The Best Seed, the Best Soil
Melissa growing at the St. Maries farm.
Now, whenever you take a seed and transplant it from one place to another place, then you have an adaptability process that it has to go through. I heard a statement made by a person from another company a few weeks ago who said, “Oh, Young Living plants are not genetically strong because they’re all brought from other countries.” Well, guess what; practically every plant in the United States came from another country originally.
It doesn’t matter where it came from; it matters what it produces. This is a field in 1999. I really wanted to show you a picture of Mary, and I couldn’t find it. Because Mary loves running the swather to cut melissa. It’s one of her favorite things. The other plant that she loves to cut is wild tansy. She’s a fabulous swather operator. She found another niche in life next to singing.
This picture was taken last year. Today, Young Living is the largest producer of melissa oil in the world, with over 100 acres in St. Maries. How many have been to St. Maries in the last five years? Wow. Yes. How many are going this year? Me, too. That’s exciting because it is beautiful.
The next machine I designed and built for harvesting melissa because those of you who were there a couple of years ago know that it took 18 people and two swathers two weeks to cut the melissa fields, because I will not let the melissa touch the ground. So I designed this machine. We started building it a year and a half ago and put it in the field last year. I had to make a few adjustments, but three people cut all of the fields in three days.
So what does that do for our oil? It gives us better quality because when you’re producing oils, you have only a short, small window for the harvest time. If you go past that window, then the oil structure will start changing. The molecule percentages will start changing. So it’s about doing it at the right time, the peak time.
Here we’re gathering seed. This is a practice that goes on all over Ecuador. I send my farm crew not only over to Ecuador but also into Peru, gathering seed; and here are pictures of them gathering dorado azul seed. So where does it come from? The seed was picked from the plants in the wilds, naturally, and then brought to the farm. Yes, and domesticated. Can you imagine harvesting enough wild lavender to produce enough oil for Young Living? France would have to grow 14 and a half times bigger than it is now to produce enough wild lavender, and actually that wouldn’t even do it.
