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Category: BUSINESS SECRETS WEEKLY

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

BUSINESS SECRETS WEEKLY

LionBerry’s Weekly Delusion & Re-Illusion Update Lion’s Mane Mushroom Powder in Your Coffee Isn’t Lifting Your Brain Fog. Welcome to Health Food Washing 101: Where Marketing Is the Science and the Label Is the Proof. If It’s on the Label, It Must Be True??? THE BOTTOM LINE — FOR THOSE WHO DON’T READ THE WHOLE […]

Presentation at the Great Plains Growers Conference

Heartland Elderberry Collaborative (Heartland ECo) “Instead of asking each farm to grow bigger, we’re building shared capacity so farms can stay viable at their current scale while accessing value-added markets.” An AgriCluster Pilot for Shared Infrastructure and Value-Added Market AccessEastern Kansas / Western Missouri PROBLEM CONTEXT Small and mid-sized farms face persistent structural barriers to […]

Elderberry’s Reputation Problem Doing It Right So It Actually Works

Elderberry has a reputation problem. People try it and they say it kind of works. Sometimes. Maybe a little. That is not the berry’s fault. That is what got done to the berry long before it ever reached the bottle. So let me start with what this berry can actually do when it is done […]

When Words Lose Their Meaning

The phrase “food is medicine” has become the wellness world’s version of “thoughts and prayers.” Everyone says it. Everyone feels good saying it. And almost nobody means anything real when they do. That’s the danger—not the phrase itself, but what happens when language gets stretched so far it stops pointing to anything true. The original […]

Fortifying the Heartland: My Christmas Wish for Hy-Vee.

This week’s delusion is pretending our grocery stores don’t have a weak point. This week’s re-illusion is remembering that strength comes from building on what already works, not acting like we’re starting from scratch. Hy-Vee does a really good job bringing in local barbecue sauces, jams, honey, and other value-added foods from the Heartland. We’re […]

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.