Jul 23, 20266 min read

Why We Don't Harvest Rhodiola

Adaptogens went mainstream fast. Ashwagandha, ginseng, tulsi, rhodiola, herbs used quietly for centuries, turned up in supermarkets, coffee shops and supplement aisles almost overnight.

The idea behind them is appealing. An adaptogen is a plant that's meant to help your body handle stress, not by pushing you up like caffeine or settling you down like a sedative, but by helping you cope with whatever load you're under. Different herbs, same broad promise: steadier under pressure.

It's easy to forget what that means. These aren't manufactured ingredients. They're plants, and for most of them the part people want is the root, which means the plant is pulled up and doesn't grow back. So when demand multiplies, it has to be met somehow. Either you farm a lot more of them, or you take a lot more from the wild.

For most adaptogens, farming worked. Ashwagandha goes from seed to harvest in about five to six months, so growers simply planted more. Ginseng is widely farmed as well.

Rhodiola is a different kind of plant, and it couldn't keep up. And rhodiola matters here for a specific reason: when people take it, the compound doing most of the work is salidroside. That's the part the body responds to, and it's the reason the plant gets harvested in the first place.

A plant that takes twenty years

Rhodiola grows where most things don't: high, cold, exposed ground across the northern hemisphere. Plants that live in conditions like that tend to take their time, and rhodiola is no exception. Some individuals live past eighty years

It grows up slowly. A wild rhodiola won't produce its first flowers until it's seven or eight years old, and it needs around twenty years to reach full size. By the time it's worth harvesting, it has usually been growing for at least fifteen.

Replacing one takes just as long. Rhodiola spreads by seed, and most of those seeds never become plants at all. Survival rates run somewhere between 5 and 35 percent, so depending on conditions, as few as one in twenty makes it. The ones that do sprout barely travel, landing close to the parent plant, which means a patch that gets cleared out has almost no way of being refilled from somewhere else

Harvesting doesn't leave anything behind either. The valuable part is the thick underground root, so taking it means taking the whole plant

Put all of that together and the math stops working. Every root pulled off a mountainside took twenty years to get there, it dies when it's collected, and what replaces it depends on a handful of slow-growing seedlings that mostly don't survive.

It has happened before

We know what commercial demand does to rhodiola, because it has already happened once.

Through the 1970s and 80s, Soviet-era harvesting took rhodiola out of the Siberian mountains on a massive scale. In the Kuznetsky Alatau range, populations fell by 90 percent between 1976 and 1987. In the Altai region, reserves dropped by 76 percent over a similar stretch. Southern Siberia's estimated stock went from around 1,700 tonnes in the early 1970s to under 1,000 by the end of the decade.

Those numbers are decades old, and nobody has good recent population data, which is part of the problem. What's clear is that the plant collapsed once under heavy harvesting, and its biology hasn't changed since.

Demand, though, has changed. In 2019, officials in Russia's Altai Territory flagged rhodiola as a plant to watch again, after reports that large amounts were being dug up and shipped out with no oversight at all. Three years later, the concern went international.

In 2022, China, the EU, Ukraine, the UK and the US put rhodiola forward for protection under CITES, an international treaty that limits trade in wild species at risk of being wiped out by it. Since February 2023, every species of rhodiola has been on that list.

Today rhodiola is listed as threatened on three continents:

Critically endangered in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic
Threatened with extinction in Germany
Endangered in New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania
Possibly gone from the wild entirely in North Carolina

Why not just grow it?

The obvious answer is to farm rhodiola instead of taking it from the wild. And people do. It's grown in around eighteen countries, with real efforts to make it work.

But it hasn't solved the problem, for two reasons.

The first is scale. Growers knew back in the 1990s that large-scale rhodiola farming would be needed to keep up with demand. Decades later, most of it is still small or experimental. You can't rush a plant that takes years to mature, and the high, cold conditions it needs are hard to recreate on a farm.

The second one matters more. Rhodiola grown on a farm usually contains less salidroside than rhodiola from the wild, and cultivated plants are prone to root rot and wilting. So even when farming works, it gives you a weaker plant. If a buyer wants the full amount of salidroside, that pushes them straight back to the wild-harvested root.

There are bright spots. In one part of Russia, conservationists grew rhodiola in nurseries and replanted it in the wild, and 17 struggling populations recovered. It can be done. But as a way to supply a global market, farming rhodiola is still slow, difficult, and not enough.

So we don't use the plant

Here's the thing every route above runs into: they all depend on the plant. Wild or farmed, you're still pulling salidroside out of rhodiola, and rhodiola can't keep up.

So we don't.

We make salidroside biosynthetically. Remember, that's the compound inside rhodiola that people are really after, the active part doing the work. Instead of taking it from the plant, we produce the exact same compound through a natural biological process in a controlled setting. What comes out is pure salidroside at 98 percent, the same known amount every time. No harvest, no wild plants, no waiting twenty years.

This doesn't save rhodiola, and we're not going to dress it up as something bigger than it is. The point is narrower and it's true: the pressure on wild rhodiola comes from the demand for salidroside, and we meet that demand without touching the plant.

And making it directly is why we can be exact about the dose. Wild rhodiola varies, farmed rhodiola has less, and you don't always know what you're getting. Ours is the same in every batch.

If you want to see how that's done, take a look at how we make our 98% High-Purity Salidroside.

Explore Neumina's High-Purity 98% Salidroside Rhodiola Adaptogen →

The short version

The adaptogen boom was mostly a good thing. More people reaching for a plant instead of a quick fix is hard to argue with. But some plants can meet that kind of demand, and some can't. Rhodiola is one of them.

Salidroside is the reason people want it. So that's what we make, directly, without asking anything of a plant that's already stretched thin. Same compound, no plants pulled from the mountains.

References

CITES. Consideration of proposals for amendment of Appendices I and II: Rhodiola spp. CoP19 Prop. 45. 2022. https://cites.org/sites/default/files/documents/E-CoP19-Prop-45.pdf
Schwarz NA, Stratton MT, Colquhoun RJ, et al. Salidroside and exercise performance in healthy active young adults - an exploratory, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2024;21(1):2433744. doi:10.1080/15502783.2024.2433744
Kumar A, Venugopal S, Jnanesha AC, Lal RK. Agricultural-based challenges, genetic enhancement, and obstacles to an industrially important medicinal plant, ashwagandha (Withania somnifera (L.) Dunal): a review. Ecol Genet Genomics. 2023;28:100183. doi:10.1016/j.egg.2023.100183

Share

Quick FAQ

Amy Qin, PhD, RD, CDCES, Nutrition Scientist at Neumina

Amy Qin is a Nutrition Scientist at Neumina with training in both nutrition research and clinical care. She received her PhD in Nutrition and Metabolism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and completed clinical training at Stanford Hospital and UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital.

Her work focuses on applying nutrition science to metabolism, aging, and chronic disease management in ways that are practical and personalized.