Randy Beavers & Steve Henson

In 1993, Randy and Cindi Beavers realized they would one day inherit her Grandfather’s farm forcing them to choose between selling the farm to land developers or moving there and attempting to make a living. Cindi’s Grandfather had purchased the farm in 1932 and paid for it with a bale of cotton per year so the couple felt they couldn’t place a monetary value on his dedication. There was only one option, move to the farm. Little did they know how that decision would shape their lives.

Twenty years later and after a series of eight Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards from USDA and NIH/NCCAM focused on development of sustainable production and processing techniques for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species Appendix II listed plant Hydrastis canadensis, aka goldenseal, Randy is considered an authority on the plant and is at the forefront of raising the bar of goldenseal product quality and reliability.

Steve Henson is a marketing professor at Western Carolina University and the Chief Marketing Officer at BotaniPharm.  He began his career working for about five years with GE Capital, then moved to a subsidiary of Ciba-Geigy, now Novartis.  Mid-career, he decided to make the switch to academics and earned his Ph.D. in Marketing from Georgia State University at the ripe young age of 40.  He is a native Appalachian and had a chance to return to the mountains at Western and jumped at it.

BotaniPharm, LLC is the only known 100% grower owned botanical product company in the US. The company specializes in United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Organic Program certified production and processing of high value, forest grown medicinal plants particularly  endangered/threatened species such as Hydrastis canadensis, aka goldenseal.

The company’s leadership in the area of development of sustainable production and processing methods for endangered/threatened medicinal plants has been recognized by the USDA and the National Institutes of Health National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NIH/NCCAM) through a series of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards totaling more than $2 million.

Through this work the Company’s Founder developed a paradigm changing method of standardizing goldenseal products to specific levels of biological activity thus assuring repeatable potency regardless of year to year and location to location variability and opening the door to controlled clinical studies using goldenseal for the first time.

The Company currently produces research grade goldenseal products for use in NIH funded human clinical studies and markets a consumer line of dietary supplements, Goldenseal Advanced™, based on the same standardization process through their website, www.botanipharm.com.

BotaniPharm’s mission is to enhance profitability for its small farm members through pooled production, cooperative processing, and marketing under a common brand name, create safer, more reliable products for consumers, and produce a desirable environmental benefit through reduction in the need for wild collected medicinal plants to meet market demand, true “triple bottom line benefits”.