The secret, lucrative world of Pennsylvania’s wild ginseng diggers

The digger had a sixth sense for ginseng roots, a preternatural ability to see leaves from a distance amid a swirling puzzle of forest life. He was driving, quickly now, on a gravel road that wound through a deep valley between those forests. Then he hit his brakes.

“Do you see that road sang?” he said, excitedly, before jumping out of the car.

Sang, a longtime nickname for the mysterious and lucrative ginseng root, might just be Pennsylvania’s most valuable crop, often selling for hundreds of dollars per pound. Some say the slow-growing root is being exploited, overharvested by deer or greedy newcomers. Many longtime diggers believe that’s an excuse to drag the harvest, one of Pennsylvania’s oldest, closer to licensing and taxation.

Most don’t want to talk about ginseng at all.

The full-time digger and forager who allowed The Inquirer to accompany him for a day wanted to be identified only as “Justin G.” A savvy competitor might use his full name to get his address, he said, then glean his hunting grounds. “Western Pennsylvania, north of Pittsburgh” was as specific as he wanted to get about our location. Other diggers wanted this reporter to wear a blindfold or leave phones behind on account of GPS capabilities. Justin, 39, only requested anonymity — and full camouflage.

“I’d just rather no one see us,” he explained.

Unlike ramps, a type of wild onion, or chicken of the woods, an edible fungus, ginseng demands big money, depending on the age and size of its roots. Diggers sell to licensed buyers, the middlemen, who then sell it to larger markets in China and Korea, where the root has been prized for millennia for its medicinal effects. Pennsylvania’s buyers number in the dozens and need to be licensed but diggers like Justin don’t need a permit to harvest it or grow it. He hopes it stays that way.

“Uncle Sam has a real hard time sticking its nose into the ginseng business,” he said.

Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources sets the guidelines for wild ginseng harvesting, with a season that runs from Sept. 1 to Nov. 30. The state asks diggers not harvest on state land or in parks, to collect “mature plants with at least three five-pronged leaves and red berries,” and to seek permission before digging on private property.

All of those rules are broken to some degree, every season.

American ginseng, according to the DCNR, has been protected since 1975 under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, also known as CITES. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service regulate its export. In 2019, the Wildlife Service went undercover and charged 14 people in Pennsylvania for the illegal harvest and sale of ginseng. The operation was dubbed “Root Cause.”

Eric Burkhart, a faculty member in Penn State’s department of ecosystem science and management, is arguably the state’s foremost expert on the plant and its place in Pennsylvania’s rural culture. He said Pennsylvania typically exports around 1,000 pounds of dried ginseng root annually, joining states like Kentucky, West Virginia, North Carolina, and New York as top exporters.

Every year, Burkhart studies reports buyers are required to submit, and he often urges diggers to divulge more information, particularly about how much ginseng they’re planting. His goal, he said, is to learn how much ginseng is left — but it’s not easy. He’s banned from at least one wild ginseng Facebook group.

“This stuff is valuable stuff and it’s only gotten more valuable and, at least in Pennsylvania, it’s kind of gotten rolled up in this outlaw culture, a kind of blue-collar thing,” he said. “People like me just aren’t welcome.”

Burkhart said social media, technology, and reality shows like Smoky Mountain Money and Appalachian Outlaws have contributed to an influx of new diggers rushing into the woods, sometimes upending centuries of traditions.

“That made a lot of people a lot more quiet about the culture now,” he said. “It brought a criminal element into the forest.”

Last year, a woman in Indiana was charged with homicide for shooting and killing a ginseng digger behind her home. A similar shooting happened in Ohio in 2013.

Derek Pritts, a retired waterways conservation officer for the Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission, sees all sides of it. He’s a digger and a dealer, and the author of Ginseng: How to Find, Grow, and Use North America’s Forest Gold. Pritts grew up steeped in moonshine and “sang” in the hills of Fayette County out in Southwest Pennsylvania. It’s the top-producing ginseng county in the state, he said.

Pritts said ginseng is deeply rooted in the earliest days of the United States.

“George Washington used ginseng to offset our Revolutionary War debt,” he said. “It was the one thing the Chinese would trade gold and silver for.”

Pritts believes the new diggers, who use plant-identifying apps, are taking roots that are too young and too small. Ginseng, he said, is a long game. It often takes roots 10 years to reach maturity.

“People see it and they dig up everything they see,” he said. “Old timers know you leave the young plants alone. You come back in 5, 10 years.”

Finding old ginseng means navigating hilly terrain and out-of-way places . If they don’t roll an ankle or tumble down a hill, diggers also face poison ivy, countless thorns, and, further north, poisonous rattlesnakes and copperheads. Justin said he was once attacked by a doe protecting her fawn.

Pritts carried a walking stick and a pistol on a recent trip.

“In case we see a coyote,” he said.

In Western Pennsylvania, Justin G. began his day by heading up a steep embankment off an undisclosed gravel road. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the darkness beneath the canopy, but he trudged through briars that clawed away at his skin. Seasoned diggers don’t follow trails or make them and the cuts and scrapes on Justin’s bare arms attested to that. With such a dry summer, the ginseng was turning yellow faster, and he spotted one plant easily from 40 feet away.

“Do you see it?” he said. “It’s beautiful.”

With a long, crowbar-type of tool, he dug carefully around the plant’s three stems, or “prongs,” and found the root. He put it all in a pocket and placed a ginseng berry in the hole.

“You dig one, you plant one,” he said.

Justin, who works as a handyman in the winter, resents how diggers have been portrayed as criminals and “tweakers” in the media and on reality shows. Few people last, he said, and he considers deer, not people, to be his biggest competition.

“It’s not easy money,” he said. “There’s nothing easy about this.”

Justin said he didn’t go to college, but knows he could have. He named every plant he passed in the forest, smelling one tree’s bark when he was unsure. Ginseng profits, he said, will help his daughter go places where he couldn’t. He declined to say exactly how much money he makes each season, but it’s in the thousands.

“You have to have a good attitude about it. You have to believe you’re going to find some over the next hill,” he said. “I always think that. At night, when I close my eyes, I see ginseng.”

On the way back to his house, he slammed on his brakes to dig the large plant he spotted ten feet off the road, somehow, while driving. When he returned to the car, he was nearly shaking, estimating the one root to be worth $50 alone.

“This one right here is probably older than you and me combined,” he said.

Back at Justin’s rancher, a porch full of puppies greeted him. Their mother is named “Sang” and he hopes at least of the pups could be a ginseng sniffer and make life easier.

Justin piled bags and bags of ginseng roots on a table, nearly 12 pounds that he’s getting ready to sell. That would pay for heat and groceries over the winter. But he kept coming back to the 100-year-old root he’d just dug, holding it up in the air and calling it a “beauty.”

His girlfriend, Joeleen, said she’s never known anyone more passionate about ginseng.

“I wish he looked at me the way he looks at that old root,” she said.