Search for natural sources of shikimic acid and you get the same list on every site. Star anise. Sweet gum. Ginkgo. Wheatgrass. Pine needles. What almost none of them give you is how much is in any of it, and that is the only part of the list worth reading.

We wildcraft one of these plants and buy another one in, so here is what we can put a number to, and where we run out of road.

Star anise, the one the industry buys

Star anise (Illicium verum) is where the pharmaceutical supply chain gets nearly all of its shikimic acid, and it is not a small amount. A 2015 review in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology puts the yield from Chinese star anise pods at up to 17 percent of dry weight (DOI: 10.3389/fbioe.2015.00145). That is a lot of compound sitting in a small brown pod, and it is why nobody in industry had much reason to look anywhere else until the supply crunch of 2005.

Star anise does not grow in Alabama and we are not going to pretend it does. We buy whole pods and do the extraction here on the farm.

The number moves depending on how it was dried

This is the part the lists leave out. How much shikimic acid a star anise pod carries is not settled at harvest. What happens to it afterward changes the answer.

A 2020 paper in Food Chemistry took fresh star anise, dried it five different ways, and measured what was left in each batch (DOI: 10.1016/j.foodchem.2020.128359). The results were not close together. The best of the five held 125.56 mg per gram on a dry basis. Same species, same pods, different handling, different result.

We think about that every season, because the plant we harvest ourselves is far more sensitive to timing than star anise ever was.

Sweet gum, the one we pull ourselves

Sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua) grows wild across our land in Crenshaw County and across most of the rest of the Southeast, where it is better known as the tree that drops spiky balls in your yard every fall. The seed pods carry shikimic acid, and the 2015 review of the tree in Pharmacognosy Reviews out of the University of Arkansas gathered the laboratory work on it (DOI: 10.4103/0973-7847.156307).

The pods worth harvesting are the green ones, pulled off the limb in late summer and early fall while they are still soft enough to mark with a thumbnail. Once they brown and drop, that window has closed. We pick green, by hand, from trees that have never been sprayed or fertilized, and we go straight into a slow alcohol extraction.

The picking is the hard part. A pod that makes a strong extract and a pod that makes a weak one look nearly the same on the branch. We have written up the tree in full, including its history and what the research does and does not say, on our sweet gum tree page.

Ginkgo, conifers, wheatgrass

These three turn up on every list of natural sources. We have never worked with any of them, we do not have figures we would stand behind, and we are not going to print a number we have not checked. If a site hands you a tidy percentage for pine needles with nothing underneath it, treat that the way you would treat any other number somebody made up.

What this means if you are buying

Shikimic acid is a precursor. It is the raw material a manufacturer starts from, not a finished medicine, and it does not behave in the body the way a finished medicine does. Anybody selling it to you as though it were one is overselling it. We say the same thing on our shikimic acid page and we will keep saying it.

What we will tell you is what we do. We pick green sweet gum balls by hand in Opp, Alabama, and we extract whole star anise pods here on the farm. Small batches, no additives, no fillers, nothing watered down. Our Sweet Gum Ball Extract and our Star Anise Extract are two different plants doing the same job, and you can see both together here.

Questions about any of this? Write to us at info@mayimfarm.com. We read everything that comes in.

These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Talk to your doctor before using any herbal supplement, especially if you are pregnant, nursing, managing a health condition, or taking medication.