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Author: admin

They Paved Paradise

“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” That line has been rattling around in my head for years. I used to think it was about asphalt. I used to think it was a song about a woman looking at a lot where a garden used to be, shaking her head, feeling nostalgic. But […]

What are we, exactly?

BS Weekly #13 That’s the question I keep circling after Mount Vernon. Are we a specialty crop, or are we bait for big ag? Because those are two very different futures, and American elderberry is standing right at the fork. This June the national elderberry community gathered in Mount Vernon, Missouri. The Heartland American Elderberry […]

Slaying the Cyclops

How the Twelve-Eyed Toad Sees What One Eye Cannot A working treatise by Bevin Brooks The Cyclops had one eye. One eye sees flat… no depth, no distance, no second opinion. And that’s every one of us if we’re honest. Every founder, every farmer alone with the thing they know, looking from the one spot […]

Elderberry Curious?

One elderberry plant. One hunch. The hunch was that this plant… American elderberry (Sambucus canadensis, also classified by some authorities as Sambucus nigra subsp. canadensis)… was going to matter. Not just to my humble farm. Not just to my health. To my region. To the way we feed people. To the soil we leave behind. […]

Heartland American Elderberry Collaborative: Rooted in Real Farms

Across America’s heartland, farmers are searching for ways to build healthier soils, strengthen their operations, and leave a lasting legacy for future generations. The Heartland American Elderberry Collaborative was created to support that vision by helping growers discover the remarkable potential of elderberries as a regenerative crop. Elderberries offer more than a harvest. Their deep […]

The Dark Berry

BS Weekly #13 The color is not a coincidence. The dark, almost-black purple of elderberry is not just a visual marker of ripeness. It is a signal of bioactive density. The anthocyanin molecule responsible for that color… cyanidin-3-glucoside, or C3G… is pH-responsive, meaning its molecular structure physically shifts depending on the acidity of its environment […]

Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap… American Heartland Elderberry Collaborative Hits the Road

Farmer Mickey Gallagher, the “Johnny Elderberry Seed” of KC Farmyard, joined by Bevin Brooks of LIONBERRY, are the co-chairs of the American Heartland Elderberry Collaborative… AHECo. They have been touring member farms of their AgriCluster and helping to cultivate the American elderberry across Kansas and Missouri. This week the co-chairs visited Jeremy Fyler of Fyler […]

LionBerry Regenerative™ to Pour at Stems

Overland Park Arboretum & Botanical Gardens • May 16, 2026 LionBerry Regenerative™ will be featured at Stems: A Garden Soirée — A Cause to Celebrate, the signature fundraiser supporting the Arts & Recreation Foundation of Overland Park and the Overland Park Arboretum & Botanical Gardens. Guests will enjoy an all-inclusive evening of food, botanical beverages, […]

Lit From Within: An Upcycled LIONBERRY Bottle

There’s a six-foot bottle of LIONBERRY REGENERATIVE HYDRATION on its way to Kansas from Canada. It used to be a water heater. Dave — the artist behind Theeupcycler Metal Art, based in Wetaskiwin, Alberta — takes things the world throws away and gives them a second life. Old water heaters. Car parts. Scrap steel. With […]

METABOLIC RECOVERY – The Next Phase of the GLP-1 Conversation: Metabolic Recovery

For the last two years, we’ve been talking about GLP-1 drugs. Ozempic. Wegovy. Zepbound. They work. They reduce appetite, improve blood sugar regulation, and are reshaping metabolic health at scale. This is one of the most significant shifts we’ve seen in decades (Wilding et al., 2021). But a quieter question is starting to emerge: What […]

What are we, exactly?

Lionberry 's Weekly Delusion and Re-illusion Update.

BS Weekly #13

That’s the question I keep circling after Mount Vernon. Are we a specialty crop, or are we bait for big ag? Because those are two very different futures, and American elderberry is standing right at the fork.

This June the national elderberry community gathered in Mount Vernon, Missouri. The Heartland American Elderberry Collaborative brought our poster. LIONBERRY REGENERATIVE™ stood alongside Elder Farms and River Hills Harvest. Dr. Andrew Thomas hosted, Buehler Organics and Elder Farms put on a dinner, and researchers, growers, and processors all ended up at the same tables. Good food, good people, real momentum.

But here’s the edge I can’t put down. The moment a crop gets valuable, the commodity machine notices. It comes in offering scale and efficiency, and it leaves behind growers who no longer own anything, working someone else’s market for someone else’s margin. We’ve watched it happen to crop after crop. The question isn’t whether American elderberry is worth that much attention. It’s whether we’ll be the ones holding it when it is.

So why does this crop matter enough to fight over? The science is finally catching up to what growers always sensed. American elderberry is anti-inflammatory in a way that speaks straight to how most of us actually live now, carrying oxidative stress from overprocessed food. And it’s stepping into the GLP-1 and metabolic-recovery moment, where early results on blood sugar and fat oxidation are turning heads. Our native berry isn’t the understudy to European Sambucus nigra either. The American acylated anthocyanin is more protected, more likely to survive processing and reach where it’s meant to work. We are not the lesser version. We are the better one, and we’re only now saying it out loud.

That’s exactly why the fork matters. A crop this promising will get built into a market by somebody. The only question is whose hands stay on it.

Here’s where I land, and where Mount Vernon left me hopeful. We are small, and small is not the weakness everyone assumes. Small means we can actually know each other. It means a grower, a researcher, and a brand can sit at one dinner table and leave understanding each other’s language. That’s how an AgriCluster works. We stick together, we grow the grower base on our own terms, and we build the shared story before anyone builds it for us. We’re standing on fertile ground here, in the dark, underground, where the real trading happens before anything shows on the surface.

More growers, yes. But growers who own it. That’s the whole game.