Sleepy Hollow Herb Farm

In 1993 Cindi Beavers and her husband Randy recognized they would one day be faced with the choice of selling her grandfather’s farm or moving there and attempting to make a living.

Cindi's Grandfather had purchased the farm in 1932 when her Dad was three years old. The couple found it difficult to place a price on the years of work that had gone into the farm so, after three years of researching crop options and various other factors relating to mid-career transitions, they decided to develop their long time interest in medicinal plants and committed to a Five-Year Plan to convert the farm to organic production methods.

That goal was accomplished in 2001 when Sleepy Hollow Farm was certified organic by what was then the Georgia Organic Growers Association. It was also at that time the couple saw a pressing need for reliable information regarding how to sustainably produce plants that were, for the most part, wild collected.

Their focus turned to Goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis), a plant that had recently been placed on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species List II, and the research necessary to domesticate a wild collected plant without losing the attributes that make it valuable such as chemical marker content and bioactivity.

The couple developed a method of producing goldenseal on small, family operated farms. The picture below shows three generations planting goldenseal on Sleepy Hollow Farm. The method was taught to more than 25 other small farmers across the Southeast which resulted in the establishment of Botanipharm, LLC, the first 100% grower owned botanical processing company in the U.S., to cooperatively process the goldenseal into high quality products.