Appalachian Innovators Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Lavender Hopes and Realities: Farming Project Doesn’t Go as Planned

We reported earlier this year on an economic development project to grow lavender on former strip mines in West Virginia. After the story was released, we heard from a number of students involved in the program, saying they were disappointed and felt misled by the outcomes of the project, called Green Mining. West Virginia Public Broadcasting revisited the story to find out what happened, and if the project is still going as expected.

Back in 2014, West Virginia’s then-Governor Earl Ray Tomblin asked the West Virginia Regional Technology Park to come up with some ideas that could help generate new jobs for displaced coal miners in southern West Virginia. The idea that the CEO of the Technology Park, Rusty Kruslock, had was to grow lavender on former strip mines.

In 2016, the project was awarded grants through the Benedum Foundation, then the Appalachian Regional Commission, to fund the first couple years of the Green Mining program. In the interest of full disclosure, both of these organizations have also provided funding to West Virginia Public Broadcasting in the past.

Seventeen other companies also donated time and resources toward the first phase of the lavender project. The Technology Park offered classes to teach people how to grow lavender, and they paid the students a $10-an-hour stipend to attend classes. The project attracted 47 students in 2017, including several from out of state.

Veteran Debra Ritchie and her therapy dog Ranger.

“We sold everything we owned, packed up our little car, [and] drove 9 hours to West Virginia,” said veteran Debra Ritchie, who moved to West Virginia from Florida with her husband, Scott, and their daughter after hearing about the Green Mining program.

“[We] came here to be lavender farmers,” said Scott Ritchie, who’s also a veteran. “We were supposed to get a deal to where once we graduate the school, they were supposed to give each [veteran] two acres of land. And we went to school, graduated from the school, and went to go talk about the land and…nothing. No call back. No email return, nothing.”

They said they were told that following the 6-week-course, they would have the option of growing lavender on a mine site, to help raise some supplemental income. But that didn’t happen.

“I definitely learned not to put all your eggs in one basket, that’s for sure,” Scott said. “We pretty much put all our eggs in one basket and the basket got knocked off the table.”

Other students we spoke to said they had also been led to believe that they would be offered land to grow lavender on after their six-week training course. Another veteran, Amber Stanley, lives just outside Charleston.

“Now I’m feeling pretty misled, and I also feel a little bit exploited,” said Amber Stanley, another veteran who completed one of the training courses in 2017.

Student with the Green Mining project in 2017.

So what happened? The project’s main organizer, Rusty Kruselock, said the grant money simply ran out. They couldn’t pay their staff anymore, so they couldn’t continue the next phase of the project. We asked him about the students who say they’re disappointed, people like Amber, Scott and Debra?

“We apologize if that’s the impression, we weren’t aware of that, but we certainly reached out in the springtime to everyone we could,” Kruselock said. “But we’ll do everything we can to rectify that in the future.”

An hour after we recorded that interview with Kruselock, a volunteer with the Green Mining project did send an email to the former students, asking if they would want to be a part of a new phase of their project, a lavender growing cooperative. The students we talked to said it was the first time they had heard from the program in seven months.

The idea behind the cooperative, in part, is to get former students to help maintain the existing lavender fields, as volunteers.

West Virginia Public Broadcasting visited the mine site nearly a year later to see how the plants had fared through the winter. The grey, moonscape soil now has some purple growing on it. Small plants of English and French varieties of lavender dot the rocky fields.

A little more than 3,000 lavender plants survived the winter. Kruselock said that’s about half of what they planted last year.

A few volunteers, and at least one person who’s been paid part time, has been up here in the past few months weeding the fields. Most of that weeding work has been done by Lori Bailey. She heard about the lavender project from a news story and reached out to see how she could get involved.

“I just thought that was the greatest thing, cause there’s so much land that’s had mountaintop removal and I just think that’s great [that lavender is] making that look beautiful,” Bailey said.

But without Bailey and a handful of volunteers up here, the lavender plants might have been overtaken by weeds.

That’s still a risk if they don’t find a way to keep the volunteers engaged or figure out how to pay people to maintain the fields.

“The last thing you want to do is go out and plant 2,000 [or] 10,000 acres and then not have anybody to work it or not have anybody to take care of it,” said Marina Sawyer, one of the Green Mining project’s main organizers from last year.

“If we don’t have the workforce or the students coming out to do that work, then you end up losing valuable plants. And we’re not about that either.”

But a few months after this interview, Sawyer and the other staff were all let go. They were only contracted to work on a one-year grant, and the funding ran out.

WVPB reached out to the Appalachian Regional Commission, which funded the project last year, to ask if they are happy with the project’s outcomes. They didn’t want to do an interview, but Wendy Wasserman, director of communications, sent the following statement:

“This project proves that Appalachia’s coal impacted communities are well-positioned for innovative economic development. The Green Mining team identified an asset, did the research, and literally got their hands dirty. Now a series of new value added products using Appalachian-grown lavender are headed to market.”

Wasserman said the project was turned down for a second round of funding from the ARC because so many other projects applied for funding. She said the application process was incredibly competitive this year.

Meanwhile, Rusty Kruselock said that in a few years, he hopes these fields of lavender will be producing enough essential oil that will earn some income for the project.

“Most of our revenue down the road is going to be shared profits. Once we get oil processing, we’re gonna use the shared revenue to make the whole foundation self-sustaining.”

And the West Virginia Regional Technology Park does have the equipment, and the chemical expertise, to produce that oil. But they won’t be producing very much oil any time soon, not for at least another year or two, until the lavender plants are big enough.

So in the meantime, how will the program support itself and maintain the fields of lavender? Kruselock said although they didn’t receive a second year of funding from the ARC’s Power Plus program, they are going to try again later this fall. And he said, the handful of volunteers will help keep it going.

At this time, there are about five students still involved in helping the project grow.

Not among them is Debra and Scott Ritchie, who said they aren’t sure they have trust in the program anymore.

“It kind of put me back to that, ‘well why am I even trying?’ thought process,” Debra Ritchie said. “So I was angry. Real angry. And disappointed.”

She said it was nice to see the recent email that the project hasn’t gone completely underground, but they don’t have time to spend volunteering on the mine site, not at this time anyway.

At this point, the Ritchies are just struggling to pay their own bills. Debra got a job at a gas station, and her husband Scott is still looking for a job. They said they aren’t sure if they will stay in West Virginia, or if they plan to leave the state in search of work.

How One Man Is Using Coal to Help Blast Rockets into Space

Brian Joseph from Ohio County, West Virginia, has dedicated his professional life to innovation, reimagining and retooling old materials in the region with new technologies.

He founded and is president of Touchstone Research Laboratory, which has produced a patent a month on average for the past 10 years. The lab has also put Wheeling on the aerospace technology industrial map.

“We are looked upon in the aerospace marketplace as real technological leaders,” Joseph said. “And we are working with all the major aerospace companies in the world from Triadelphia, West Virginia.”

Joseph has some thoughts to share on incubating innovation.

Coal: A Rock that Does More Than Burn

NASA is preparing the replacement of the Hubble Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope will launch in 2019 with a goal of observing some of the most distant events and objects in the universe. The molds required to craft such precise equipment are made of Appalachian coal.

Also, next-generation rockets are being blasted into space with super-strong, heat-resistant coatings made of Appalachian coal. The guy behind these innovations believes burning coal happens to be the least economically viable thing you can do with it.

“How many labor hours do we get per ton?” Joseph asked in a conference room surrounded with various innovations and materials that have come out of his research lab (many made from processed coal). “When you extract coal and you and burn it, that number is basically zero. If I take that and make it into foam, I’m probably using 10 to a hundred times more labor, and then if I take that and make exotic things like molds for rockets, I’m adding so much value to the coal, and I’m also adding a lot of jobs.”

Brian Joseph is a resident and product of the upper Ohio Valley. His lab is an innovation incubator in Wheeling that’s produced inventions like a foam made mostly of coal that has interesting properties: it’s fireproof, lightning-proof, super-strong and light-weight and it doesn’t expand or contract with extreme temperature variations.

The lab is also working on new exhaust systems for U.S. Navy ships, new ways to make carbon fiber airplane parts and new forms of carbon fiber. Joseph says his group also expects to produce a new form of aluminum next year that is more than twice as strong as the world’s strongest aluminum.

The lab is not only producing and testing materials, it’s now also spinning off companies that apply some of those inventions and innovations.

Creating Space for Innovation

When asked how he cultivates innovation, Joseph reflects on a recent visit to Thomas Edison’s laboratory. He says he couldn’t help but notice that Edison’s culture and structural organization was almost identical to the environment he’s fostered at Touchstone. He explains, it’s an environment that allowed Edison’s team of 23 to produce some 400 patents in just six years.

“He invents everything from iron ore separations technologies to the light bulb to the world’s first electrical distribution to the world’s first electric train and on and on,” Joseph said.

“How do you do that with 23 people? You find people that can make virtually anything and mix people that bring new technologies in to that environment. And you make a very flat structure so that everyone works really well together, and it’s amazing how fast things move.”

“Edison didn’t focus on what school did you go to,” Joseph added, “he focused on: what can you do for me?”

People Made of the Right Stuff

Joseph hasn’t had to search far to find innovators to join his crew. More than half of his employees are local. He says the region is teaming with people shaped by the industrial revolution. He points out how steel, aluminum, and fundamental glass innovations were all developed here in this region.

“In this crucible here, all these people became people who know material. So you have generations of people who know how to work with material. They just naturally know.”

“On every block someone’s got a machine shop in their basement and every third house has a welder in their garage and people naturally know how to make things. And that is the basis, I think, of what makes Touchstone really successful.”

Advice

Joseph has a few tips to share about fostering innovation. He says business owners have to be willing to change and adapt in this age where technology is rapidly changing and challenging status quos.

He also maintains that, especially in West Virginia, small business need to actively look for ways to engage with and help their communities.

“In West virginia, if you play well in the community and you really help the community, it’s amazing what they will do for you.”

Finally, Joseph insists that there’s a pressing need to cultivate optimism throughout the region. He says hope really makes anything is possible.

The story is part of the Appalachian Innovators series, which is made possible with support from The Benedum Foundation and The Appalachian Regional Commission.

Pa. Trail Initiative Could Provide Roadmap for Some Struggling W.Va. Towns

There’s a national storyline that’s told about parts of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. It goes something like this: As the steel and coal industries fade, small towns are dying out. Young people move away because there’s a lack of jobs.

But for the past 20 years, some entrepreneurs have quietly been working on a different narrative — one that harnesses the region’s natural beauty to build the economy. Their slow climb is starting to bear real fruit.

About 10 years ago, after a long career in computer sales, Rod Darby was downsized, and out of work.

“And I got angry about that, so I thought, ‘I’m never going to work for someone else again, so I’m going to start my own business.”

As he researched what that business would be, he started noticing a lot of activity around the Great Allegheny Passage — a 150-mile bike trail along an old rail line, connecting Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Maryland. Construction was still in progress then, but it’s since been completed. Darby wrote up a business plan to open a bar and restaurant along the trail, in West Newton, about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. He shopped the idea around.

“I went to a large bank, they said, ‘Nope, that’s not what we do. I went to a medium sized bank, ‘Hey, great plan, that’s not what we do.’ Went to a small bank, ‘Great plan, we’re not sure about this trail.’

Then he went to a community development program called the Progress Fund.

“They said, ‘This is exactly what we do.’ And they’ve been a fantastic partner for me, since we started.”

Progress Fund co-founder David Kahley, saw a need to support tourism in the region 20 years ago.

“So, we started basically a non-profit bank, and making loans to small businesses,” he said.

They initially invested in nearby Ohiopyle, financing a whitewater rafting facility, a bed and breakfast and other tourism projects. Today, it’s bustling with cyclists, hikers and rafters spending money to eat, shop and stay overnight.

Kahley wanted to try something similar in West Newton, which is only a 34-mile bike ride from Pittsburgh. Then Rod Darby walked in the door.

“Rod became one of the first people outside of Ohiopyle to start investing in the other little towns. So, when he approached and said, ‘I want to do something here,’ we were jumping for joy.”

The Trailside Restaurant and Bar in West Newton, Pa.

Today, Darby’s Trailside Restaurant serves pub food, boasts a full bar and a takeout beer shop. Twenty-eight people work here, 16 of them full time. And Darby said business is hopping.

“And people ask me, ‘Does the trail help you out?’, and I’m like, ‘The trail is the reason I’m here.’ ”

The Progress Fund’s David Kahley walks just a few feet from the restaurant, on to that bike trail that runs along the river.

Kahley said the Progress Fund invested in pizza and fast food restaurants near the trail, a canoe and kayak livery, and the renovation of a bed and breakfast — nearly $2.5 million in total.

“We have nine loans that we’ve done in West Newton, and it’s really, that kind of level of investment is changing West Newton’s future around tourism,” he said. “Why nine loans here? Well that Great Allegheny Passage is a huge economic opportunity.”

Based on studies and surveys over 17 years, the Progress Fund estimates nearly a million people use the GAP trail annually — creating an economic benefit of $50 million along the route, with 65 trail-related businesses opening in the past decade.

As the steel and coal industries have declined, Kahley said, West Newton and other towns in the region have faced years of disinvestment. But he said the Progress Fund is trying to help them see what they do have to offer.

“The resource here is the landscape and all the recreational opportunities,” he said. “So it is a fully invested economic development program, but it’s one that relies on the environmental qualities of the community, rather than being the extractive industry.”

West Virginia Trails

Kent Spellman is encouraged by the Progress Fund’s results. He’s a consultant with the Rails to Trails Conservancy, out of Washington, D.C. Spellman is pushing for this kind of development along West Virginia’s abandoned train tracks.

He has spent most of his life in West Virginia and said some communities are suffering from something like post-traumatic stress disorder because of the loss of industry in recent decades.

“Their future too often in southern West Virginia, but also in many northern West Virginia communities, has been determined by that big extractive industry, or that big steel mill, or that big chemical company,” Spellman said. “Those things are going away, and it’s a time for us I think in rural Appalachia for understanding that we have to take responsibility for our future ourselves.”

Spellman is currently focused on completing a 230-mile rail trail from Parkersburg to Morgantown, hooking up with the Great Allegheny Passage into Pittsburgh.

He sees rail trails as the new main street. The place where people walk their dogs and talk with neighbors — and a piece of the region’s future economy. Christine Risch isn’t quite convinced.

“Well, it may never replace what was lost by the coal industry.”

Risch is director of Resource and Energy Economics at Marshall University’s Center for Business Economics, in Huntington, West Virginia.

“Because those jobs were extremely good paying jobs, and tourism industry is lower wage, closer to minimum wage,” she said.

But Risch also sees reason for hope in the tourism industry. She points to the Hatfield McCoy trail system in southwestern West Virginia — an area she said has lost more coal jobs than most of the state. While rails to trails are for bicycles, the Hatfield-McCoy trails are for motorized all-terrain vehicles. Her center surveyed visitors there in 2014.

“We estimated based on surveys that about 22-million dollars was staying in the area, for what people were spending to buy permits to ride the trails, for lodging and food and fuel that they needed while they were in the area,” Risch said.

According to the Marshall study, the Hatfield McCoy trail system was supporting nearly 240 jobs in 2014. Risch said the number of permits sold has continued to grow since then, as has the need for lodging and other amenities to support those visitors.

“It’s not replacing the coal industry, yet, but it certainly has potential to grow, quite a lot.”

Kent Spellman said trail tourism could bring a longer-term economic boost to the region — because it can showcase the beauty and livability of West Virginia.

“And if we get just a small percentage of the people who come through our communities to be thinking down the road about maybe that would be a good place to rear a family. Maybe that would be a good place to bring my small business. That is the goal of tourism. We should think of it as a recruitment tool not as an end unto itself.”

Mary Popovich, agrees. She’s the mayor of West Newton. She said thanks to the trail, and the economic development around it, there’s excitement in their old coal town. Even the elementary school that almost closed, is now seeing increased enrollment.

“There’s a lot of houses that are getting sold to young families. This is how you help your community grow in numbers, and then you’re going to get more businesses.”

The Progress Fund has invested a lot in West Newton, hoping other former coal towns will look here, and start re-imagining their futures as trail towns.

Julie Grant is a reporter and producer at The Allegheny Front, which is based in Pittsburgh.

This story is part of the Appalachian Innovators series, which is made possible with support from The Benedum Foundation and The Appalachian Regional Commission.

New Wave of Lavender Farmers Hope to Revive Barren Stripmines into Fields of Purple

When you picture the Appalachian Coalfields, you might think of those scenic photographs of mist rising from the mountains. But there are the less picturesque landscapes too — views of mountaintops that have been stripped away from coal mining. Imagine if these barren landscapes were covered with purple fields of lavender.

That change may be coming because some people in West Virginia think growing lavender could give the state’s struggling economy a boost.

The farm is located in Boone County, on land that looks like a moonscape, with parched, gray dirt, and jagged, blasted-off mountaintops in the distance.

A Reason to Stay in W.Va.

Donnie Facemyer is a laid-off coal miner. He helped strip this mountain, back when he was working for Pritchard Mining. “A year ago I would have laughed at you if they would have said they were gonna farm on a strip job,” Facemyer said. “Cause it’s all just shot rock. But these plants seem to be doing real good in it.”

These lavender plants are little more than scrawny bushes now, barely a foot tall, but Facemyer is hopeful this mountaintop will soon be turned into fields of purple. He’s one of the farmers taking part in a new project launched by the West Virginia Regional Technology Park in Kanawha County to grow lavender on former strip mines. Turns out, the plants actually thrive in the dry rocky soil that surface mining leaves behind.

This job is what’s keeping Facemyer and his family from leaving the state.

“Me and my wife were going to, until we ran into this job, we were going south,” he said. “Just anything, we were gonna sell everything we owned; take off, start all over.”

Money for Students to Learn Farming

Like Facemyer, other new farmers are hoping the lavender industry can provide a steady source of income to support them in West Virginia.

Students working at the Green Mining work site in Boone County

It’s a new industry here in Appalachia, but the idea was enticing to a handful of people who signed up for a training class, even some who moved to West Virginia for the program. Some came from Texas, others from Ohio.

One family came from Florida. Debra Ritchie says a fellow veteran told her about the lavender project, and so she and her husband sold everything they owned and moved from the Sunshine State to the Mountain State.

“We moved up here to turn a new chapter in our lives,” Richie said.

As part of the program, the Ritchies get paid an education stipend of $10 an hour for the 6-weeks they spend learning about lavender and how to grow it. The program is called Green Mining and it’s just getting started. Last year, it received a $1 million grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission’s Power Initiative, which helped pay for salaries and students’ stipends.

Debra Ritchie, veteran with PTSD, with her therapy dog named Ranger. Debra and her husband Sky moved to West Virginia from Florida for the lavender project.

Can They Make a Living Off Lavender Alone?

We reached out to more than a dozen lavender farmers across the United States, and each of them told a similar story — it’s a lot of fun and a great way to earn a small side income, but two farmers, both in Washington state, said they make a full-time living from lavender alone.

Shelly Keeney has a small lavender farm in her backyard in Huntington, West Virginia. It’s a peaceful place with wind chimes, and the scent of lavender wafts through the air.

“I have about 100 lavender plants, and I do fairly well, but as far as having a full time business, I would probably have to have, let’s say, 10-acres at least, to do just solely lavender,” Keeney said.

Shelly Kenney is a lavender farmer in Huntington, W.Va.

The plants Keeney has keep her busy enough, especially since she also has a full-time job. Inside her garage, she has a small workshop. Fresh lavender hangs from the wooden beams to dry. Keeney has jams and jellies she sells at farmers markets.

“This one is a strawberry jam,” she said, “with just a hint of lavender. You don’t want to overpower anything you’re gonna eat for culinary purposes. This is great on scones and biscuits.”

She says she gets requests from farmers markets across West Virginia — more requests than she has time for. One product that’s in especially high demand is essential oil.

Examining the Potential for Essential Oil

The coordinators for the Green Mining Lavender Project want to tap into the essential oil aromatherapy industry. too. But they’ll need to produce at least 2,000 gallons of oil to sell to the larger companies.

At the Green Mining headquarters in South Charleston, a former Dow Chemical coal-testing lab has been transformed into a distillation station for lavender.

Project Coordinator Mariana Sawyer says Green Mining is prepared to meet demand. They want Appalachia to be the new home for USA-sourced lavender oil.

“It hasn’t been that big of a crop in the U.S. before. Unless you buy locally grown or something that was made out of Washington, then it’s probably from overseas,” Sawyer said. “Because that’s where most of the lavender comes from. It hasn’t been that big of a crop in the U.S. before.”

W.Va. Economist: ‘We Need More Innovators’

Lavender could bring in some revenue to southern West Virginia, but it’s unlikely to bring back the thousands of coal jobs that have disappeared in the past decade.

West Virginia’s chief economist John Deskins says that although coal production has bounced back some, “it’s still far below what it was a few years ago. So ultimately in the state we desperately need to diversify our economic mix.”

Deskins says what the state’s economy desperately needs now is more innovators; people who will try out new business ideas. “You know cause nobody knows, for sure. People like me, or government officials, study the economy, we try to figure out what might have potential, what might not have potential — but ultimately, it’s up to an entrepreneur to experiment, and they’ll find what works and what doesn’t work.”

Not a 100 Percent Solution

Back up at the Boone County strip mine, the students in the program are busy planting baby lavender plants.

One man is drilling holes with an electric rototiller. Retired Army Officer James Ross is helping troubleshoot a problem the crew had where they accidentally planted in the wrong area. Now, they have to go back and replant the crop.

Ross is one of the program instructors. In the Army, he led missions for a battalion of 11,000 people. Now, he’s channeling that energy into teaching West Virginians how to farm.

“Have we got a 100 percent solution on helping the state’s economic problem? No, I’m not saying that. But it’s a good starting place,” Ross noted. “Taking this land that was deemed unusable and doing something good.”

Not everyone has stuck with the program. Last summer, 16 people signed up for the class, but only half completed it. The second course had 20 graduates.

Many of the trainees say they’ll grow lavender on a strip mine — especially if they are able to lease the land for cheap. The coordinators with the Green Mining Program say they’re applying for another federal grant to help them transition to a co-op model. If they succeed, the lavender farmers would be the owners of the entire business and operation within three years.

This story is part of the Appalachian Innovators series, which is made possible with support from The Benedum Foundation and the Appalachian Regional Commission. Thanks to TVW, Washington Public Affairs Network, for footage of lavender farms in Washington state.