IHA Annual Conference 2026

Kat Chiba, a 30-year resident of Cherry Valley, is known for her alternative lifestyle. Her family built a straw Bale House with local materials and the help of friends. Building community has always gone hand in hand with growing a family and creating gardens. As a homeschooling mom, the gardens were our classrooms. Kat, a biologist by education and a teacher by trade, shared her knowledge and enthusiasm with Cornell Cooperative Extension as a Master Gardener. Her home gardens include a large vegetable plot, orchards, perennial beds, a dooryard potager, and a food forest, her focus though has always been herbs. This all came to fruition in her shop “Straw House Herbs.” There was finally an outlet to share not only herbal tinctures, culinary herb salts, and fruit and herb cordials but also information through her educational programs.

Strawhouse Herbs 

Skye Suter broadcasts her fondness for art and plants through a combination of writing, lecturing, graphic design, and illustration. As a writer and illustrator, she creates and contributes to publications about herbs and plants. She also lectures and teaches classes on herbs and related subjects to interested groups.

An Herbal Leaf

Since 1980, Matthias and Andrea Reisen have lived on their 40-acre farm located in the Finger Lakes Region of Western New York, first as dairy farmers and then establishing Healing Spirits Herb Farm & Education Center in 1991.

Matthias and Andrea both studied with Rosemary Gladstar at Sage Mountain and with Tom Brown, Jr at his tracking school. This knowledge brought forth their understanding of herbs and how to caretake the land. Matthias was fortunate to be able to assist Rosemary with her programs for many years, further adding to his understanding and appreciation of the world around us. Rosemary’s strong foundation of earth-based herbalism is the basis of Matthias and Andrea’s herbal work, and this resonates just as much today as it did in 1991.

Matthias has a degree in agronomy (the study of plants and soil) and has worked with farmer-to-farmer programs having had assignments in Beluris, Nepal, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Armenia and Columbia. This love of working with other farmers in different parts of the world is a continuation of his and Andrea’s Peace Corp days together in the Philippines where they had a two-year assignment living in the jungle and working with the mountain people there. Matthias has also served as president of Northeast Herbal Association and International Herb Association.

Matthias and Andrea are also students of numerous healing modalities, including Certified Zero Balancing Practitioners, CranioSacral, Reiki, Myofascial Release, Therapeutic Touch, as well as SomatoEmotional Release, practicing for 30+ years. Working with these therapies may help relieve physical and mental symptoms related to stress, illness, trauma, as well as balancing body, mind and spirit for optimum health. They have found that combining herbs and bodywork are a natural fit that the body knows and responds to in a very healing way.

They have added the production of medicinal mushrooms with a building that includes a sterile room with two HEPA filters and a growing room with high humidity. The same integrity is brought to their mushroom products that people have come to expect from their herbs.

Matthias and Andrea take careful consideration of the seasons, weather, soil quality, and even the energetic health of the land and water. After harvest, they properly dry, process and package herbs to ensure their products are of the highest quality. They dry herbs in a greenhouse using a racking system that allows the dried herbs to be on the top and the wetter, more delicate herbs to be on the bottom shelves with a lot of shading.

Today there are three generations living and working on the farm – and at one point Andrea’s grandmother who would help with the herbs in the beginning years, joking that she had to wait till she was 90 to become known as the “New York State Stripper.” Where they once milked cows they now have an apothecary, commercial kitchen, and herbal processing and storage rooms. This spring, they added a sunroom to the side of the apothecary to winter plants in and start new ones in the spring. Andrea says, “Change is always underway here. Once we think we are set, the plants come and whisper in our ears, and then we are off doing something else we hadn’t thought of before.”

 Healing Spirits Herb Farm