Hi my name is Bill Chioffi, I'm a Vice
President of global sourcing for Gaia
Herbs. I'm also on the advisory board of
the Appalachian Beginning Forest Farmers
Coalition and Gaia Herbs is a liquid
extract manufacturer, certified organic
operating in Brevard, North Carolina. We
operate a 260 acre certified organic
farm and certified organic manufacturing
facility where we make products that are
resold in health food stores, online,
and basically anywhere you can buy a
packaged herbal good - some of them you can
see behind me. You know we grow about
thirty percent of our biomass that we
use for our products on the farm, it can
vary with the yield obviously and then
we also have a need to buy botanicals
from different parts of the world
because they may not grow in North
Carolina or different parts of the
country and certainly some of those
botanicals come from Appalachia. Why
don't we go down and take a look at the
farm and we can take a look at an actual
hawthorne leaf and flower bud harvest
and then I can also show you some of our
drying techniques and post-harvest
handling which is very important for the
sale of raw materials to this sector of
the industry.
 
 
 
 
 
Harvest time is very important with
Hawthorn but also with all of the
medicinal herbs because you're trying to
get them at their peak of activity and
there are traditional harvesting methods
that have been tried and true for
centuries really. We try to use
traditional harvesting methods and times
and also look at are there any other
things that we can improve on. This
happens to be a leaf and flower harvest
so we're very concerned that they're
picked at the right time to get the
medicine correct but then we're also
concerned with not over-drying them
because they're a little delicate and it
doesn't take as much to dry them down.
If you had a root, you'd be concerned
about making sure the root was
harvested at the peak of activity and
then also that the root was clean and at a
proper state to be dried afterwards and
you'd have a very specific set of
standards that went along with your
root harvest so roots take a little bit
longer to dry so that is also something
you need to consider in your
post-harvest handling - what type of
equipment are you going to use to dry
roots vs leaf and flower. You may very
well be able to dry leaf and flower
like this outside in a protected area
under shade cloth and not need a dryer. We
happen to need a dryer because we
process tons of materials so we have
that advantage to use mechanical drying
but those are the types of things that
go into planning to grow a medicinal
crop from start to finish. So the
temperature at which you're drying an
herb is going to depend on the
botanical itself. Obviously we've got leaf and
flower material here which is a little
bit more delicate. The constituents that
are in the plant material that are the
main medicinal compounds are really
what's going to drive your temperature.
If it's something that's very
heat-stable like a resin or a
crystalline substance then maybe you can
use a little bit more heat. If it's a
flavonoid or something that's not real
stable when it's exposed to a lot of
heat or it's sugar compound like a
polysaccharide right
then you want to keep your temperatures very low because the sugars will be
destroyed in the drying process and
that's part of the medicine in the plant
so that takes that's where the art of
herbalism and herbal medicine and the
science really come together because
they're look... people have been drying
herbs for over 3,000 years as far as we
know, maybe longer
that's when they started writing things
down about it so this is nothing new
it's just a way that now we have ways to
measure what's going on with the
medicine in the plants.
Alright, so let me walk you through the
process of taking a raw material like
the hawthorn leaf and flower through our
process here at Gaia to get it from
dried botanical into a liquid-filled
phytocap. We take the raw material
whether we take it from our farm or
someplace else,
it's dry material it goes into large
extraction equipment that will use
alcohol and water at various
concentrations for the particular
material and we can also control for
temperature in those extractors.
Basically you're liberating all of the
chemicals that were saved inside that
raw plant material into a liquid
suspension, in our case alcohol and water.
Inside that same piece of extraction
equipment, the alcohol and water can also
be removed so that we're able to take
that liquid concentrate and deliver it
in a vegetarian capsule. So as the
alcohol and water are removed in this
piece of equipment, it can be mixed with
vegetable glycerin, lecithin, or another
carrier to replace the alcohol and water
but keep the extract very stable. So once
that extract is in a finished form, it's
like a thick, sort of a syrupy - little
thinner than honey consistency, then we
can put it into our capsule filling
equipment which will fill the capsules
with that liquid and seal it and then
those capsules are inspected for quality.
They're tested for all of the things
that we test for here at Gaia many
parameters and then they're, once they're
approved, they can be taken in bulk and
then taken to a different part of our
facility where bottles are filled with
each different type of capsule that
we're making and then once the bottles
are filled,
there's also another quality check done
to make sure that there is the right
number of capsules, that they're not
contaminated in any way, that there's
nothing in the bottle that shouldn't be
in there and that the
paperwork is right. Once that happens,
then the product can be released into
general inventory and taken to a
warehouse at Gaia where we can fill
orders for health food stores around the
country that are ordering our product
and then selling it finally to a
consumer.
