Foster Farm Botanicals: Normalcy In Nature.

As Spring unfolds in Vermont, the team at Foster Farm Botanicals is busy preparing for the growing season on their botanical farm in East Calais.

“This is my favorite time of year. Everything just comes alive,” says Operations Manager Benjamin Uris, “We’re really in it now.” By this, Uris means that work on the farm doesn’t slow down from now until November. The growing season in Northern Vermont may be short, but the team at Foster Farm Botanicals makes the utmost of it. “We start getting on our fields to work soil as soon as the ground thaws and dries, and we’ve been seeding in greenhouses since mid-March.” 

McLane Ritzel, Marketing Manager adds, “We feel incredibly fortunate to be farming right now, because the plants don’t stop for anything. There’s a sense of normalcy in nature, and with everything going on right now, we continue to find great solace in our work, and immense gratitude for the wonderful community in Vermont.”

Foster Farm grows, harvests, dries, and mills nearly 50 different botanicals on their land. The farm has been in the same family for over 200 years, originally as a dairy operation. Co-owners Peter Backman (who spent his summers on the farm growing up) and Annie Christopher, founded the natural foods company Annie’s Naturals in the 1980s. After selling Annie’s Naturals, some 35 years later,  Peter and Annie realized their dream to reinvigorate their fertile dairy farmland into an organic herb farm, and cultivated a few botanicals on an acre of land with Uris. Over the past five years, paralleled with the continued growth of the herbal industry and support for local farming, the farm has expanded to restore neighboring lands in Calais with herbal production. This year, they are establishing a forest-grown botanicals program in heavily wooded areas around the farm to evaluate the potential of cultivating wild at-risk herbs including ginseng, goldenseal, and black cohosh, that take years to mature.