A Good Rotation Crop

In his light blue sedan, husky William Gehring, 46, was moseying along the sand-rutted roads of northwestern Indiana. The air had a sharp but pleasant smell. Farmer Gehring sniffed it with proprietorial fondness, watched an echelon of his big tractors cut across the black muck and sandy loam. Trucks, loaded high with sweet-smelling green leaves, carried them to workers who dumped them into giant vats, then jumped up & down on them.

Farmer Gehring, the biggest U.S. grower of mint, last week was in the midst of harvesting his highly profitable crop. From his 2,500 acres of spearmint and peppermint he expected to gross close to $600,000, almost double what the same acreage would yield in corn.

Onions & Potatoes. Wisconsin-born Bill Gehring became a scientific farmer through spare-time study. He moved to Indiana in 1929 after marrying a Hoosier, got into mint farming by way of potatoes. Jasper County had been a heavy onion grower. When that market slumped, Gehring bought 350 brush-covered acres at $60 an acre (now worth upwards of $375), turned the fields to potatoes, and gradually added to his holdings. "Potatoes," explains Gehring, "meant rotation. To get steady potato crops, I reached for more land. For a good rotation crop, I chose mint. Mint and potatoes meant irrigation and controlling more land to protect our water rights. So this thing just grew and grew."

Since Gehring never grows mint on one field more than two years in a row, he is still a big potato grower--in fact, Indiana's biggest. His potato crop this year will gross an estimated $700,000. All told, his 5,800-acre farm, run like a factory, is a big business, with an annual payroll of $250,000, 350 workers, two $35,000 mint distilleries, 54 tractors and 150 buses, trucks, jeeps and other engines that weekly burn, in peak season, over 9,000 gallons of gasoline.

Stalks & Stills. At harvest time, Gehring's tractors slash their sickle bars through the 30-inch mint stalks with machine-gun speed. At the "still," the workers tramp the leaves down, 1 1/2 tons at a time, into the huge vats. Then steam is forced through them for 45 minutes to an hour. This boils out the essential mint oils, which are condensed through water-cooled coils and then drained off. The end result is a faintly yellowish-white fluid.

Gehring gets $3.50 to $5 a pound for spearmint and $5 to $7 a pound for the more delicate, harder-to-cultivate peppermint. This year, all of his spearmint will go to William Wrigley Jr. Co. to flavor chewing gum. The peppermint will go to Wrigley, Beech-Nut and other gum makers. Naturally, Gehring is a faithful gum-chewer.

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