Daily Hampshire Gazette - Valley Bounty: Plant medicine for the people: Local herbal company grows their own ingredients

Oct 14, 2024

Anne Wagner, owner of Blue Crow Botanicals, in her gardens in Greenfield. STAFF PHOTO/CAROL LOLLIS

Anne Wagner, owner of Blue Crow Botanicals, in her gardens in Greenfield. STAFF PHOTO/CAROL LOLLIS

Anne Wagner, owner of Blue Crow Botanicals, in her gardens in Greenfield. STAFF PHOTO/CAROL LOLLIS

By JACOB NELSON

For the Gazette

Sometimes, medicine comes from a pill bottle. Other times, it grows right in your backyard, if only you knew how to access it.

Blending modern chemistry with traditional wisdom, Blue Crow Botanicals puts locally grown herbal medicine right at people’s fingertips.

“We’re a bio-regionally focused herbal medicine company making herbal extracts and oils,” says owner and director Anne Wagner. “We mostly use plants we grow ourselves, and the rest we source them from trusted partners locally and nationally.”

Blue Crow was founded by an accomplished herbalist and medicine maker named Bonnie Bloom. At the time, Bloom was working at Sojourns Community Health Clinic in Westminster, Vermont.

“The idea for this place grew out of the Soujourns’ need for quality herbal medicines, preferably grown locally,” Wagner says. “Bonnie was already an avid gardener herself. She understood the need and she built a business to meet it.”

While Bloom still sees patients, she decided to step away from Blue Crow Botanicals earlier this year. Wagner, who had spent eight years working and apprenticing under her wing, was an obvious choice to take over.

“Bonnie will always be the grandmother of Blue Crow, and she’s still an important advisor,” Wagner says with an obvious tone of reverence in her voice. “What I want is to continue her legacy of community care and excellence in medicine making.”

Wanger herself credits finding success with aromatherapy in 8th grade as her entry point to the world of plant medicine. Later in her 20s, she found community among people studying and practicing different forms of herbalism, including her good friend Jade Alicandro, a local clinical herbalist and teacher who started Milk and Honey Herbs. A stint working at Atlas Farm in Deerfield proved that working with her hands among plants and soil all day could be fulfilling. After having kids, Blue Crow Botanicals was the first job she eased back into. Finding it fit like a glove, she never left.

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Blue Crow Botanicals’ product line is headlined by a huge catalogue of almost 160 single-herb tincture extracts. Each one captures the medicinal properties of an individual plant, mushroom, or other natural material in a solution of water and alcohol. Single-herb extracts are ideal building blocks that people knowledgeable in herbal medicine – like their longest running customers, the practitioners at Sojourns – can combine to create personalized remedies.

They also make herbal-infused oils, topical salves, and several combined tincture extracts that either support certain systems or parts of the body or target certain ailments. Many of these combined tinctures target tick-borne illnesses like Lyme disease – no surprise given how common these infections are in New England.

“When Bonnie was working at Sojourns,” Wagner explains, “she created our Lyme formulas working alongside Dr. Alexis Chesney, who is a renowned naturopathic doctor focused on treating tick-borne illnesses. The FDA has strict rules about how we can talk about it, but I’m glad to say we hear stories from lots of people who find significant improvements using these formulas.”

Like all medicine, herbal remedies are best used with knowledgeable guidance. Especially for people with complex medical needs or who are already taking other medications, Wagner encourages working with a medical professional to make sure treatments have the best effect.

Blue Crow Botanicals’ farm is where the journey from plant to medicine starts for many of their products. “We grow on about an acre,” says Wagner, “and to me it’s just amazing how much medicine can come from a single row of plants. It’s really humbling.”

The perennial plant sections are a little wild by design. Over the years, some plants continue to grow and even seed younger generations outside the lines of where they first rooted. Annual plants, whose seeds are collected each year to plant again the next, live in more orderly rows.

Blue Crow Botanicals follows the logic that the best medicine comes from strong plants, and strong plants come from healthy soil. With that in mind, Wagner sees improving soil fertility as a new frontier for their herbal medicine making.

“We already add lots of compost,” she says, “and we don’t till the soil (which can disrupt the structure and release nutrients). But we want to keep improving our methods to be gentler and more effective. Dr. Alexa Smychkovich is a soil science researcher who is helping us study that.”

Back at their production facility in South Deerfield, precision becomes a little more important. As plants come in, they’re carefully washed and inspected. Depending on what part of the plant is used, roots might be scrubbed and chopped, petals plucked, or leaves trimmed. Finally, that plant material is put into a solution that will draw out the desired compounds and medicinal properties.

“Different herbs are best extracted in different solutions,” Wagner explains. “Like many things in herbalism, that knowledge is often passed down as a combination of folk medicine and scientific knowledge. Often, both those ways of knowing agree with each other, they’re just expressed differently. That’s what makes herbalism beautiful and complex.”

For their tincture extractions, Blue Crow uses solutions of water and organic cane alcohol in different ratios depending on the herb. Meanwhile, their medicinal oils and salves are made by first extracting into neutral oils.

“Today I just made lavender extract from the lavender we grew, which is a first for us,” she says. “Our facility often smells amazing – that’s one of the fun parts.”

Blue Crow Botanicals sells directly to many customers from their website (bluecrowbotanicals.com). For local customers, their South Deerfield facility has a tamper-proof pick-up area with 24-hour access. They also ship products nationally, and sell some of what they make at local stores, notably River Valley Co-op.

For Wagner, it’s the relationships she cultivates between the people around her and the plants themselves that are most meaningful. “I want to be of service, and I want to feel connected to my community, including the incredible herbalists and plant people living here,” she says. “And more than anything, I want what I do every day to be something I love and am dedicated to. Blue Crow Botanicals absolutely fulfills that for me, making medicine for my community.”

Jacob Nelson is communications coordinator for CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture). To learn more about all kinds of local farms growing food and medicine near you, visit buylocalfood.org.