After all, how much impact can rosemary essential oil have on the brain?

Well, according to Anita Watt, managing director of Glenelg River Herbs, quite a significant impact actually.

“Research shows it is a mild stimulant that helps make you more alert,” Anita says.

It was probably this alertness that saw Anita decide to create essential oils using some of her 140,000 rosemary plants. She distils about three litres a week on her Balmoral farm in western Victoria. But she didn’t stop at essential oil. She also created a product called The Memory Stick, a roll-on diluted oil that capitalises on rosemary’s particular selling point.

“I’m always looking for something new and different, ways to diversify and the idea is that this can help people like students concentrate,” says the 61-year-old.

Anita has solid support for her views. The BBC in 2017 reported a study — presented at the British Psychological Society — found pupils working in a room with the aroma of rosemary essential oil achieved 5 to 7 per cent better results in memory tests.

Then there’s the International Journal of Neuroscience study that found rosemary produced significant enhancement of performance for overall quality of memory and secondary memory factors.

“Even historically there’s reference to rosemary’s abilities — in Shakespeare’s Hamlet he quotes, ‘there’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance’,” Anita adds.

Because the essential oil can’t be applied directly on skin, Anita creates the 15ml Memory Stick with sage essential oil and grapeseed oil, which can then be rolled under the nose or on the hand for a hit of clarity.

Clearly, farming the herb has in some way inspired the creative evolution of Anita’s two-decade farming business.

Today Glenelg River Herbs is run on four leased properties, three in western Victoria and one in Lucindale South Australia, totalling 20 hectares under crop, producing up to 35 tonnes of herbs a year.

The biggest crop — at 140,000 plants — is rosemary.

Young sprigs from plants less than three years old are picked daily, producing one to two tonnes per hectare each year, sold fresh through hydroponic growers to major supermarkets across Australia.

“You can’t grow rosemary hydroponically and because major supermarkets don’t want to deal with growers on individual products, I have to supply rosemary to hydroponic growers who then onsell it,” Anita says.

Older rosemary plants, up to six or seven years old, produce about three tonnes a hectare, which is made into dried herbs or used in essential oil distillation.

In addition to rosemary, Anita grows up to 4000 sage plants, with the harvest sold fresh, dried and in oils. About 2000 oregano plants are in their infancy and being trialled alongside 400 stevia plants, a sweetener alternative.

There are 2000 thyme and 400 lemon thyme plants, as well as 25 bay trees.

All herbs are hand-picked daily to order, with Anita overseeing 12 casual staff.

Aside from supermarkets, fresh herbs are also supplied to food services, such as Ingham’s Chicken.

Dried herbs are packaged into Glenelg River Herbs 8g bags, marketed as “100 per cent Australian and 100 per cent real herbs” and sold to about 40 specialty stores mainly in regional Victoria. The dried herbs also feature in a salt produced by Mt Zero Olives.

Aside from The Memory Stick, Anita produces 10ml essential oil bottles, sold in specialty stores. A litre of oil is produced by 100kg of green matter.

While rosemary makes up about 85 per cent of farm production, Anita hopes to maintain this same output, but increase other herbs to be 40 per cent of the farm by 2020.

It’s a testament to Anita’s creativity that the business has come a long way since its creation in 2000.

Back then Anita was a special education teacher, living on a 485-hectare property farming 3500 sheep in Balmoral with her husband, Danny.

Her neighbour, Christina Hindaugh — who had completed a Churchill Fellowship in 1998 in Europe on broadacre herb growing — was farming with her husband, Chris.

“One day Christina asked me if I could help her write a business plan, because I had experience in it,” Anita says, adding that such was Christina’s passion for herbs she even wrote a book, The Great Herb Tour in 1999.

“I could see potential for success and something totally different and I agreed to become a partner,” Anita says.

With no investment capital and no land, the duo sought seed funding from investors, with Glenelg River Rosemary launched in 2000 with about 10 shareholders and a board of five directors. That funding allowed them to lease land and invest in infrastructure from irrigation to refrigeration.

For 12 years Christina and Anita farmed just rosemary, then in 2012 diversified to the other herbs and renamed the business Glenelg River Herbs.

Sadly, Christina passed away in 2015, about a decade after first being diagnosed with breast cancer. Not for a moment did Anita contemplate giving up, although she has taken more of a management role.

As rosemary plants live for up to seven years, every year around autumn two to four hectares are removed and replaced with 5cm-high seedlings, bought from another grower.

Soil is tested at this point to determine plant mineral needs, with soil and plant tissue testing continued during the life of the plant.

The herbs are planted into weed matting, crucial for ground-hugging herbs, while across the whole property herbicide and mowing are used to reduce weeds.

Given Balmoral’s Mediterranean climate, the herbs have few pest or disease problems and therefore no pesticide is used. Fertiliser is applied through fertigation, via the farm’s sub-surface irrigation lines. Irrigation water is sourced from dams, creeks and ground water, in addition to Balmoral’s annual average rainfall of about 600mm, “although it’s been unpredictable in recent years”, Anita says.

Hand-picked to order, herbs can range in sprig size from 8-10cm for Ingham’s, 10-12cm for supermarkets, with some customers requesting 18cm sprigs.

Herbs are washed if requested, otherwise they are checked, packed into boxes and stored in the coolroom with refrigerated transport on Tuesdays and Fridays.

“Our distance from market is a challenge,” Anita says. “If a customer calls up and wants herbs tomorrow we can’t meet that.

“There’s a trigger point where we would have our own trucking but we’ve not reached that point yet.”

Herbs earmarked for drying are harvested with a header specially modified by Danny and Chris, then dried in a remodelled shipping container fitted with heaters and a dehumidifier.

In summer, herbs dry in less than a week. “I try to avoid drying too much in winter because of costs and time,” Anita says.

Dried herbs are then rolled to remove the leaves from the stem and packed on site into pouches. Distilled oils are packed on site, once they have gone through the steaming, boiling and distillation process.

Anita says the moments when she bought the still in April last year and launched The Memory Stick in October were both poignant.

“Christina and I would always celebrate everything, we popped a bottle of bubbly even when a new toilet was installed,” Anita says. “So when I got the oil distiller and made The Memory Stick, my first thought was, we would have opened a champagne right now.”

FARM FACTS

Glenelg River Herbs

Anita Watt runs Glenelg River Herbs across four properties in western Victoria and South Australia.

She grows rosemary, sage, oregano, stevia, thyme, lemon thyme and bay leaf.

Rosemary is her biggest crop, with 140,000 plants. The herbs are sold fresh to supermarkets, as well as dried and made into essential oils.

The Memory Stick is Anita’s newest innovative product. It is a 15ml diluted rosemary essential oil roll-on stick that can be used to boost memory.

The Memory Stick costs $25 online.

thememorystick.com.au

glenelgriverherbs.com.au