For the inhabitants of St. Johns, Michigan, located 85 miles northwest of Detroit, mint is more than the tingling sensation of toothpaste or the stringent burst of cerulean mouthwash. They have grown up in Mint City, USA, where everything mint is described in superlatives. Mint fields are the deepest green, not forest green, spring green, or grass green. During the August harvest, the sweetest, crispest, iciest, bordering-on-painful fragrance fills the surrounding countryside, where 5,000 acres are planted in the pungent herb. The scent is strong enough to travel, without the aid of a breeze, five miles in any direction of a mint field. One drop of the oil extracted from these fragrant, deepest green plants is all that is needed to flavor 2.5 tubes of toothpaste, 31.25 sticks of gum, and 125 mint candies. In St. Johns, mint is king. And has been for almost a century.

Until now. Over the summer, while the town celebrated the 20th annual mint festival, one of its key players, the Mint Grove Farm, found itself on the brink of bankruptcy. Should it fail, a long American tradition would be closer to an end. The farm was established in 1912 by J.E. Crosby on two acres just 2.7 miles south of St. Johns and is believed to be the oldest continuously operated mint farm in the United States. Over the century, Mint Grove Farm, better know among the citizens of St. Johns as the Crosby Mint Farm, expanded to 140 acres and has been passed down through four generations: from J.E. Crosby to Lawrence Crosby to James E. Crosby and his brother Larry Crosby to its current owners, Linette Crosby, 49, and “Peppermint” Jim Crosby, 42, great grandchildren of its founder. Today, it is only one of four mint farms that have survived in St. Johns area, from a high of 60 in the 1920s and 1930s, when one-third of the world’s mint oil came from the area.

Linette Crosby, a brown haired woman with an optimistic and youthful laugh, moved back to the family farm to help her brother a couple of years ago after their father suffered a stroke. She’d been away for almost two decades. She lived in Pennsylvania and in Northern Michigan before she returned to St. Johns. Why did it take her so long to return to Mint City, U.S.A’s greenest green and iciest smell of mint? “I didn’t move back to the farm cause I didn’t know if I was ready for it,” she says with a slight hint of remorse in her voice. But when the farm fell on hard times in 2005 she did return home. The farm, which had survived for almost a century by selling mint oil, was no longer bringing in enough money to survive.

Peppermint was introduced in Michigan in 1835 by Ohio native Calvin Sawyer. By the 1900s, the Michigan mint industry dominated the global market. But its dominance was short lived. The state’s mint fields were decimated by verticillium wilt in the 1940s, a fungus that attacks the roots of some plants, and by the 1970s, Michigan’s commercial peppermint industry had almost disappeared. And while the creation of verticillium resistant varieties revived the Michigan industry, it was unable to regain its glory. Clinton county, were St. Johns is located, continues to rank first in the production of mint in Michigan, even though the number of farms in the area has decreased by over 90 percent in 80 years, highlighting the rapid deterioration of the Michigan mint industry.

In 2000 peppermint oil production in Michigan stood at 50,000 pounds. In the years since, it has decreased by 44 percent, to just 28,000 pounds in 2007. The acres harvested and the crop yields have also decreased. High production costs, driven in part by the preponderance of much smaller farms in Michigan, keeps the state’s mint farmers at a disadvantage when compared to their peers in competing states: Idaho, Indiana, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin. It is estimated that a mint farm in the St. Johns’ area must be larger than 1,000 acres to be sustainable, according to Linette Crosby, and with only 130 of her family’s 140 acres planted with mint, the farm is far below the point of sustainability. The high cost of Michigan mint production keeps prices relatively high, around $ 14.40 per pound, while the larger farms in competing states can sell their product for less — $13.20 a pound in Washington, for example.

A LITTLE DROP WILL DO YOU
Most of the mint grown in the U.S. is distilled to produce oil that will be sold in bulk. Forty-five percent of the domestic production is used as chewing gum flavoring; 45 percent is used to flavor toothpaste, mouth wash, and breath fresheners; the remaining 10 percent is used for medicinal purposes, aroma therapy, and to flavor liquors. While less than a drop of oil is needed to flavor a tube of the most refreshing toothpaste, many barrels are needed to flavor all the tubes that supply a $2 billion toothpaste market. All of which fuels a $92 million peppermint oil industry and a $30 million spearmint oil industry.

The nation’s peppermint growing epicenter is the Pacific Northwest. With about 7,000 acres of mint, Washington is the leading producer. Rod Christensen, executive director of the Washington State Mint Commission, anticipates that the state’s mint oil production this year will be 2 million pounds. But even the largest producer of mint oil in the highest-yield region is struggling and may soon be facing problems similar to those of Michigan. Except this time competition isn’t coming from peers in other states but from abroad.

China, a newcomer in the mint industry, now joins India as a fierce mint competitor. In only a decade, Chinese production of mint oil increased tenfold to about 1.5 million pounds, and with production costs that are lower than those of even the most competitive U.S mint oil producing states, it can undercut prices significantly. At around $5, the cost of producing a pound of oil in China is a third to a half of Washington’s average of $11 to $12 a pound, according to Christensen. In China, smaller farms are an advantage since they have minimal need of machinery and are therefore less susceptible to increases in fuel prices. Additionally, they do not use diesel in their distillation process, unlike American mint farmers. In China boilers are heated by burning bamboo, wood, or dry mint hay that has already been distilled. “When oil prices for our growers, who mostly use diesel boilers, went to $4 a gallon it had no impact on the Chinese mint producers,” says Christensen. Even with transportation costs of shipping the oil from China, it sells for about $12 a pound, which is still cheaper than the American average of about $13 a pound.

In an effort to promote an area in which U.S. mint growers had a competitive advantage, Oregon, the second largest producer of peppermint oil, recently launched a campaign to raise awareness of the high quality of America’s mint oil. “There is no doubt that the Chinese can produce spearmint oil cheaper than we can,” says Washington Mint Commission’s Christensen. “There is also no doubt that the oil we produce is significantly higher quality oil than they produce. This is the trade-off. We have to work to make sure that the difference [in price] does not become large enough to cause end users to opt for the lower quality product.” With 90 percent of the national mint production used for bubble gum, toothpaste, and mouthwash, all products that need just a drop per unit for flavoring, it’s not easy to make a case for quality over price. Nor will it be easy to keep prices low enough to compete. In 2008, fuel and fertilizer price increases brought production costs in the U.S. to $15 a pound. “During that year, most growers felt that they did produce at a cost greater than the price they received,” according to Christensen. And while 2008 was an anomaly when compared to the previous years in which mint farmers in Washington were able to break even or make a profit, it does put a strain on domestic oil producers. For Michigan farmers, who hadn’t been able to produce their mint oil for less then $12 in years, the possibility of competing with their American counterparts is tough enough; the Chinese numbers are completely disheartening.

Four generations of the Crosby family produced mint oil in St. Johns, Michigan. Now, their way of life is slipping away.

PLOWING THE SAME GROUND
St. Johns with its nutrient-rich black, muck soil is the perfect spot for growing peppermint and spearmint. At the Crosby Farm, mint is not only grown but also distilled into the all important oil. In a process has remained practically unchanged over the last century, the freshly harvested mint is heated in large steam boilers until the oil rises to the top of the water where those with patience and a steady hand can spoon it out. This honor falls on Linette’s brother, “Peppermint” Jim, a large, round-faced man who can be described as cuddly and cute without losing a trace of masculinity.

For decades, the Crosby family sold their mint oil in bulk to a large oil distributor, usually for less than $20 a pound. The returns were never enough; Linette and Jim’s father had a second job in Michigan State University to make ends meet. Loans were taken out to keep the farm running in hopes of higher prices and bigger deals that Linette thought would “catapult [them] out of the financial situation.” But when a deal with a major corporation to sell a large amount of their oil fell through in 2005, they were unable to make payments on four loans, including an equipment loan, an operating loan, and a mortgage. The Crosbys were at risk of losing their farm. They needed to make changes, to come up with a new strategy for selling their mint oil. “We couldn’t continue with the same kind of marketing our grandfather and father did. It would be the end of it,” Linette says. “Unless we come up with some great marketing, we will be out of production.” says Linette. The solution: sell their oil through the holistic niche market. If it went to the broker in bulk, they’d get $20 a pound – max. Sell it as a natural curative, and they’d get $20 an ounce. According to the farm’s website, pure essential mint oil has many healing qualities. It increases mental focus; decreases frustration; increases energy; heals minor cuts and abrasions; relieves migraines, tension, sore muscles, arthritis, asthma, sinus congestion due to colds, and sore throats. Whether its healing powers would extend to the Crosby Mint Farm wasn’t clear.

On August 14, 2008, less than a week after St. Johns’ 20th annual mint festival, the Crosby Mint Farm was sold for $300,000 at a foreclosure auction. The buyer was Greenstone Farm Credit Service, an agricultural lending agency providing financial services to the agriculture industry in Michigan and Wisconsin. Though their property was sold at an auction, state law provides the Crosbys a period of redemption. If they pay all foreclosure costs, back interest, and unpaid principal payments before the period expires, they can recover their property. The Crosby siblings had 12 months to come up with the total sum of $635,000 to be paid in two installments. The first, in the amount of $348,000, was due on November 1, 2008; the second, $287,000, is due on August 14, 2009. If they didn’t meet the first deadline, they would forfeit their equipment and the oil inventory that had been saved from years of production, making it close to impossible for them to raise enough money to cover their debts. Their lifeline: selling enough oil to cover their financial obligations.

The Crosby Mint Farm produces, on average, about 224,000 drams (eight drams equals an ounce), or 4 barrels of 400 pounds of oil a year on 130 acres. Linette Crosby says they have enough oil in stock to pay off the debt and redeem their farm, but only if they stay away from bulk prices and sell it “the way they envisioned it” — at $5 a dram, which comes out to $40 an ounce or $640 a pound, a far cry from the going bulk rate of $20 a pound. At $640 a pound, they would have to sell a total of 127,000 drams (over 900 pounds) to retire the entire debt of $635,000. The same amount of oil if sold in bulk would raise less than $20,000, an insignificant amount when compared to their debt. The Crosbys launched a fervent fundraising campaign to sell 70,000 drams – about 500 pounds — of mint oil by November 1 to cover the first payment. This would buy them eight months to sell 57,000 additional drams (about 400 pounds) to pay the second installment.

With time growing short, the Crosby siblings launched the “Save a Farm – Buy a Dram” campaign in September 2008. They emailed over 1,000 former customers, describing the situation and asking them for their support and to spread the word. Orders poured into the farm’s website. This burst of good business is helping the Crosbys meet their financial obligations, but Linette admits that it won’t be sustainable. Even when marketing their product as a holistic product and selling it at $5 a dram, she admits that while “the Internet is a wonderful tool, [they] haven’t been successful at maintaining a steady flow of orders, till now.”

This has forced them to think up a new plan. “We would like to transform our farm and create a non-profit. Maybe work with the government and some conservancy to preserve the farm. Make the farm into a community farm where people can have gardens and things like that. That’s really our goal.” But the new goal leaves very little, if any, acreage for the planting mint or the conservation of the mint heritage. The large number of orders pouring into the website has fueled a sudden explosion of optimism. If she can buy her uncle’s neighboring 140 acres mint farm…if the orders keep coming. They are big ifs. The Crosbys have already liquidated most of the farm’s machinery, they’re still in debt, and they haven’t found a way of effectively branding or marketing their product in any sustainable way.

November 1 came and went. They have sold 24,665 of the 770,000 drams they need to meet their goal, and they continue to sell their product even though, under the redemption agreement, their oil inventory has been forfeited. On November 19, the bank still hadn’t shown up to take possession of the oil and while still hopeful, the Crosby Mint Farm is still 102,335 mint drams away from reaching its larger goal of keeping the Crosby Mint Farm in the Crosby family. Raising further concern that the Crosbys can raise the money is the fact that over the past few weeks, Linette noticed a real decline in orders. It’s getting harder to hold on to the optimism. “It’s economics, it’s business,” she says. “We love it but sometimes you just can’t afford it.”

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