I don't know if Desmanthus illinoensis is good for brews or not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmanthus_illinoensis#Chemistry wrote:Root bark of D. illinoensis has been found to contain N,N-DMT, NMT, N-hydroxy-N-methyltryptamine, 2-hydroxy-N-methyltryptamine, and gramine (toxic).
The article does mention that it's used for aya analogues.
I have never seen good information about gramine toxicity in humans.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramin wrote:Gramine is harmful to grazing animals like eg. sheep, whereas it has only low toxicity in mice and rats.
A table with a bit more concrete information about the mice and rats can be found
here.
Of course this doesn't really allow to conclude anything for humans one way or the other. Caution is certainly advised.
Anyway, if you were to extract from the Desmanthus root bark using naphtha, you would get rid of the gramine - i don't know about the other alkaloids though. You'd also get an upper bound of how much DMT your specific plants contain (at the time and conditions of harvest), and you could send some of the extract to analysis to learn about the constituents and their ratios.
I just googled 'ohio climate' and i have no ideas for other plants that might survive your winters outside. I hope others do, as i'm in a similar situation in Switzerland. My region has relatively mild winters, but still too cold for the most popular DMT plants. So far I'm simply growing a bunch of plants in pots and bringing them inside for winter.
One species that might survive your winter outdoors is Delosperma cooperi, but it is certainly less of a candidate for anahuasca than the Desmanthus.
https://www.dmt-nexus.me/forum/default.aspx?g=posts&m=267973#post267973 is an old but interesting thread about D. cooperi.