A SPECIAL GROWERS’ REPORT OF AG ALERT ® CALIFORNIA Trees & Vines ®
Katie Reneker, founder of Carmel Berry Co., harvests elderflowers in the Salinas Valley. Native blue elderberries, which can grow 20 feet tall without pruning, are drawing interest as a possible niche crop.
Native shrub may have a future as commercial crop By Caitlin Fillmore
“It can be super frustrating to be the first person to try things. I can’t even describe how much has been lost,” said Reneker, who has since emerged as an advocate and mentor for elderberry farming in California. “But all the failures I experienced in those three years were super helpful in switching to (thinking), ‘How can we move the native blue elderberry forward?’ Instead of us starting all over, we would support other growers.” Small-scale elderberry production is luring other upstart growers, said Sonja Brodt, the agriculture and environment coordinator for the University of California Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program. While limited numbers of farmers use the plant for hedgerows for other crops, ambitious elderberry producers are looking to capitalize on natural hedges on their land to sell value-added products to restaurants or consumers. Brodt said it is hard to determine the amount of the crop produced in the state because elderberries don’t fall under traditional farming metrics. “This is a wild, unbred plant with no cultivars (and) has no known consistency of production that
Katie Reneker discovered the natural immune-boosting properties of elderberries in 2015, trading homemade syrups with her Carmel Valley neighbors who let her forage for the native plant. That inspired her to produce elderberries, as she looked to commercialize what has been largely a wild shrub hardly seen as a potential cash crop in California. As her idea grew into a business, about a dozen local farmers agreed to establish small trial plots. By 2017, a farmer in southern Monterey County offered to help Reneker plant 3 acres of American elderberries, a Midwestern cultivar prized for its pest resistance and strong, uniform yield. The niche crop, which grows abundantly throughout Europe and the Midwest commercially and as a native plant, has never successfully been cultivated on a production scale for West Coast consumers. In 2020, after three years, Reneker’s first commercial elderberry crop was ready. Her 3 acres of elderberries, planted in the county’s Greenfield community, sold right before the first crop of berries matured. The new venture was launched, even if it was suddenly out of supply and needing to grow.
See ELDERBERRIES, Page 8
March 8, 2023 Ag Alert 7
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