value-added products, not to mention improve the ecological heath of farmland by encouraging biodiversity and permaculture as a path towards greater soil health.
No matter the herbal crop you hope to crow, this book will guide you through the entire process -from cultivation to creating value-added products.
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