Ethan Swiggart Tells His Ginseng Story at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival
Story Text: On week one (June 23-26) of the 2022 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Ethan Swiggart, a ginseng researcher from Middle Tennessee University, joined colleague Iris Gao and fellow ginseng experts Ed and Carol Daniels (Shady Grove Botanicals) and Eric Burkhart and Lisa Grab (Penn State University) to provide information about American ginseng conservation to thousands of visitors to the "Earth Optimism: Inspiring Conservation Communities" program. While at the Festival, Swiggart recorded a short audio piece for the organization Seed Broadcast, telling how he got involved in researching ginseng. The audio recording is located here, and below is the transcript of the story. Transcript from SeedBroadcast recording EO festival June 2022: My name is Ethan Swiggart, and I am at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival with Earth Optimism in Washington DC. I grew up in Tennessee, and I was raised by parents that really pushed me to be outside. We did a lot of camping trips, and kayaking trips and that developed a strong love of nature and the natural world for me. After high school, I decided to join Americorps, and I went there, and I got to travel all around, and when I came back, I took a job as an arborist, and I got to literally swing around in the trees and be a part of that community for a while, and I eventually got hurt and decided to switch gears out of tree climbing and studying plants in a more academic setting. So, the love of plants is what brought me to ginseng because ginseng does not behave like a normal plant. Most plants will germinate pretty quickly, and they’ll grow pretty quickly, and if you add inputs, you get more. With American ginseng specifically, it has doubled dormancy. So, the seed takes two years to germinate. That’s interesting in and of itself. Breaking that dormancy is an entire field of research to try to get that seed to germinate. After that, to get any sort of harvest off of the root, it’s around seven years to get that root to be of sustainable size. That’s also interesting to me, it’s not an annual crop. It also grows in the woods and, as I said earlier, being in that forest is really important to me, and ginseng doesn’t grow in ugly places, and so that really wonderful habitat of the Appalachian Mountains in that diverse ecosystem is where ginseng really needs to be. If you push it and try to cultivate it, in which you can do, but you don’t get nearly as much. And so, these are the things that have attracted me to ginseng and keep me coming back to try to learn more about it and get to know that plant. Ginseng is really interesting. It’s been around for thousands of years, and in the Appalachian region where it naturally grows, there’s people there that know a lot about it, and they have these skills on how to grow it, and this wisdom gets passed down and passed down, but there’s oftentimes not a lot of scientific research being put into that. One of the things that I’m interested in with the International Ginseng Institute, is to take these ideas and put scientific tests to them. One of the things that I’m looking at recently is companion planting. Ginseng does better when there’s golden seal around it, and lot of people are familiar with companion planting and we know that when they’re together they both do better, but so what I’m looking at is taking botanical extracts from goldenseal and looking at what active ingredients are actually in there, and I’m finding out that that extract reduces fungal pathogen pressure on ginseng. So, we’re producing these ways to protect ginseng from fungal pathogen pressure using the botanical extracts on plants that are growing right beside it in that same ecosystem.Ethan Swiggart Tells His Ginseng Story at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival
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