Almost every crop is a race for sunlight. Ginseng is the opposite โ it grows in the shade, and its farmers build the shade themselves.
American ginseng is a woodland plant. In the wild it grows on the floor of shady hardwood forests in eastern North America, under a roof of leaves, where only crumbs of sunlight reach the ground.
Basis: American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) is a native understory plant of eastern North American hardwood forests โ U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service species information.
So growers copy the forest: they stretch dark cloth, or wooden lath, on posts above the beds, building an artificial forest roof over an open field.
Basis: Standard ginseng production practice described by university extension services in the ginseng-growing states.
It is a slow crop. A cultivated ginseng root usually stays in the ground about three to four years before it is dug. A corn plant is finished in one summer.
Basis: Extension guidance on field-cultivated ginseng: roots are typically harvested at three to four years.
People have dug the wild plant in these forests and shipped it across the ocean since the 1700s โ so much of it that wild American ginseng is now listed under CITES, the international agreement that watches trade in wild species, and states run permits and set seasons for digging it.
Basis: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: American ginseng is listed in CITES Appendix II and its export is regulated; the export trade goes back to the 18th century.
Why did nearly all of the farmed crop end up in one state? Growers there have raised ginseng for generations, and a slow, fussy plant rewards a place that already has the shade frames, the know-how and the buyers. That is the story people tell โ these numbers can show where the crop is, not why it stayed.
โป A hypothesis is an idea that isn't proven yet.
๐ Sources for the rankings mentioned in this note (links to the original data and retrieval dates) are on each quiz page below.