A number of years ago, there was an attempt made to establish a distillation facility in south central Manitoba to extract dill oil from the plant tissue. The effort went bust due to low dill oil prices just when production came on line. One of the characteristics of essential oil markets is price volatility. It seems to me that it might be prudent to set up distillation plants on the basis of perhaps two or three or more essential oil crops rather than just one. The mystical ginseng root.
Seed is very expensive, the plant is a shady-forest species so it needs to be shaded by a structure.
Weed control is largely by hoeing and pulling, and multiple sprayings are required to keep diseases in check. While there have been many inquiries, there hasn't been a huge increase in the number of commercial scale growers in Manitoba. Our first grower's experience was encouraging enough to him that he has sown more, this time under polypropylene shadecloth instead of wood lath. I have not heard about anyone successfully following through on this. Echinacea angustafolia , or Purple Coneflower is native to the southern Prairies.