Going Native for Seed

A collection of articles from

Copyright 2012 East Oregonian Publishing Co.

On the cover: Kevin Loe examines native seeds stored in bulk at his Triangle Farms near Silverton, Ore. Mateusz Perkowski/Capital Press

In this issue

Native seed prices rise after wildfires

Project helps farmers sell native plants

Seed origins traced

Dearth of specific seeds inspires farm’s business

More from Capital Press

Native seed prices rise after wildfires

By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI

Capital Press

The wildfires that swept across parts of the West this summer caused widespread destruction of rangeland and habitat, but they also created a spike in demand for the native seed needed to revitalize the charred landscape.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management bought more than 1.9 million pounds of native seed in 2012, roughly triple the amount purchased in 2011 and nearly five times the amount purchased in 2010.

“It has impacted the market. It has consumed significant pounds and reduced our inventory,” said Mark Mustoe, owner and manager of Clearwater Seed in Spokane, Wash. “In almost all cases, it’s moved the price up.”

Demand for native grass and forb species is likely to increase along with the frequency of blazes on public lands in the West, which have become more vulnerable to fire, said Paul Krabacher, national seed coordinator for the BLM.

Cheatgrass, a noxious weed, has been expanding on rangelands that were traditionally dominated by sagebrush and experienced longer periods of calm between catastrophic fires, he said.

“We’re a very reactive agency to fire rehab,” Krabacher said.

The agency spent nearly $26 million on seed in 2012 — an amount that would have been even higher if not for a spending cap, he said.

This year’s wildfires coincided with the USDA enrolling more acreage in the Conservation Reserve Program, which offers financial incentives for planting grasses instead of crops and gives priority to native species, said Jerry Benson, president of BFI Native Seeds in Moses Lake, Wash.

Established native seed growers are in an advantageous position to benefit from spikes in demand, as the difficulty of producing such crops hinders others from jumping into the market and flooding it, he said.

“It’s not something that somebody will bounce in and out of like corn or wheat,” Benson said.

Prior to the recent surge in demand, however, the appetite for native seed was weak among the federal agencies that buy most of the niche crop, he said.

“Sometimes they’re asking for unattainable amounts, sometimes they’re asking for miniscule amounts,” Benson said.

Native seed growers say the industry depends on natural disasters and the decisions of government agency managers, which makes predicting demand even trickier than with crops subject to more regular market cycles.

“We threw away a lot of seed over the years because it can only keep for so long,” said Kevin Loe, owner of Triangle Farms in Silverton, Ore. “It’s definitely not a get-rich-quick deal, that’s for sure.”

On their face, the prices involved in native seed production can make the niche industry seem deceptively lucrative.

Native grasses typically fetch $3 to $4 per pound, which is substantially higher than for mainstream grass seed crops like perennial ryegrass, which sells for 75 cents per pound, Loe said.

Scarcer native wildflower seeds can sell for $55 per pound or as much as $260 per pound if they’re low-yielding or must be harvested by hand, said Lynda Boyer, native plant manager at Heritage Seedlings in Salem.

“When people are looking at price, they have to think about how it’s being produced,” she said.

Government agencies are increasingly pushing farmers to collect native species close to the intended restoration projects, officials and producers say. The goal is to produce site-specific seed that’s acclimated to where it will be planted.

“It’s good to have that wild impact,” said Jarod Jebousek, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who conducts restoration work.

The problem for farmers is they can’t reliably predict exactly where or when future restoration projects will take place, he said. “It’s tricky because we’re dealing with federal or state budgets, and these aren’t always reliable.”

Site-specific seed demand adds complexity for farmers, who would generally prefer to grow a large field of a species rather than numerous smaller ones that must be managed separately, said Craig Edminster, president of Pacific Northwest Natives in Albany, Ore.

“It’s very difficult to produce small plots of this stuff economically,” he said.

Aside from the expense, the practicality of this type of production becomes a major limiting factor when trying to restore major landscapes that have been burned, said Mustoe.

“It’s an impossibility to work like that on a large scale, especially when you don’t know where the fire will be,” he said.

Unlike commercial crops, the biology of native species generally isn’t as conducive to efficient production and harvest, said Rob Fiegener, director of the Native Seed Network, a program within a conservation nonprofit.

“They haven’t been domesticated,” he said. “They’re wild plants. They’re not uniform crops that are easy to cultivate.”

For example, the seeds of a native species of plant may mature over a longer period of time, complicating the timing of harvest, he said. “The readiness of your crop might be all over the place.”

Waiting for seed production can also drive up production expenses. For example, the camas plant must grow several years before flowering, Loe said.

In other cases, native seeds must be prompted to germinate with heat or other conditions, while weed species have no such needs, he said. “A lot of these seeds have dormancy triggers. They don’t compete very well.”

As there’s often a dearth of agronomic expertise about native plants, growers must experiment to devise solutions to such problems.

Loe, for example, successfully improved the germination of a native species by soaking the seeds in a hot tub for a month to imitate warm mud.

“There’s just not a lot of information on this stuff,” he said.

Boyer of Heritage Seedlings grows some native species over a ground cloth that captures seeds as they fall from the plant.

Seeds that remain on the plants are harvested with a swather, while the fallen seeds are swept up and collected. The added effort is well worth it, as fewer seeds are lost.

“We’re able to quadruple our yields,” Boyer said.

Mechanical harvest of some native grass seeds is impeded by barbs, hairs and other unusual characteristics, said Lee Arbuckle, founder of Native Seedsters, which makes native seed-specific harvesting implements.

Combines are more likely to be plugged by such seeds, so Arbuckle designed an implement that better accommodates their features. The machine, which attaches to a tractor’s loader arms, relies on counter-rotating cylinders — a comb that picks up the seed and a brush that dislodges it.

“It imitates your socks,” Arbuckle said.

The implement avoids harvesting immature seed, allowing farmers to make multiple passes, and it’s geared toward quick changes from one type of seed to another, he said. “We purposely designed it to be really easily cleaned out.”

Originally published in Capital Press on Nov. 30, 2012.

Mateusz Perkowski/Capital Press

Native seed grower Kevin Loe of Triangle Farms in Silverton, Ore., examines a plot of Canada Goldenrod, a native species. Native seeds often are more challenging to grow than plants that have long been cultivated.

Mateusz Perkowski/Capital Press

Lynda Boyer, foreground, works as a native plant manager at Heritage Seedlings near Salem. She is examining a root ball of Shooting Star, a native wetland plant, which the farm grows for seed. The native seed market largely depends on demand from government agencies.

Project helps farmers sell native plants

By SEAN ELLIS

Capital Press

ONTARIO, Ore. — A special project at Oregon State University’s research station near here is providing farmers in the region with a new crop that’s really not new at all: native plants.

The plants are grown by farmers who sell them to federal land-use agencies to restore lands in the Great Basin that have sustained fire or grazing damage. The plants are also used by the Natural Resource Conservation Service to restore or improve sage grouse habitat.

Because getting native plants to grow consistently in an agricultural setting can be a challenge, OSU researchers have been studying the most efficient and reliable growing practices.

“There is a long list of things that you have to deal with when you bring things into cultivation (and) farmers aren’t going to want to take them on if they can’t get a good, solid stand,” said Nancy Shaw, a research botanist at the USDA’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Boise, which coordinates the Great Basin Native Plant Project for the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.

The BLM, the largest purchaser of seed for fire restoration, buys an average of 2 million pounds of seed per year.

The program includes about 20 plant varieties native to the Great Basin, which covers parts of Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah and California.

OSU researchers study a plethora of issues associated with growing native plants but focus on irrigation management and plant establishment, said Erik Feibert, an OSU researcher.

Because the seed is planted in the fall, soil compaction, dry soil and bird damage can make stand establishment a big problem, he said.

“We found that after planting the seed in the fall, covering it with row cover — a white fabric that allows moisture and sunlight to get through but protects the soil from compaction and bird damage — really helps,” he said.

Because they’re desert plants, they don’t need near as much irrigation as many other farm commodities, Feibert said, but researchers have discovered that a few inches either way can make a significant difference.

“Some of them produce the most seed with 8 inches per season, some of them like 4 inches and for some of them zero irrigation is just as good as four or eight,” he said.

Jerry Erstrom, who grows about 62 acres of native plants for federal land agencies near Vale, Ore., said the price for the materials is volatile, rising in years with lots of fire damage but tanking in years with few fires.

“Some years you can’t give them away but some years they can be a very desirable commodity,” he said. “If there’s not a fire season, there’s not a market.”

To try to make the program more stable, the BLM plans to do more seed storage and take on proactive restorative efforts even during low fire years, said Paul Krabacher, national seed coordinator for the agency.

“We’re trying to level the playing field out for growers and us,” he said.

Information: www.fs.fed.us/rm/boise/research/shrub/greatbasin

Originally published in Capital Press on June 1, 2012.

Sean Ellis/Capital Press

Oregon State University researcher Erik Feibert stands in front of a research plot near Ontario, Ore., that is being used to study native plants that farmers can grow for federal land-use agencies.

Seed origins traced

By STEVE BROWN

Capital Press

PORT TOWNSEND, Wash. — Through much of history local farmers saved and shared seeds, creating a genetic path that can to traced to the place where the plant originated, Washington State University Extension’s Laura Lewis said.

In a presentation to the annual convention of Tilth Producers of Washington, Lewis said agricultural geographers can trace the origins of crops to areas on all continents.

That is where the gene pool is deepest.

During her work as a Peace Corps volunteer in sub-Saharan Africa, Lewis found that native farmers planted seed that had wild genes.

“They weren’t getting high yields, but stable yields,” she said.

When breeders want to add valuable traits that have been lost in a certain crop, they find the highest diversity of varieties tends to be in the gene pool at the center of the crop’s geographic origin.

When breeders or farmers choose germplasm to improve their crops, they often consider the source of seeds and cuttings.

The National Plant Germplasm System, which has a half-million distinct varieties from throughout the world, is maintained by the USDA Agricultural Research Service as part of the Germplasm Resources Information Network. A website — www.ars-grin.gov — provides searchable information not only on plants, but also on animals, invertebrates and microbes.

Rebecca McGee, legume research geneticist with the ARS, said breeders often use more-resilient native varieties to add desirable traits. To her peas and lentils she has added disease resistance from India and Ethiopia, high protein from Estonia, seed weevil resistance from a wild relative in Israel, plant height from Iran, cold tolerance from Turkey and day-length sensitivity from Australia.

McGee said she uses traditional breeding techniques, transferring pollen from one variety to another that is closely related. And though commercial breeders look for yield, she said public breeders can look for resiliency.

Originally published in Capital Press on Nov. 16, 2012.

Dearth of specific seeds inspires farm’s business

By STEVE BROWN

Capital Press

PORT TOWNSEND, Wash. — Brian Campbell couldn’t find seeds suited to his small organic farm in far northwestern Washington, so he started producing his own.

Now that’s all he does.

Campbell and his wife, Crystine, operate Uprising Seeds on four acres of leased land in Whatcom County, which borders the Canadian border.

“We produce a lot with very little,” he said at the Tilth Producers of Washington’s annual conference.

Campbell provides open-pollinated material specifically for small farms and organic farms. For example, he has developed a hull-less oat variety that produces a good amount of grain on a small area.

He focuses on the “wealth and legacy of publicly owned seed,” growing varieties suited to how he had been growing vegetables.

Large-scale farmers can’t be expected to invest in the breeding of open-pollinated seeds because there’s no profit in it for them, he said. The hybrid system is where the energy has been.

Not only that, Campbell said, he has seen a lack of transparency in what’s available. Open-pollinated seed is sometimes sold as hybrid, and hybrid sold as open-pollinated.

“We’ve lost the skills. We’ve gotten away from the practice of harvesting and saving seeds,” Campbell said. “But we focused on it and dropped fresh-market production.”

Nash Huber, owner of Nash’s Organic Produce in Sequim, Wash., said the industry needs agricultural systems that can respond, instead of top-down decision-making.

“What Brian’s doing is a very good model,” he said. “It has to be farmer-led.”

When he started farming more than 30 years ago, Huber harvested his own seeds with 5-gallon buckets and tarps, then graduated to using screens. Rudimentary tools work well and can produce a lot of seeds.

The key, he said, is growing a weed-free stand of plants.

“A clean crop means clean seeds,” he said.

He chose his first crop based on the demand he saw in the surrounding community, which was rich in German heritage. To Huber, that meant cabbage. He saw where those crops were growing, their place of origin, then went there and got good material.

Online: http://uprisingorganics.com

Originally published in Capital Press on Nov. 23, 2012.

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Table of Contents

Copyright

Native seed prices rise after wildfires

Project helps farmers sell native plants

Seed origins traced

Dearth of specific seeds inspires farm’s business

Other Books from the publisher