Four Elements Organic Herbals- a journey of healing and land stewardship
“When I was 18, I always knew I wanted to go to college. I was the youngest of five. But when I had to pick out a career, I thought where are you happy? What do you like to do? And I thought, you have to be outside”, said Jane Stevens, owner of Four Elements Organic Herbals in North Freedom, Wisconsin.
According to Four Elements Organic Herbals (4E) website, Four Elements has developed a complete herbal wellness line. Established in 1987, but specializing in herbs since 1982, Stevens has been growing and using these effective plants, grown in the Pristine Baraboo Bluffs of Wisconsin on her and her husband David's 130 acre certified organic farm. They have been certified organic since 1990 and take great care to cultivate sustainably, offering organic matter to the soil every year, which gives them food, herbs, beauty, and fresh air.
In the words of the late Paul Harvey, “And now… the rest of the story”.
Stevens’ decision to look towards a career where she could, as she put it, “commune with nature”, was really influenced by her grandmother. Stevens recalled when her grandmother lived up past Antigo, Wisconsin. She would visit her and go out picking blueberries with her. “I must have been three or something, but that memory, it was like I went to heaven. I was on an outing where I could be picking things, and it just made my heart sore. That memory is what I called upon in deciding my career path.” A career path that led to her and her husband David into the business of organic herbals.
When the time came for her to start her path in higher education, she picked horticulture and attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “I never even knew there was a word like horticulture,” she said laughing.
Stevens credits her parents for teaching her how to save money for an education. She shared that her parents had a rule: half of any money earned went into the bank.
“I actually quit after three years because I wasn't touching plants at all. Madison is very theoretical, very scientific. I was just like, where's the plants?”
Leaving university, she entered into the business trade of landscaping in Florida and eventually Arizona. In the Southwest, she said she became in tune with meditation (that she admitted was part of her spirit) and lived in an ashram for a while.
Eventually though, she completed college and her first job was putting in an herb garden. Feeling it was a gift from God or Gaia, she studied old fashioned gardens, or what could be considered a formal garden for herbs. That was in the 80’s.
Winding up in Dallas, Texas, Stevens found herself working at the Dallas Arboretum with herbs. As a bonus, she found the true love of her life-a man named David with whom she worked had befriended.
Stevens recalled after she had her son Forest, she quit her job working at the arboretum and wanted to grow potted herbs. “I just thought, oh, this is what I'd like to do, never thinking, do you make money in that. Then certified organic became a thing, so I jumped right on that.”
Stevens eventually made her way back home to Wisconsin. About a year later David followed suit when he was accepted into graduate school at UW-Madison.
Landing in Spring Green, Wisconsin, Stevens wanted to, as she put it, “find her own piece of land to further her herb business. She wanted to be close to David yet have a suitable piece of land to steward. “I thought, well I'm gonna move an hour radius from Madison. I went all over, like Dodgeville, Spring Green, all over. It was about 1989, and I was a woman with an herb business. I think real estate agents and bankers were just looking at me like I was Peter Rabbit’s mom with my herb business,” she said laughing.
Stevens, reaching a point of fatigue looking at places, stopped in on a whim to one more real estate agent. “The way I tell the story, I don't remember if I fell on my knees, or pulled on her clothing saying, ‘you got to help me find a place to live. I've got a down payment and everything’, and she said, ‘Well, I think I got the place for you’, and she brought me here to this land,” she said glancing around her farm.
“This was a miracle place. It had been rented for about 20 years and was owned by a woman in Evanston, Illinois. She let me write a land contract financing the land for the first three years. I offered her like 60% of the listed price and she took it. I got the deal of the lifetime; it was meant to be. It was a gift from Gaia. I always tell David that Gaia picked us to be the stewards of these 130 acres of land. It is amazing!”
Even as amazing, she was able to come across this good of a deal as a woman with her own business, especially back in the late ‘80s.
Quickly, Stevens realized that to be organic, she would not be able to use her go-to fertilizer Miracle Grow if she wanted to maintain an organic status.
Looking for venues to grow her business, she found herself signing up for several herb events. At the time, she had a crop of herbs ready for sale about every six weeks.
With an abundance of herbs available in her booth, she decided to use her crops to produce herbal products to sell in her booth. “I love the way Gaia just pushed me in these corners that ended up creating goodness,” she said.
As a personal testimony in the benefits of herbs, Stevens shared that at one point her son Forest had reoccurring ear aches. She took him to the doctor that resulted in a course of antibiotics, which still left Forest with ear aches. “I just thought, well maybe nature has something, you know, this is what the native people did, this is what the pioneers did, they took stuff and made remedies.”
Referencing an herb book, Stevens read about a remedy using mullein flowers in olive oil. She made the mixture and applied two drops in his ear and he healed. Stevens said that she believed that remedy was just the tip of the iceberg saying, “I mean, there's has to be so many remedies coming from nature that I don't know anything about. I just have been doing that ever since”.
Stevens is very passionate in her belief that nature is here to support healing if you engage in nature. “What you can get back from nature is amazing!”, she exclaimed.
Stevens feels that, in general, people view nature as something to step on, like real estate to put something on. “It makes me crazy to see what some people have done to our Earth.”
David eventually finished graduate school in horticulture, the two married, and together, continued a journey stewarding the land, nurturing plants and herbs, and growing their business.
Currently a full-time curator at the UW-Madison Arboretum, David comes home and spends a good amount of time working the gardens and with chores that keeps the farm running smooth. “He’s like the total soil builder. He does the cover cropping; tills crops, and he knows how to make things weed free. But I kind of like weeds. So, our gardens are like fine artists. He's like Rembrandt, where every line is perfect, and I'm like Monet, where they're all splashy,” she said smiling.
Conveniently, they produced products in a commercial kitchen right on the farm from 1990 until 2013. As business picked up, Stevens admitted it was becoming difficult to manage. Working a lot on weekends, she found it was a challenge to find a balance with having her workers on site and finding the personal space she needed for herself and her well-being. It was time to find a solution.
The solution came in the form of her first federal grant, the Value-Added Producers grant. The funding enabled them to move the business into downtown North Freedom not far from the farm. This afforded a brick-and-mortar retail space and allowed Stevens some time for herself.
Moving into the old bank building made for a very unique store front, but Stevens said they made it work. With a little finessing, Stevens said they managed to transform the old counting room into a commercial kitchen, allowing them to make products at their store. All order requests and shipping are handled there as well.
Stevens said they produce a variety of herbal products that include; Functional Creams, Handmade Soaps, Herbal Teas, Herbal Tinctures, Liniment & Salves, Facial Toner, Lip Balms, Body Oils, Hydrosols, Deodorants, and Outdoor Body Sprays.
Stevens always is looking to add new products to her line as she learns more about other herbs and their health benefits. “I study what plants can do, what their remedies are, and then make them into a product that I think can help people. My real motive with all my products is I want to get people to trust nature so they can become Earth stewards.”
Before COVID, Stevens said she attended national herbal shows and hung with the best herbalists and learned from them. “I am a continuing student. When COVID hit, I took three classes online. Right now, I'm writing a book on gardening by the moon. The title is Connecting People, Plants, and Planets. Originally, the name of the book was Nature Speaks, Listen, but it's really about connecting people, plants, and planets, so they can do better gardening by them. That is the premise of my book because the FDA won't let me talk about how herbs heal at all.”
“I just told myself two weeks ago, ‘Damn that's pie in the sky, you got to do something else, like, get your book published.’ I think it's now my voice, my teaching, and my writing that is going to make a difference.”
Stevens’ best-selling product as she put it, “was a gift from my daughter Savanna.” Shortly after Savanna was born, she developed eczema. “By then I was already making herbal skincare and organics, and here was my baby whose skin was erupting. There's a picture of Savanna’s baptism where her skin is just all red and splotchy. That was very freaky to me and I thought, there's got to be some type of herb for this. So, I studied up on what I could do to help her and came up with this product Look No X Ma cream, and it's been my number one best seller. By 1999, I had this product. Forest got me into this, and Savanna is the one who gave me my best-selling product,” she said smiling.
Stevens and her husband have worked hard and passionately over the years, and their dedication to Certified Organic Herbals has not gone unnoticed. Four Elements Organic Herbals received the 2020 MOSES (Midwest Organic Sustainable and Education Service) Farmers of the Year award.
Even with the years of hard work put into their business, Stevens acknowledged it would not be possible without her crew of five. Lisa who has been with 4E the past 20 years, their daughter Sylvie working 6 years since the age of 16, Mindy for over a year, Liz for 5 years and Maria that started 6 months ago. Keeping the business end of things running smooth is 4E’s office manager Kris.
Mindy, originally hired as a shipper, saw her role evolve. “I thought initially, I was just going to mostly be in the shipping area, printing off the orders, filling them, and shipping them out. Then, it became, like, so many different things,” Mindy said. After a while Stevens figured she could use Mindy in a few different ways.
Mindy, a graduate from UW-Madison with a BA in Journalism with an emphasis on advertising, could and would play a bigger role. “I always knew that Jane created wonderful natural products, but I guess I didn't know to what depth. I didn't understand exactly how much the business had grown the product line. I told Jane, ‘I think you should be everywhere that's local’. So, we started talking about me doing some sales work and working with some the sales teams. She has regional teams, and we agreed I could be a liaison, giving them information and updating our marketing materials, things like that,” she said. In addition, Mindy works with Stevens to put out a newsletter for their retail customers and buyers.
“We all depend on each other. It's one web,” Stevens said. “It’s like a story, I'm going to be an herbalist, now I'm going to be organic, now I'm going to make herbal products. Oh, let's write a book, add that to the repertoire. Then, I thought, ‘well, I'm writing this book on gardening by the moon. I don't know much about astrology.’ I found the best college for astrology and took some classes. But what I learned was, oh my god, the cells in our body all know what they're doing and they're doing the same rhythm, rhythm, rhythm. Planets are doing the same thing and we are just part of this amazing system,” said Stevens.
This journey of healing, connecting with the Earth, nature, people, and land stewardship, is a story that is still being written. I would be remiss if not to mention a quote from Carlos Santana that is at the top of 4H’s website, “If you carry joy in your heart, you can heal any moment.”
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