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The Trojan in the Hedgerows: One Woman’s Elderberry Mission in the Heartland

My Bevin Brooks Co-Chair of The Heartland American Elderberry Collaborative

A small Trojan in the Heartland, Lori Trojan’s elderberry farm began not with a nursery order, but with a friend’s overgrown backyard bush that needed to be cleared.

Sitting in the kitchen with American elderberry (Sambucus canadensis) farmer and master herbalist Lori Trojan—a great competitor and elderberry friend of mine—I am reminded how hard this one-woman farmer works the dirt every day.

Lori planted those 65 American elderberry cuttings in 2021 on her new Wild Ivey Herb Farm in Palmyra with careful intention, choosing elderberry because, as she says,

“It checked every box: perennial, low maintenance, hedge row, easy to duplicate, manageable for a very short human who is aging.”

Those original cuttings have become far more than a planting. They have become the foundation of a farm, a teaching space, and a community.

The Trojan Hedgerow

As a farmer, Lori has proven herself as both a grower and an educator.

Throughout each summer she hosts workshops including Making Medicine for Unpredictable Times and Elderberries Workshops Parts I & II, welcoming students into both her fields and her kitchen.

During my visit, Lori, Mickey Gallagher—Project Manager of the Heartland American Elderberry Collaborative (HAECo)—and I sat around her kitchen table, sharing three varieties of her elderberry syrup while discussing farming, herbal medicine, and the future of American elderberry.

The three of us are founding members of HAECo, brought together through facilitation by the North American Food Systems ACRE Program (AgriCluster Resilience and Expansion).

I grow and produce the LionBerry Regenerative line of metabolic recovery beverages, making Lori and me both marketplace competitors and collaborative partners. That balance reflects something unique about the American elderberry industry: we understand that growing the category benefits everyone.

American elderberry and Comfrey

What began with sixty-five cuttings has now expanded into more than four hundred thriving elderberry bushes.

Lori harvests everything by hand, often disappearing into dense hedgerows that tower above her.

She smiles when she talks about the plants.

“The plant is forgiving. It wants to grow. It wants to feed you. You just have to get out of its way.”

Then she adds what may be the simplest description of her entire farming philosophy.

“I don’t force the elderberry.”

Her farm produces elderberry syrups, vinegars, tinctures, and herbal products, each reflecting the same principles of food as medicine, soil stewardship, and community resilience.

As Lori explains,

“Everything I do is a balance of science and magic.”

Her products now appear in local grocery stores, natural food markets, and regional retailers, but perhaps her greatest product is knowledge itself.

Education has become as central to Wild Ivey Herb Farm as farming.

Students visit to learn propagation, harvesting, processing, and herbal preparation.

Lori Trojans Wild Herb Farm and high tunnels.

Growers exchange ideas.

Neighbors leave with cuttings.

The farm has quietly become a gathering place.

Lori’s vision extends well beyond her own acreage.

“When I started the farm, I was looking for a crop that was sustainable. Truly sustainable.”

She believes elderberry offers opportunities for everyone—from large commercial farms to homeowners with only a backyard.

“There is a massive benefit to anyone who has land… whether you are a farmer with hundreds of acres or someone with just a backyard patch.”

For Lori, stewardship always comes first.

She often says,

“To plant an elderberry is to bring a land to life.”

Workshop Classes at The Wild Ivey Herb Farm

After touring the herb gardens and elderberry hedgerows, Lori showed Mickey and me through her high tunnel.

Inside sat one of her newest additions: an elderberry de-stemmer purchased through a KC Cultivate grant.

Before either of us could ask about it, Lori explained that she intended to share the equipment with members of the Collaborative.

It wasn’t simply a machine.

It was another investment in the success of everyone around her.

Wild Ivey Herb Farm De-stemmer

Later we wandered toward the creek that winds through the property.

Sitting beneath mature trees, our conversation shifted naturally toward science.

As someone who often occupies the science seat, I brought up preserving anthocyanins through proper stabilization before freezing and discussed the importance of quality analysis using HPLC and mass spectrometry.

Our discussion turned to the growing body of research examining American elderberry’s potential role in blood sugar regulation, fat oxidation, gut microbiome health, and metabolic recovery.

Research from Washington State University and other institutions continues to expand our understanding of this remarkable native fruit.

Good farming and good science are strongest when they grow together.

Lori and Mickey discussing elderberry processing

The American elderberry spreads differently than most agricultural success stories.

It does not spread through conquest.

It spreads through generosity.

Every rooted cutting shared with another grower…

Every workshop taught…

Every piece of equipment loaned…

Every conversation around a kitchen table…

These become the real harvest.

Lori’s work demonstrates that resilient agriculture grows through relationships every bit as much as it grows through soil.

Mickey Gallager Project Manager Lori Trojan

“Elderberry is probably one of the greatest gifts that Mother Nature has bestowed upon us,” Lori says.

“I think elderberry is the medicine not just of the past, but certainly of the future.”

Standing among the hedgerows at Wild Ivey Herb Farm, it becomes clear that Lori Trojan is cultivating much more than elderberries.

She is cultivating trust.

She is cultivating community.

She is cultivating the next generation of growers.

And she is quietly proving that lasting agriculture grows one rooted cutting, one shared lesson, and one generous act at a time.

Help us grow the future of American elderberry.

Root for Local Farms

The Heartland American Elderberry Collaborative connects growers, researchers, educators, makers, and agricultural partners working to strengthen the future of American elderberry in the Heartland.

Learn more at heartlandamericanelderberryco.com

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When Words Lose Their Meaning

Lionberry 's Weekly Delusion and Re-illusion Update.

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 use of the phrase belonged to grandmas, gardeners, and people who still know how to cook and where food comes from. In that world, “food is medicine” meant something simple and grounded. A piece of meat and some vegetables—and fruit when it was in season—was just a regular meal. And then there were the special things you made when someone didn’t feel well: mixtures built from botanicals, herbs, fruits, nuts, grasses, roots, seeds, and whatever the land offered that season. Things pulled straight from soil and pantry because they carried function, flavor, and a purpose. That usage was peaceful, instinctive, and honest.

Then came the influencers, using the same phrase while holding something powdered, flavored, and algorithm-optimized. “Food is medicine” became a caption under a neon shake that tastes like peach sorbet and contains a clinically irrelevant amount of plant dust. They didn’t inherit the meaning—they inherited the hashtag. And hashtags don’t carry wisdom; they carry trend cycles.

Then comes the USDA, NIH, and hospital systems, who use both phrases—but in different ways. “Food Is Medicine” is their broad, public-facing concept, the umbrella idea that nutrition is foundational for health. “Food As Medicine”—capital As—is the technical term for the clinical, billing-coded interventions:

produce prescriptions,

medically tailored meals,

medically tailored groceries.

This version has insurance pathways, reimbursement logic, metrics, screenings, and outcome evaluations. It isn’t a belief system. It’s a healthcare program.

So we end up with two phrases—Food Is Medicine and Food As Medicine—that sound almost identical but function in totally different worlds. And both of them, at their best, once pointed to something we still have right now: real plants growing from real soil, carrying real chemistry that does real things in the human body. Not ancient in the sense of “long ago,” but ancient in the sense of continuity—still alive, still growing, still here.

Once a phrase becomes universal, though, it becomes meaningless.

That’s what’s happening now.

A wellness word printed on plastic.

“Natural” stamped on a bag of potato chips.

“Immune-supporting” slapped on anything that wants to look virtuous.

Marketing fog replacing actual meaning.

It’s Peacekeepers in 1984.

It’s “community” in Big Tech.

And on the Idiocracy side, it’s the fictional Electrolyte Drink Brawndo—marketed so aggressively that the entire population believes “it’s got what plants crave.”

In the film, they irrigate crops with the Electrolyte Drink Brawndo instead of water because advertising has replaced knowledge. Marketing departments tell us what truth is. The soil dies. The crops fail. The land collapses into a dust bowl. That’s what linguistic drift does: it hollows meaning until the absurd becomes normal.

“Food is medicine” used to mean:

eat real plants,

respect soil,

trust the chemistry that grows in the field,

trust the phytonutrients that come from this earth,

food keeps you alive and makes you whole.

Now it means turmeric dust on junk food.

Or a wellness word added so a product can sell for $3 more.

This hollowed-out category is not a comfortable place for real food to sit.

The old category, where LionBerry sits—the one before wellness gloss, before powdered fantasy, before language drift washed the meaning out of the words—still exists. But sitting there is not accidental. People tell me all the time to cheapen it, powder it, plastic-bottle it, isolate it, dilute it, lab-flavor it, margin-boost it, and make it “scalable” by stripping out the thing that makes it real.

I don’t do it.

Not because it’s easy.

But because sometimes the right thing to do is always the hardest thing to do.

LionBerry sits in the old category because I fight for it to sit there.

Real plants.

Real chemistry.

Real soil.

Real function.

Zero powdered fantasy.

LionBerry is exactly what it says it is: a farm-crafted drink made out of actual food.

When I say “the phrase doesn’t need to be fixed,” I mean the phrase “food is medicine.”

We don’t need to invent a new set of buzzwords or rescue the old ones from misuse.

We don’t need to rebuild or replace the language itself.

What needs to change is this:

start making products that mean what the words used to mean.

Start making food products that are just food