The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.

Hello, I'm Kimberly King, and welcome to the mother's market radio show, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition.

On today's show, ever wonder where those fresh herbal supplements come from?

Well, today you'll hear from a farmer who did things his way and it made all the difference, plus later we'll tell you what's new at mother's market and what's going on around town, but first up, Randy Birch is a licensed registered nurse organic farmer and herbalist. He's a co-founder of organs wild harvest. Randy is extremely passionate about health and healing, the natural way, and we welcome him to the mother's market. Radio ready? How are you?

I'm doing fine, thank you. How are you?

I'm fine. Thank you to be here.

Thanks, it's great to have you here.

Why don't you fill our audience a little bit in on your mission and your work before we get to the show's topic.

Okay, well, you know, my mission basically is to make sure that there's plenty of good herbal medicine for not only this generation but future generations, having been a healthcare worker professional, most of my adult life pretty much...

I really... I started out back in the Midwest as a registered nurse and a physician's assistant. And during that time, I became very frustrated with the way that I was helping to practice medicine, it seemed like way too much unnecessary surgery over use of heavy duty pharmaceuticals that I saw our patients coming back and we're treating the side effects from the pharmaceutical singing dock it's right here in the PDR. These are side effects. Oh no. We can take care of that. So I felt as though at that time we were driving the disease process deeper into the body, and so during that time, which was in the late mid-80s, in the mid-80s, early late 80s, I started exploring less on basic methods in healthcare, started growing some herbs started studying the old Arabic medicine in Chinese medicine and a Native American medicine, and what they used... And I lived in southern Missouri at the time, and so I studied with the Osage and a Delaware, and these Indians were using in those areas. For medicine, it's interesting, you look at where all the major tribes where there are all these herbs that grow there and they... So they landed where the herbs were, and so I started making extracts and teachers and treating my dogs and my cats and my kids, see anybody else I could try to talk into doing Larrabee concoction and... Oh my gosh, stuff worked and what... This is amazing. So I said, there is a purpose on this earth for these plants and we've lost that connection, and so it's been my goal since then to do that, so...

I love this.

So you're here today to talk about them. And today, actually, we're talking about healthy living, the natural way, and so let's start... I wanna start by asking you, I understand that you and your wife started that company, and you said how many years ago...

Well, we're 20 years in business as organs, we harvest... We really got into working with herbs a few years before that, and during that time I was exploring becoming a naturopathic physician, and so I visited the bastar University in the School of naturopathic medicine in Portland. And I think it was during that time then when I visited them a disinterest and I saw the quality of the plant material that they were using to make plant medicine for their patients that I went, Wow, I said, it's got better stuff in this at home and it's like then the lights went up and I said, Well, let's target the naturopathic physician, so we really started out on that level... Of course, my wife's the business side of the company, and so I had my little 12 pack of encapsulated arms, I was going and talking to all the young docs, and my wife was off to the health food stores with Baby on back and pretty soon we started selling product to the health fosters, and it just took off. I just basically took off from that point, so... Well, that's great, you have a partner for life there, and now you have started, so why is your company different than any other herbal supplement companies?

I think we're beginning... And I guess probably the way to say this is that we've really set ourself support in the marketplace to do the fact that we've really stuck to our guns, that it's important that you have high quality plant material that you don't try to take that through any type of process to actually isolate active constituents, and so from the onset of our company, it's been our goal to make the best plant medicine that we can possibly make, and that means that you have to take a very active role in not only doing that, but actually growing the herbs too, so that you have a good supply of raw material to make these different products with, and we just teamed up and started working on it and it came together, but it's always been about quality, it's always been about offering something at a fair price, so people can afford to buy this stuff. Because it's the people's medicine. This is what... These clamps are... They're here for us to use.

I love how you said you used your cats and dogs and kids as you... The ones that you were trying everything on there, so... I think that's great. And so, sometimes maybe did things... Did you see not go right with that or you always felt like everything was a... You mean I as your audience there?

Or it was my dogs and the cats and the kids and everyone else, you know... It's been quite a journey since the time we started our company when a lot of people didn't even really know what organic was all about, but we've always been organic farmers, I've been an organic farmer for 25 years, and so you have to have healthy soils and healthy plants to health, healthy people in our environment is so terribly contaminated now, so that's really the things that we work towards on a daily basis, and they have that high quality, fresh plant material, so it's not put on a boat and shipped over here from some other country across the other side of the earth.

And I think that's also what makes you stand out and what makes you different, what's the difference in a whole versus a standardized extra... Basically holes as nature intended to have thousands of active constituents, and so although a lot of the products these days are targeted towards specific health problems, most of the herbs do many things once they get inside your bodies, and so they... Team didn't know what to do.

Okay, and so it was about 25, 30 years ago when they decided to standardize herbs, and that was really spun from the fact that in Europe, they wanted to do clinical trials, and so they gathered a lot of product from different companies through Europe, and they realized that there was a lot of in-continuity and in products, some stuff was really good, some stuff wasn't so good, some products didn't even have the right genus and species in there, and so it's like, how are we gonna do a clinical trial less... We have a standard base to start from, and so they said... A bunch of scientists got together, say, Well, let's figure out what the active constituent is, and these plants like 80% Silliman milk thistle, or you know the 25% titulus DES that you find in black co-hoh for a minute. Passport, the list goes on and honestly, they isolated these BACON stated says, Now we have to run these through solving to bring those levels up to what they say is a therapeutic level, I've never believed that's necessary hours if their process properly have that same level of activity and sometimes even more and more stability for the shelf life than the standardized extracts do, so... We've stuck to our guns. The standardized were big back in early 90s, everybody's online to go to a standard desert, I went, Nope, I practice in old time medicine, the traditional ways, it's always been done, and 20 years later, it's paying off, where now the second fastest growing a diliman caps line in the nation, from a little company that we started in her garage, I... Oh my gosh.

We did it here.

Congratulations, and that is good, and I love the fact that you say you... You stuck to your guns. And now like what's going on for you?

He stuck to it.

So again, I kinda asked this, but what's said to you, apart from other companies that do the same thing? I do the same thing as if.

Well, part of that is our processing, and one of the things is that we do all our own processing, and so on our farm, we have encapsulates, we have dryers, we have a full QC lab, we make all their own extracts and so a lot of the stuff comes right off the farm fresh.

The trick is that if you do it yourself and do your encapsulation, most companies use high-speed equipment and third party encapsulation services for them, they don't do their own work, we're very much a hands-on company, and so we voice, I believe the best medicine is always been made by hand. And so on that level, we have equipment that runs much slower, so we can speed it up or slow it down by doing that, we don't have to add things like extra silicon dioxide or flowing agents, because if you're running 10000 capsules an hour on a high speed equipment to get the powder to drop into the capsule, you have to add fun agents like silicon dioxide or meguro actually make it slicker, it slides in the powder, herbs come in all various shapes and forms, some are very, very fluffy, really hard to get, very many milligrams in a capsule, others that like the roots are heavier and so it's easier, but so we can slow or machines down for the really fluffy light stuff until the capsule fills to wait or we can speed it up for the heavy stuff. But we run about 25000 hours at the highest, and probably more like about 15000 capsules an hour, so it's more painstaking, it takes longer to do it, but it actually makes a big difference because then we have a totally 100% clean product, it's Herb and a non-GMO capsule and... Wow, and that's all right there on your phone, right on our farm, and how many people work with you, and we have about 35 employees or for...

I think that it's just, again, talks about the integrity of what your company is, most of our employees have been there. From the beginning.

Really?

Yeah, and so we've empowered them to make decisions and it's not... I don't micromanage.

Yeah, and we've surround ourselves with very smart people that have the same passion and love for what they're doing as we do, and it's a mission, and we all know that mission and that's to do our very best to make good medicine for people and make it at a low price. So they can actually buy it.

You can see you're passionate about what you want to you statisticians beginning. I love that.

And have you ever taken a camera behind the scenes, I would love to see what... Have I taking the camera? Being set a little bit, we have a little bit... We're starting to do videos now, and then we're gonna do visions, I've actually from the time the seed goes into the grant until it turns into a product, so we've always talked about it. Now we're gonna actually do it, not to give away any of your secrets, but it would be kind of neat to see that process yet no one wants to do what we do, it's too hard, we... But authentic, that it... And its authentic is good.

Well, we wanna be the first to get behind that, so... Go, Thank you.

Yeah, Stay tuned, right at that age to... What do you think or why do you think you've been so successful? You kind of really did talk about that, but it's because you're authentic, isn't it?

I think why... I think one of the things that... One of the major things that we've seen in the last few years is the fact that on most of our products were able to put a structure function on the label, we watch people read the labels and knowing that we have a very clean product, and... Thank you, China. For messing things up for everybody, and thank you for the gmos because everybody's going off. We don't want gmos, we want stuff from the United States. And I've also seen a really big turn around in the last probably five years that people from the Baby Boomers to the lowlands are starting to figure it out. You know, they're going, Wow, I don't wanna go on to pharmaceuticals like my parents did, and they want a product, it's really clean, and so there's a lot of things going on even with that, and so when they read the label and they say, Wow, this is perfect this is exactly what we're looking for now. And it works, you know, We have to figure... We've been growing at about 24% a year.

So about 75% of that is our return customers, and then we're gonna get new customers, and so it's been a really nice steady trip.

What about your customer base? Do you find a percentage of who that clientele is...

Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

Interesting enough is seen as, Oh, the Baby Boomers have dropped down a little bit, but they're still pretty strong, the buyers, the people that mainly make the decisions on miners are, from what we understand, middle-aged women between all... Between the ages of maybe 30 and 50.Okay, and why... Because they're the caregivers, they're out there looking to take care of their family, take care of their parents, take care of their grandkids, and you still look at the world population, 80% of all the medicine to this day is still given by moms in their homes across the arts and so on in the user Benedictine, so we're one of the few countries that uses so many pharmaceuticals, hence the name mother's market. Yeah, and mother's market.

Absolutely, so yeah, absolutely. You know... That's amazing part of it. And I said that, we get it. People are getting it. And so those are the people that do the buy and make the decisions, and because they're very invested in there doing what they love to do, and that's to watch over take care of their old husbands that don't know any better, they take her... Their kids, their grandparents, so... Well, this is really fascinating. It's great information, Randy. So we're gonna have to be quick break, but stay with us. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. And welcome back to the mother's market radio show. And we wanna remind you that if you missed any portion of today's show, you can always find us on iTunes by searching mother's market or download the show from our website, mother's market dot com, click the link for radio and listen to past shows, plus download our Healthy Recipes and money savings coupons, all available at mother's market dot com.

And now back to our interview with Oregon's wild harvest founder Randy Bush.

So Randy, tell me more about your capsules and why do they work so well?

Well, one of the things that I realized is, and we started looking at why they wanted the standardized RBS in the first place, to the fact that they didn't... The whole orbs didn't seem to work very well. Was the fact that it's all about oxidation, and if you think about that, in most cases, a whole root or a whole seed or a home, the top of the plant is gonna be have that locked down energy the minute that you take something from a hole and into a powder, you increase surface area and you allow for heat, like more stern are to get to that plant material, it immediately breaks down, so it's kind of like the concept of having fresh coffee, and you have fresh coffee, you buy certified organic fresh coffee beans. You crying those beans up, but when you open that bag of coffee in the morning, smells really good, right.

It hits the coffee grinder, it gets better, and then pretty soon your whole kitchens fellow, is the coffee smell so good?

Well, that wonderful smell is oxidation at plant materials breaking down as it sets there, and so I realized what we need to do is just make our customers fresh coffee every day, and so we don't do big batches, we don't do a six month or a year supply at a time, we do a three months supply at a time, and so our billing department is really big, once you get the mill set up, it takes a couple hours to get everything ready, you could easily mil a 1000 pounds in a day, but I can't sell 1000 pounds of encapsulated herbs in three months or four months, and so we do small batches and so we'll do enough to make a supply for about three months supply at the most, so we'll only mill three or 400 pounds and do three or 4000 bottles. What does that do? That hits that powder and we could take it from a hole to a powder and into a capsule within a 24 to 40-hour period, then when you open that bottle and you smell it, you're actually gonna actually smell something, it's not a sterile pill inside a bottle, and so immediately your body recognizes is that something is useful, even our... When you put him in, your master's gonna be a subtle taste and the subtle smell, your body immediately understands that this is what it needs, and so you produce digestive ensigns to break that plant material down very quickly, and it's very fresh through our shelf life studies and watching what we've been doing, we found that not only do you have the active constituent in that climate, but you also have thousands of others, has always been traditionally used, and so very fresh, people try it, it works, they smell it, it tastes good, and they get good results, and so that's kind of what's driven us to do that... Does that make sense?

It absolutely... That's that coffee. And do that.

So absolutely, I think that we just make word in the Starbucks of durable industry, that's a great a...

Okay, so I understand that you're a certified organic farmer and processors and that recently purchased more land in central Oregon. Let's talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, well, we've realized many years ago that the key to being successful in the key for our company to go into the next generation and to be sustainable is the fact that we have to have land... Yes, and we have to grow our own herbs, the demand for organic plant material to make medicinal plant medicine is extremely high, and so it's getting harder and harder to source quality plant material.

Over the last 20 years, I've built a really big network of certified organic farms, and I promote sustainable organic agro business, and so we've put a lot of people kind of into the little side line business on their land and they grow herbs for us and they know our specs, and so then they can deliver those products to us, that Herb to us, but our goal is to be pretty much vertically integrated from the seed to the bottle, we were in the beginning, we outgrew that and now we're catching back up, so now we have over and we will soon have over 300 acres of certified organic farm land to grow our herbs on and my son probably busy today over in Central Oregon plan and stuff, so... Yeah, that's nice that you've passed it along to the... Yeah, we already a second generations taken over, so I'm not gonna end up selling... This goes to them. And it goes to their kids. Oh, that's wonderful. I'm sure many people listening don't really know much about biodynamic farming and what that really sets that farming method apart from organic for me. So let's talk about biodynamic farming.

Well, years ago, once again, I started really looking at... And I'm always trying to find better ways to do things. And biodynamic farming was in the back of my mind the whole time, and so basically, biodynamic farm is the philosophy set down by Rudolf Steiner, who was a philosopher and scientist and quite an amazing person, he actually... That was established in the 1920s in Europe, during the Green Revolution, which was the introduction of pesticides are resides in chemical fertilizers, and the farmers became terrified because they not only killed the bugs, they killed all the birds, they killed... Their cows began to work cabs and their children seemed to be sick, and so they went to Steiner and they talked to him and to give a series of lectures, and he taught them how to heal the earth, and so basically he looked at the farm as a living entity within himself, and he broke the farm down into body systems, for example, the farm has a digest, the ground has a digestive system, think about the earth worms and all the things that go on a new soil, it has all these body systems, and so we built a bunch of homeopathic preps to put onto the land to actually stimulate not only the microbial life and all the other things that are going on in the soil, but also bring the farm back to center, and so it was the original form of organic and still the largest form of organic farming in the world, it's done by one organization called Demeter, and so we've been now biodynamic farmers for seven years, and I could talk about biodynamic farming for the next three hours.

But that's just a quick overview. Easton, I found it interesting. You said Rudolf Steiner, this originated in the 1920s, a 1920, so going green really started back in the 20s.

Oh, absolutely, yeah.

And they had been doing that the generation before, but once the pesticides came in and then maybe say, Well, we made a mistake here, so... Yeah.

Oh, that's fascinating. You talk a little bit about... And thank you for introducing that to the way your herbal supplements, let's get our OEE pretty much do a full line of certified organic encapsulate irbs, organic alcohol extracts, specialty products, we do organic glycerin or strength lies in our capsules, and I've actually built our capsule line around disease processes, should I say, I probably shouldn't say that, but processes that are very directly related to stress, stress is a number one leading cause of illness in today's society, everything from inflammation to digestive disorders, to sleep disruption, it wears away on your body, and so I've created this line, very strongly around having a lot of those products be adapted, those are herbs have helped the body to adapt to stress, just a list of few Oshawa is My Favorites and old Arabic Urban is actually an Aramean medicine. It means giving you the strength of a horse, and so all adaptor gens balance the neuro-introns stent, and that directly affects the adrenal glands and cortisol levels in the body, and there's adaptions listing anything from Ashwood, American Jensen, electro caucus rodeo, Mara. The list goes on. We have around 11 adaptions.

The other side of the coin in what we've done is sexual, so look at other things that happen from stress, inflammation, chronic fatigue, immune depression, and so stress shutdown two major parts of the body, it shuts down the immune system and it shuts down the digestive system and then it directly affects sleep patterns, all of those need to work together with the core and a circadian rhythms within the body to be healthy, most of us are extremely stressed, most of our adrenal glands are at some area of pretty significant depletion, and so that leads to lots. Lots of different illnesses.

Well, guess what, nature has all that waiting to take care of us, and all you have to do is learn how to use it and learn about it, and it's very safe, it's very effective on that level, and so we have anti-inflammatories. Think of this, all the spices are anti-inflammatory, from Rosemary to rice, which is a big seller now, and everyone wants to... Right, 'cause it's such a powerful anti-inflammatory, and so I always tell people, if you have a bunch of spices at home, go home and throw them away, come back, go back to store and buy new fresh lens and start cooking with spices because it directly affects inflammation and immune response. And so, once again, I always like to reenter this, this Earth was set up perfect for us, we have every plant on this earth that we need, and every ecosystem has plans to protect and help the people that are not in those systems live and the animals and so, so we have adaptions, we have anti-inflammatories like the spices, the other major problem that most people have at this point in time is the ability to sleep, you can't shut your mind off or you'd go to work hard all day, you come home about the time you get all the kids and everybody taken care of, and you can't shut your mind off and you know you have to have sleep, and so there's a lot of really good herbs that improved sleep patterns help you go off to sleep. skull cap is an amazing herb.

It's also a nerve called a nerve or a nerve, and I always think it's think about scallop, if you can't shut your mind off, pull that capped a little bit lower on your skull, so you pull the skull cap down and you will go off to sleep and it does help you go off to sleep and stole other herbs like valerian are very profound and putting you to sleep, but then you wake up back up for a few hours later to ask what happens with most people is You'll get off to sleep pretty good, three or four in the morning, wake up and you're going... Again, well, the nice thing about a lot of these herbs is they don't leave you so dated when you wake up in the morning, so even at 20 in the morning, you can take scallop, you'll go back off to sleep and you wake up refreshed and so it's all there at these plants are pretty amazing when you look at that, and my feeling is that we're about three generations from lost from that connection, and it's time for people to reconnect with the plant world to understand at these plants and what they do. And I always encourage people, buy some seeds, get some seeds, plant some herbs in your back here on your pot, so you know what they do and you get familiar with these plants, it's very important.

We're at the verge of a healthcare crisis, like we've never seen... The train's coming.

Yeah, and you said you started off that way in your registration to first-hand and absolute, and that's what I think is so fascinating because you just kept seeing people get over-medicated maybe, and then coming back in for the reasons... Very alright.

And you do, and you see, once you walk out of the doctor's office with the pharmaceutical in your hands, you've given up, you pretty much turn your life over to a drug that's gonna cover up the symptoms, but it's not... I not gonna address the deeper issues and why you're sick in the first place, you know... And so a healthy diet, number one, Nero's de organic food, fresh, good fresh water, and you're 95% there, and the herbs are good food, it's all there, there's no true defining lines between really nutritious food and good herbal medicine. It's all the same way, and all these years of your research and look at what it's come to you for winter, we have a mission, that's very important when you're living it too.

It's been very interesting, thank you very much for your time, Randi, and do some great advice, and we really appreciate your knowledge and your research, and we look forward to having you on again, but in the meantime, you can get more information on Randy and his website, organs wild harvest dot com, and we look forward to your next visit.

Thank you.

Thank you, pleasure.

Thanks for listening to the mother's market radio show, and for shopping at mother's market, the advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen, mother's recommends consulting your health for your personal medical condition E-