Idaho mint

An Idaho mint farmer has some impressive numbers when it comes to growing mint. Here's Idaho mint farmer Galen Lee. Speaker2: First, we swapped the crop swaths into Windrows, and it sits there and dries for a couple of days. And that's just to get some of the natural moisture out of it. Do it a lot easier and quicker. It makes it cook faster so we don't spend as much time, don't use as much energy and natural gas to cook the oil out. So after it's dried, then we go through the chopper and they chop it into these tubs, and the tubs are all enclosed. And that's what they bring back here to the still to cook the oil out of it. This is where they cook the peppermint to make oil out of it. Basically extract the oil out of the peppermint plant. This is a still where everything's cooked. Bring the trucks in and park them inside the still here. They pump steam into the bottom of the truck. There's a big boiler in this building. Makes steam. They pump it to the bottom of the truck. That saturates the whole tub full of steam, and there's a pipe coming off the top where they collect the steam, and that's got all the oil in there off the mint and any moisture that's left. That steam is all collected and goes into a condenser. It condenses it back down to a liquid. The liquid runs inside to a separator. The separator sits there and the oil floats to the top. Then they pour the oil off the top. And that's what we sell as the finished oil. I sell to two different middlemen essentially that buy it and they'll hold on to that oil. And then when somebody like Colgate or Wrigley's or anybody that's using the oil so toothpaste, gum, mouthwash, they will order some oil, they say, hey, I want like a southwestern type of oil with these characteristics. And they can take those individual drums and say, yeah, this fits the bill for what you want, and this fits what you want. And they sell those drums. Speaker1: Lipsmacking mint.