Producer profile

Mike Goeman, President of Sales and Marketing, and founders Pamela Martin and Randal Buresh

Oregon's Wild Harvest
Sandy, Oregon

(Sound Consumer, October 2002) — As a registered nurse and physician's assistant for 18 years, Randal Buresh was concerned about the overuse of pharmaceuticals and surgery to treat illness. He started growing and working with herbs to find a less invasive way to improve health.

Buresh says, "I experimented with friends, neighbors, cats, dogs — anybody that would hold still — and it worked." With five acres of fertile Oregon land, Buresh and his wife, Pamela Martin, laid the groundwork for Oregon's Wild Harvest as a way to combine their interest in natural medicine and herbalism with the desire to raise their family at home.

Since they began shipping fresh herbs in the early 1990s, their company has expanded to encompass 40 acres in the mountain foothills of Sandy, Oregon. They still live on the property and merely walk out the front door to start the workday. With a strong desire to ensure quality, organically grown and cultivated herbs are grown, processed and shipped on-site.

Buresh says, "We want as much control from the seed to the bottle as possible." About 25 percent of the herbs used in their products are carefully and sustainably wild-harvested from local forests and mountains. Most of the other 75 percent comes from the farm or other growers.

Echinacea fields in full bloom at Oregon's Wild Harvest

Oregon's Wild Harvest is situated comfortably on the corner where herbalism and science intersect. A food scientist and a naturopathic physician are part of the 20-person staff. As a certified organic producer, Oregon's Wild Harvest does not utilize fumigants or irradiation to sterilize herbs.

Instead, it carefully tests the herbs at the in-house laboratory. After the herbs are dried, they're tested for the presence of salmonella, E. coli, yeast, mold and heavy metals. The tests are repeated a second and third time after the herbs are milled and encapsulated.

In an industry where plant quality is always an issue, Randal, Pamela and their team put a lot of focus on proper growing, harvesting and post-harvesting techniques. They guarantee their herbs are the correct genus and species. They perform extensive research to harvest herbs at the optimal potency, when high levels of beneficial activity are present.

"I love the healing process and want to make sure the herbs work," Buresh says. "Everything we ship is less than a year old, so you know it's fresh plant material — live and full of energy. Then, it works as nature intended."

See the Oregon's Wild Harvest Web site for more information.