New: Native Seeds: Supplying Restoration

(pensive music)
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– We’re facing the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. We’re losing whole ecosystems. And so for me, figuring out ways how we can return, at least part of the function and structure of those systems to continue to provide ecosystem benefits is really important.
– Our landscapes started to see some degradation. We started to see some disturbance that were anthropogenic. We still, within our hearts, feel like we know we did something wrong that we need to fix and so the whole concept of restoration is, okay, let’s see what we can do to bring it back to more of its natural state.
– [Olga] Native seed, when used in restoration, are a nature-based solution that can help us tackle climate change and biodiversity loss.
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– Now we’re just figuring out how to use seeds so that we can do some of the repair that is needed on the landscapes
(seeds rustling)
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– Globally, the UN has estimated that we need to restore 350 million hectares of land degraded by climate, weather or just human use. We have estimated that we need 1.9 billion tons of seed to do that restoration.
– One of the things that fascinates me about seed is in that little teeny speck is all the genetic programming that’s necessary for that thing to know when the day length is right, when the precipitation is right, and when all the conditions are right for it to wake up to go,
(Jason gasping)
“It’s time!” And just grow.
– I really love seeds, because without seeds would be nothing.
– Seeds are amazing. These are not dead things. These are living organisms, they are breathing!
– Native seeds are important, because first off, plants are important. Plants are, without a doubt, the most important layer on the planet. Without them, we wouldn’t have the base of the food chain.
(bird calling)
– When we talk about native versus agricultural seed, native seed collected in the wild is going to have grown up in that wild setting. It’s going to have been battered by the winds, its parent is going to have lived through all sorts of trials and tribulations. Native seed is really, we’re trying to focus on preservation of that history, that evolutionary history. We’re trying to preserve the genes that are in this environment. We’re trying to preserve that legacy.
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– To contextualize plant materials and history, the indigenous people that were first here had a rich and deep connection to the plants that were here already and there was management for those plants. They had their nurseries of their own, burning of the landscape using certain plants and transplanting plants. From a restoration standpoint, how can we interweave traditional ecological knowledge? We can repair some of the landscape and some of its ecological functions, but then also keep ties with those cultural context as well?
– The native species are really the stuff of diversity. Weeds, while they do some of the things that natives do are far less diverse in any particular area, but natives are not and they are highly diverse in any particular location and they turn over very much from place to place.
– This diversity just naturally develops over time, either through evolution or through dispersal. You have plants evolving to be early. You have plants evolving to be mid-season. You have plants evolving to be late. You have tall plants and short plants. Plants, that like it dry years plants, plants that like wet years, it is the natural state of communities to be diverse.
– The majority of public land in the United States is in the west and that’s where the largest native seed need is, but when you talk about restoration, immediately people think of trees. They were not thinking about the seed that were in the understory, they weren’t thinking about the seed that are in the deserts, they weren’t thinking about the seeds that are in different biomes than the forests. There’s degraded lands all over the United States and the world that need more than trees.
– You can look at a clear cut and you can say, “Oh, those trees are missing!” And anybody can do that, but to look at the sagebrush step of the grasslands and say, “The native species aren’t there, there’s this invasive grass.” That takes a little bit of education.
– Some introduced species can become invasive and displace native species and then eventually turn into essentially monocultures that are no longer providing the services that native plants provide.
– If I could snap my fingers and make it either wetter or make cheatgrass go away, I would make cheatgrass go away. We think that cheatgrass came in as a seed contaminant with European settlers, probably in feed or in animal hide.
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– A lot of the immigrants who settled the west came from either European or Northern European lineage, so when they came here, they brought their European ideas of grazing and animal husbandry with them and it wasn’t really compatible with the West,
’cause we’re a desert, we’re not in the Netherlands. They moved their sheep and their livestock on the mountain and they mowed everything right down to the rocks.
– [Elizabeth] People were grazing at levels that are just kind of unbelievable, hard to imagine, you see these pictures of sheep lined up like sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep. You could walk on the back of sheep and never touch the ground
– With all that vegetation missing, the snow falls, the rain falls, there’s nothing to hold it back and so it would just rush out of those canyons.
– There was massive floods from that overgrazing that actually almost wiped several of the towns off the map here in Utah.
– [Jason] And that was happening in one form or another all over the West, erosion from range land and mountain land, degradation was a serious issue.
– That unfortunate timing of really doing a hit on our native plant communities, at the same time, we bring in a very weedy plant, really seems to have sort of exploded that invasion across the West.
– Annual grasses are driving even more intense wildfires.
– In the last 20 years, we have burnt over 150 million acres across the United States.
– As a lot of arid lands will experience, what you’ll find in a native ecosystem are shrubs with large interspaces in between them with a few grasses mixed in, perennial bunch grasses and forbs, but there’s still quite a bit of bare ground naturally and with invasive annual grasses, what they do is fill in all of that interspace and they dry out within a couple months of growing, so by the time it’s storm season, they are literally just kindling, sitting in between all of these shrubs and grasses and the smallest spark will just set off a wildfire.
– Native plants, they can deal with a little bit of fire, but they cannot deal with fire every 10 years. Cheatgrass does very well with that, it’s totally fine if it burns every single year.
– So when a wildfire comes through these areas, the only thing you’ll find coming back up on its own are these invasive annual grasses, because guess what? They are adapted to this fire and without intervention, oftentimes the native ecosystem plants won’t come back on their own.
– We’ve created this problem, what are we going to do about it?
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– The ultimate goal of this is restoration and to do that, we need to get the right seed in the right place at the right time.
(seed rustling) The restoration need for locally adapted native seed is outpacing the supply that’s available for us to buy commercially.
– The native seed supply chain is the steps or the process it takes, from seed collection from the wild, all the way to seeding at a restoration site.
– Why it’s worth developing the native seed supply chain, I think our very existence depends upon this, I think our food security depends upon this.
– When we talk about restoration, I’m glad that there’s really wonderful people who have a heart and a passion to do it, because it’s like looking towards the future and it’s about preserving our landscape, the only landscapes that we have.
– When we go and do restoration work, it’s hard to get seed and it’s not always there when you need it. And the science of restoration has only been around for a hundred years or so and when we talk native seeding, it’s really only been around for maybe 40 years. We’re really in our infancy of figuring out how to even do what we do.
– Having native seed for resilient landscapes is not as easy as getting a bag of seed from the hardware store. The seed supply chain is going to take time, it’s going to take planning, it’s going to take money, it’s going to take infrastructure and it’s going to take us working with the farmers across the United States who are interested in working with us to develop it.
– Seed need planning is understanding, first off, what are the restoration needs going to be in the next few years? And working back from that. Then we can ask, “Okay, what are the species we’re going to need? When do they need to go into production?
(vehicle reverberating) And then we can go out and plan the wild seed collection that’s going to support that. Restoration is needed for a variety of reasons. It may be to come in after a disturbance that was planned, like building a dam or a road.
(train horn beeping) It could be needed after a wildfire or after some other kind of catastrophic disturbance like a hurricane. Fire damage is becoming a pressure that is changing the need for native seeds in ways that we haven’t seen in decades past.
– It is very hard to predict what wildfires are going to do, what reactive needs are going to be. For some of the fires now, it’s not just hundreds to thousands of acres, it’s tens to hundreds of thousands of acres that are being affected and needing to be treated.
– So we have to keep asking one another, “What do we need?” Because our predictions aren’t always right.
(container squeaking)
– You’ll have years where there’s virtually no demand, like this year demand is very low. We’ve had comparatively few wildfires. Then you’ll have a year where like the whole world burns and there’s so much need that no one can keep up.
– Private growers, contractors who grow native plants for a living are farmers and so it’s a risky business.
– We’re just a little mom-and-pop player. I think it’s hard to believe that we’re actually hand cutting the stuff this day and age. It seems sort of archaic but it works. That’s gorgeous seed, just gorgeous. The native industry has always been volatile. There’s a whole bunch one year, the next year there’s none. The price goes from nothing to a fortune. Agriculture has also the protection of USDA, crop improvement programs, disaster programs, insurance programs and a stable market supply, demand and pricing.
– One way that we’re encouraging farmers to work with us is through the process of forward contracting and that basically takes the risk off the farmer and puts it on the government.
– If we can do what we call forward contracting, where we’re identifying a certain quantity of seed for different species and seed zones that we want to purchase and we have to obligate the funds upfront for those contracts, they’re guaranteed payment, so they’re less prone to the whims of the market.
– The most challenging part about working with native seed is the fact that we want to retain diversity and wildness. What we’ve done with farming is create the opposite. We’ve created plants that have rapid germination, that have uniform growth, that retain their seed, all bloom at the same time, ’cause it’s easy. It’s easy to go through and harvest a bunch of plants whose seeds are all ripe at one time and just stay on. When we’re talking about restoration, we don’t want to have plants that have this super narrow gene pool and all have the same traits. So it’s challenging to farm a plant when you’re trying to retain these wild qualities.
– We are working with species nobody has ever worked with before, so there’s some really basic biological information that we don’t know about the species that we really want to use for restoration.
– Native plants have been here for millions of years and then humans come along and we change everything and so in my lab we spend a lot of time thinking about,
“Okay, what are the responses? The rapid evolutionary responses that plants can make to this new environment? Can we figure out what works now? Not what worked a hundred years ago, but what works now?”
– There’s a lot of common gardens across the West and it’s considered common because it is the same environment for every seed being planted in, regardless of where that seed came from.
– We use common gardens to develop seed transfer zones, which can be used as a guideline for managers and other restoration practitioners to determine where they can plant certain sources of seed. What we would like to do is try to get seed that matches as much as possible, both genetically and climatically to the location where that restoration is happening.
– A seed zone is a geographic area that says it’s okay to move seed sources or populations around within that area and it’ll be expected to be adapted to that zone.
– Whereas if you were to move seed outside of that seed zone, it might not necessarily survive, it might not establish and it might not become the native community that you’re hoping to restore and you really do need those locally adapted native plants.
– Common gardens look basic, but this kind of information is one of the best gifts we can give future generations who are going to have to pick seeds for new climates and we can say, “Well from our observation, this is the strategy that works under this particular kind of climate.” Do you just love this plant?
– [Participant] They’re just so cute!
(Both laughing)
– I know!
– I could not love this plant more!
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(bag rustling)
– So this is bitterbrush and it’s very important food for mule deer in the winter. The seed collection is kind of the first step in the restoration process. As a seed collector, I get contracts from usually the BLM or forest service to collect native seed that’s going to be used in restoration. A lot of the contracts are three year contracts, because each species doesn’t give seed each year. When I thought that we were getting close to the seed being mature, I can usually guess, knowing when it’s the right time to harvest. I believe that’s the art, it’s not just science here. During my career in this sagebrush step, which has been about 50 years, I’ve seen the disappearance and the degradation of acres and acres and there’s not very many pristine native areas left and it’s important to capture that genetic material. We want to preserve it and I think it’s really important to try to protect what we have and to try to restore areas that we can.
– So we are out here collecting bottlebrush squirreltail with the Bureau of Land Management, The Forest Service, and Fish and Wildlife Service and we’re here about 10 miles outside of Reno, Nevada. So we’re really interested in this site, because these are the plants that have the traits and adaptations for surviving in a really hot and disturbed area. So the seeds that we collect here do really well in restoration sites, just because they’re so accustomed to disturbance. When we are collecting and choosing sites where we want to collect seeds to ultimately produce and then send out into restoration sites, it’s really important to do a few things. If you have a big team, you’ll split up the landscape, so you’re not sort of on top of each other, kind of create quadrants to work in. Want to find the populations that are really large and that also helps them sustain the sort of stress of collection.
– Practices for not harming the population is, you don’t want to take that much seed from your site, especially if it’s a smaller site.
– We’ll never collect more than 20% of the available seed on a site,
– But for plants that you can’t necessarily count all of those seeds, like a bush, you might want to do every fifth plant.
– [Sarah] So at a site like this it’s really important to make sure you’re collecting exactly what you’re looking for, without inadvertently getting this nasty cheatgrass in our bags as well. This cheatgrass seed looks exactly like squirrel tail seed.
– We want to make sure that this is a quality collection that has the full range of diversity from that population, from that species. It is so easy to only look at the biggest plants out there, they really catch your eye or the most blue flowers, but you really do want to collect evenly and randomly, to ensure that you’re getting all of those genotypes and then you also want to ensure that you’re collecting from at least 50 plants to ensure that we’re getting 95% of the alleles within the population.
– So sometimes you can think, if you look around this area there’s a lot of poa secunda, but a problem we have with our grasses in the Great Basin is they don’t always fill their seed and especially under drought conditions, and so you can be scouting something and monitoring a species phenology and then go actually to harvest the seed and do the cut test and it’s all blanks. You think you have seed and you don’t.
– They’ll do a cut test to calculate how many ripe and healthy seeds there are.
– Once we find a couple seeds, we take a razor blade and we cut those seeds in half and then from, there we look at the inside of the seed. So this seed is completely white and full on the inside of it and then this one is empty and black on the inside, which is a non-viable seed.
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– There’s a lot of different methods you can use to collect seeds, like grasses, you’ll always want to hand strip them.
– The grasses and the forbs are so specific that you almost have to pick one individual flower at a time. For shrubs, we have a hopper or I use a big plastic dish that I stick under there.
(instrument rustling) Well we got a bunch there! You want all the seed to fall into your, either hopper or whatever you have. If I’m whacking in and I’m not getting any seed, then it’s not ready. I only use a racket for the bitterbrush. Sagebrush has a really tiny little seed in the fall, I like to strip the flower heads off.
– If you collect at one site and then drive to another site, you don’t want to just leave those seeds in the car, like you wouldn’t leave your dog in the car, it gets too hot. So what a lot of folks will do is they’ll put them under the truck in the shade, but typically you do want to get things shipped to a cleaning facility as soon as possible.
– I’ve been at a lot of sites where I’ve collected seeds and then two months later the site burned down and those plants are just gone forever. But part of me feels like, well I did something, it’s really hopeful to have seeds in a bag from that site, because you took a snapshot of what was there and you can hopefully reestablish it. We could never capture enough seed from these wild populations to physically take the seed and put it on a restoration site, so then we take the seed, put it in production, make it a big collection that still has the genetics that we’re interested in and then use it for restoration.
– If we want to have enough seed to say restore a field, then we need a lot of seed. What we do here is we take seeds that have been wild collected and we propagate them to increase the seed availability for habitat restoration. Native seed production is farming. It really relies on the techniques that farmers use on a day-to-day basis, but most native species could be described as specialty crops. The same techniques you would use to grow oats or soybeans might not work very well here.
– Farming native plants, it’s important to try to retain all the diversity that could be there and that can be diversity in size, diversity in vigor, flower color.
– We’re putting them on so many different kinds of sites and they’re going to experience so many different environments. The way around that is to provide a lot of genetic diversity. For example, right behind me is Oregon iris, it is represented here not by just seeds from one place, but seeds from many different populations and so we have created essentially a hyper diverse population here by collecting seeds from multiple locations all within the same kind of ecological zone. What results is a seed crop that is over diverse, compared to any single population out there. I love coming out here this time of year, I mean this just makes for such a show! We could probably sell tickets to this. All of these crops here are first generation from the wild, they’re the result of collecting seeds at remnant populations of these wild species. We don’t like to go past one or two generations if we can help it. Three is kind of the industry standard of stop for keeping the wild types present in the gene pool.
– So the steps that go into native seed production are the initial collection.
– We have to clean them and sort them. Typically we start them in a greenhouse.
– And it has to be sewn into a field that has been prepared to have a very nice seed bed. The next step would be the year long process of weeding the field and keeping it clean.
– So they grow in an agricultural field. They flower in the spring and summer. In midsummer to fall, harvest begins.
– [Amy] Once it’s harvested you have to thresh the material and then clean all the seed and make sure that you’ve gotten all the weeds out.
– Then the seeds are made available for sale or for restoration. So one of the biggest challenges to specialty crops is harvesting. There’s no single technique for all of these species.
(vehicle reverberating)
– This is ranunculus occidentalis that we harvested, the western buttercup. We’ll use the combine as the first step that removes most of the plant material, so then it’s easier for us to get in with the brooms and the vacuums.
(broom scraping) James is down at the other end of the field and he’s sweeping the seed that’s on the weed fabric towards me and then I’m going to fire up the generator and use our shop vac and suck it up.
(shop vac whirring) That’s why we vacuum,
’cause it’s just about as much seed vacuumed as combined. There are not a lot of machines that are made specifically for harvesting native seeds, so you have to adapt a lot of machinery that exists and build stuff that doesn’t and it’s neat and weird and I like that. Next we’ll actually dry them down in kiddy pools and make sure that all of the after-ripening that’s going to happen has happened and that they’re nice and dry to the touch before we pack them up into grocery sacks and we’ll take them off to our seed cleaning facility and we’re left with just the seeds that we harvested and what we want to go back out into restoration sites. A lot of these plants that we’re putting back into restoration sites, their habitat’s been lost and it’s people that took that habitat away. It feels good to me to try to right that ship a little bit.
– Well there’s an interesting spot for you, that is a roosting site for a young sage-grouse hen. This is part of the restoration component of this site. We planted the sandberg bluegrass, the bluebunch wheatgrass, the Idaho fescue. I’m Jerry Benson, I represent Benson Farms Incorporated. We are a seed production and restoration company. We produce everything from wildflowers, native grasses, sagebrush, even corn and vegetable seeds, probably in the neighborhood of 100 species. Bring me four ounces of seed and we will make 5,000 plugs out of it, we’ll plant those tublings out into an initial propagation block, harvest the seed off of that. Generally, we go from four ounces to three or four pounds and then the three or four pounds, we can plant two acres and we can bump it up to 1000 to 2000 pounds. That’s the first step, is to decide that the crop is in harvest-able position, then the next step is to come in with like the swather here and put it in the windrows and then let it cure for seven, eight days under the sun, so that it gets good and dry.
– See how green and soft that is? It just bends. The seed head will come apart easier once it’s thrashed as some moisture evaporates out, the stem moisture has to come down too,
’cause you have to be able to also break down the stem that it’s attached to and it’s getting there but we’re not there all the way yet.
– [Jerry] Combine picks this up, runs it through the apparatuses inside and then you haul it to the seed plant.
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– We keep our forbs separate from our grasses. That’s the Oregon sunshine. So this one here looks like it’s starting to lose it’s petals, so this is a sign that it’s going to start becoming ready to harvest or seed. You have to be patient, sometimes you’re going to plant something and nothing’s going to grow that year and then the next year you’ll see something up. It’s really hard, because these plants are used to living out in the wild and when you take too much care of them, you’re babying them so much or you’re putting much more water on them, they don’t really like it. You want to try to still give them what they’re used to out in the wild. I learned to fall in love with this job and everything that it stands for, just the fact that we help to restore burnt down areas, the fact that what we do impacts and helps the little creatures out in the wild. You’re always learning with native flowers.
(hand scraping)
(bees buzzing)
– My name’s Jim Cane. I’ve worked with native bees for 40 years. A couple things about bees that make them more attractive than most beetles or stinkbugs. For one, they’re rounded and furry, so they have a puppy like attraction to humans that I think is deep-seated. Many of their behaviors are overt and out in the open. You can watch them on flowers and they’re convenient and available. They’re in your city park, they’re in your yard, they’re right there and they beg questions just by what they’re doing.
“Oh, this one’s different from that one.”
“Oh, what’s this one, is this a bee too?” And then you’re started down the path. The honeybee is not the only bee. Worldwide for bees, there’s
20,000 named species.
(dramatic music) In North America, about
3,500 species of native bees. Every bee is native somewhere. Bees are native, if it was presence without the assistance of humans. We’ve moved a few bees around the world, honeybees in a big way. Native bees are important from two perspectives, I guess. One, we never ask why pikas are important or moose are important, but we conserve them anyway. The other one which most people talk about is that they are important pollinators for most of our wild land plants, not the grasses, not the conifers, but so much else. And they’re important pollinators for many of our crops, spices especially, fruit crops, humans wouldn’t starve without bees, but we’d have a much less interesting diet and we’d have trouble getting some vitamins. Bees are organized into three groups, so the one group are like the honeybee, they have perennial colonies, they have a queen, she’s strictly an egg layer. There’s a sharp division of labor in the colony, there’s the egg layers and then there’s all the workers who do everything else. Then there’s the what are called primitively social species, so that’s bumblebees. There’s also a bunch of primitively social bees who are ground-nesters, very unassuming little nests, but they have the same arrangement and the same lifecycle and the same business as the bumblebee, but most people never notice them. There’s also some kleptoparasites. They invade an active nest of a host bumblebee and displace that queen, usually rather aggressively, again other Shakespearean drama like, “Hamlet,” and then the workers are their slaves. So yeah, pretty dramatic. All the rest of the bees are what we call solitary bees. They may nest in groups, but each female does her own reproduction. She’s made it, she lays her own eggs, she builds her own nest, she does her own provisioning and she never meets her offspring, there’s no overlap of generations, there’s no division of labor. The purpose of a lot of flower morphology is to precisely position the visitor, such that there’s reliable pickup and transfer of pollen.
‘Cause plants are stationary, they can’t move to find other mates, so it finds its mates through pollinators. I’m going to use this daylily flower to show you the elements of pollination. It’s really quite simple, but I can show you ’cause the flower parts are big here. So pollination is how plants reproduce sexually. The basics of it is that compatible pollen moves from the anthers and is picked up by a pollinator, usually inadvertently, sometimes intentionally and some of it ends up on the stigmatic tip here and so all it is, you simply get a pollen deposit right there. You can do this yourself in your own garden if you want. Then that pollen will germinate on that stigma and grow tubes all the way down this long, long style, probably takes several days to reach the ovules at the bottom and the male gametophyte of those, the equivalent of our sperm essentially, will fertilize the ovules, essentially the equivalent of our eggs, down inside of here, which in that fertilization will start an embryonic seed. Every pumpkin you have ever carved and dug out the seed, every single one of those seeds arose from one pollen grain sending a pollen tube down the style of the flower and fertilizing one ovule.
(relaxing music) The relationship of native bees and native seeds is that most everything that’s not wind pollinated will cease to reproduce without native pollinators. Most of the showy flowers you see, even some of the flowers that aren’t showy would be gone.
(car door thudding) Yeah.
(insects trilling)
(birds calling) Gorgeous flower. You have these in the Sierra Nevada, down in the western desert, some of them are yellow. It’s the state flower of Utah and this is the Logan River and it’s running high right now,
’cause of the blast of melt from the high country. One of the more important things we can do is where we have good habitat, is not to compromise it, to set it aside, to protect it, to manage it properly. We’re getting to the point for native bees where a few more changes in land management practices and all of a sudden, large parts of their biota start to go into sharp decline. As we’ve expanded crop land, as we’ve used insecticides and things like that, there’s been a gradual loss of habitat and so it may be a forerunner of where we could be headed if we’re not careful, if we’re not paying attention. Nature is restorative to one’s soul and spirit, I don’t think I’d want to live on a planet where everything was cultivated and all land was transformed for human use, it’s just not a planet worth living on.
(relaxing music continues)
(seeds rustling)
– Lots of people ask the question, “Why clean seed?”
(machinery rumbling) There’s a couple reasons. One of the big ones is so that you know what you have.
(upbeat music) It’s really difficult to do a restoration project or commit to space in a greenhouse or at a nursery, which is really expensive if you don’t know what you have. Bend Seed Extractory is part of the Forest Service national nursery system and that system services any governmental agency in the country. During the seed season, from July to March, seven to twelve people will process
15,000 pounds of raw seed. We store about a third of that seasoned seed on site. About two thirds of the material actually goes directly back out to public lands. You can’t process seed that was just collected and is still moist. It’s living tissue, so that material has to dry down to be able to be worked in any type of machine. Our job is to assess that seed lot coming in and we’re going to put it through the extractory here in three phases, extraction, finishing and testing. Extraction encompasses taking the seed out of the flower part, taking the seed out of the cone, out of the pod, out of the capsule. Seed naturally has developed appendages of various types for dispersal. In the case of a grass, the appendage would be an awn, that awn is part of that seed that would propel it into the ground. These dispersal mechanisms are really fantastic out in the wild, but when it comes to seed processing, they actually can impede what we need to do and the reason we’re going to remove that awn is so that the material flows evenly. Then we take that seed and we head to our finishing step, some people also call this conditioning. This is where we’re going to take out everything that doesn’t belong, so we want to keep the seed that’s filled and has tissue inside, we want to remove the empty seeds, the stems, the sand, the bugs, the needles, the leaves, the petals, anything that doesn’t belong, we want to remove in the finishing step. This has already been through the first initial extraction phase and now it’s into what we call a finishing step. If this material didn’t flow evenly, then we wouldn’t be able to get this type of separation. The first thing everyone assumes is that we have a protocol that you can look to and determine what to do with that seed and unfortunately every seed law is different. Once you decide what you need to remove, then you can think of,
“What machines do I have at my disposal that will help me with that? Do we need some kind of rubbing to get the material to break up? Do we need some kind of spinning action? Do we need some kind of texture to work the material against?” So how do you accomplish that with what you have at your disposal? And that answer’s going to be different for everyone, because everyone has a different set of tools.
(seeds rattling) Then we’re going to take our seed and put it into the testing room. In the testing stage, that’s where we want to determine, what do we have? We have a digital x-ray, we’re able to image seed and then we can understand what’s going on inside there. It’s a non-destructive test, so we’re able to look inside the seed and see what’s happening within the seed coat and understand, is that filled with tissue? Is there embryo endosperm? You can see that this is some kind of bug damage. This is stem material. Some of this is sand or chaff and you can see out of these 100 seed, we have two over here that we would call empty or not filled. So looking at this X-ray, I would call this 98% filled and we take an X-ray image of every seed lot before it gets packaged. The X-ray test can be done instantaneously and you can understand what’s in there.
– Seeds are living organisms. They go through an aging process and this is due to an active metabolism. What we do is to slow down this aging process, so that we can store seeds for long times.
– Not all seeds can be stored.
(upbeat music) Orthodox seed can be safely dried down and put into freezer storage without damaging the seed tissue. Recalcitrant seeds, they have to stay moist, they can’t be frozen, there’s too high of moisture and if they are dried down to the point that we could freeze them in our freezer at the extractory, then we’ve now killed the seed, because it has to stay moist to stay alive.
– Most of the tropical species are recalcitrant. They have constant moisture, almost across the entire year, so they’re not really adopted to a dry season.
– [Kayla] Where when you think of most of the orthodox seeds that we work with, in the western US, they’re developed for these drier climates and they need to be able to store for long periods of time and there isn’t a lot of moisture.
– One of the things that people don’t recognize is how important seed storage is or even why we need it. There’s various types of seed storage that we need, whether it’s a seed bank for long term or whether it’s seed storage for short term.
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– When we go and do restoration work, there needs to be a place where people can go to get the seed that they need and so by having a centralized storage facility like we have, we’re able to one, have the seed on hand when we need it and two, we can reduce costs by buying in bulk quantities. Within our normal storage facility, we calculate right around
1.25 million pounds, about 150,000 pounds of that, is what we call our cold storage. We monitor it here. Our temperature is in red, our humidity’s in blue. We try to keep it around 34 degrees and down around 5% humidity.
– Some seed loses viability very quickly, such as the sagebrush seeds. If you don’t have cold storage then you do not have viable seed when you’re putting it out.
(door scraping)
– Really you want to eliminate as much moisture as possible to prevent mold. We store all of our seed in these green boxes and in six mil plastic and then ideally store it at a temperature that you are minimizing any kind of physiological activity within the seed.
– In terms of planning, if we can have it stored correctly for years, then we’re ready to use it when devastation hits, like a wildfire.
– Storage space is at a premium. There’s not a lot of high quality storage facilities.
– We need to do more investment in high quality seed storage facilities.
– Seed testing tells you information about the seeds to see whether this fits your purpose for planting. Oregon State University Lab was established in 1909. In terms of the wide range of crops that we test and the wide range of tests that we provide for our customers, this is one of the largest labs in the world. We are going to go and see the different seed quality tests. There is no one test, magically can give you all the information about the seeds. The quality of the seeds actually doesn’t start when the seeds arrive to the lab and we tested the quality seeds start in the field. The seeds actually can come from any grower or farmer, from seed companies, from researchers, from official organizations such as BLM, the first test we run is a purity test. We divide the samples into four components, the pure seed, weed seeds, other crop seeds and then inert matter. Anytime you mechanize seed procedures, you reduce the subjectivity of people, the machine will be consistent. The screening separates different components, based on the seed shape and seed size.
– The goal of this screening process is to separate the samples of seed, based off of their size and it’s just an extra step to help our analysts when they are looking at the seed.
(seeds rustling) I’m going to turn on our machine that will use vibrations to work our seed down through the screens.
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– [Sabry] If we have a little tiny wheat seeds or noxious weed, it can go through a screen while the good pure seeds will stay.
– So this is sending the vibrations from this bottom board all the way up through these pans, so that the seeds can kind of move around and work their way through the holes And so then I will put it in an envelope for the analysts to look at.
– I’ll run through the seed and stop and take out the contaminants. A contaminant is a different seed that is not part of the sample that I’m working on. Other seeds end up in the sample by birds, animals, water, wind. We can discover what’s in the sample so we can inform the customer.
– One of the common uses of the information seed testing is certification. Seed certification sets the minimum quality standards that the seeds has to meet. If you have premier seeds, you may sell it for higher price.
– This site here, I’m inspecting for a seed collector to collect the seed off of for source identified seed certification. What I look for when I do a site inspection is to see that the species is there, that there’s enough seed production potential for the collector to get that number of pounds of seed. The seed company will request tags from us that has all of this information on it, not specifically the GPS coordinates, because that’s kind of proprietary information, kind of like your favorite fishing spot. It does have enough information that the seed buyer can tell if that seed is going to work on their site.
– So when we sell those seeds, the customer wants to make sure that the seed that they’re buying is adapted to the place that they’re going to plant it. The yellow tag source identified program comes into that because in the Utah Crop Improvement Association, as a third party says, “Yes, I can verify that this seed came from that site and here’s a yellow tag that certifies that claim.”
– Sampling is part of the seed certification process, so that we make sure that the seed that’s sent to the different seed buyers, that seed is representative of what was collected. We have a label that we put on that shows that we have sampled the seed and what tests are required and we want purity, germ and TZ. The next step, this will go to the seed lab.
– [Sabry] So the pure seeds now is going to be tested for viability, meaning are they alive or not.
– What I’m about to show you here is a test called TZ test. TZ test is a chemical physiological test, basically we use staining to tell if the seeds are viable. The seeds are going to be put in a TZ solution and the TZ solution by itself is colorless, but it will react with the viable seeds or the seed’s alive, the color will change, becomes red. When seeds are softened, they need to be pierced in order for TZ solution to get into standing embryo. After the piercing, now the seeds are ready to be soaked for about 24 hours with staining. So after evaluation, the seeds are divided into two categories. You can see here on this side the seeds are stained red, those are viable seeds, this means they’re alive. On the right here, un-stained seeds, those are non-viable seeds.
– [Sabry] There is two main viability tests, the germination and the TZ test and the objective of the standard germination test is to achieve maximum potential germination of the sample. Now Barb is going to show us how she conducts the germination test.
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– It starts in this box, we just lay the seeds in. We’ll put the lids on these and band them all together and they’ll go through the germinators and in seven days it’ll look like this way. That’s seven days growth right there.
– Seeds, you are contributing to the most important element that keep the human being alive. How cannot I love it?
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– Seed technology has been around for a long time and ag is probably the birthplace. Most seeds that gets put out in ag is going to have a treatment of some kind. But in our range land sector, most seeds are left untreated. Our lab is focused on improving range land seeding success and we’re working to do that by developing seed enhancement technologies. Probably one of our biggest limitations is just getting the plants out of the ground. That seed goes in the ground and right away it can be taken by predators coming in. And the longer a seed sits in the soil, the higher the chances those seeds can be impacted by pathogens. Over that winter period, some of those seeds, they may germinate too early, now they’re getting hit with freezing. Let’s say you make it through that gauntlet and the springtime, you’re ready to merge from the soil, there’s issues with seedlings germinating and not emerging because of soil physical crust. Now the ability to come up out of the soil can be limited, especially if we have low organic matter soils, say that those soils were disturbed already. If it makes it through all that, there’s a good chance that plant’s just going to stay there for 40 years or however long its lifespan is.
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(seeds rustling) The cool thing about seed enhancement technologies is it addresses those limiting stages, seed germination, seedling survival. With our seed coating, we’re able to add active ingredients onto the seeds, such as plant hormones or fungicides. Another limitation is just getting these seeds out onto the landscape. Because of the physiology of the seed, it makes it difficult to plant, so we can build up the size of the seed.
– So this is winterfat seed. This seed here is straight off the plant. So you can see it’s really, really fluffy. That fluffy texture of the fruits makes it so these seeds can’t flow through range land, seed drills, through broadcasters. So we can demonstrate that just like this, we put the fruit in our equipment and as we try to plant it, that fluffy texture causes the fruits to bridge and it clogs it up. Winterfat is often not even included in restoration projects, because it’s just impractical to use on a large scale. What we are working on with our research is applying these coatings. This coating is limestone based powdered calcium carbonate with a hydrophobic coating on top. So those are the fruits after they’ve been coated and these can flow through equipment much better than untreated fruits. So by applying coatings, it’s easier for managers to deal with, they can run it through their equipment, they can implement it into seed mixes and they can be involved in more restoration projects.
– It’s kind of been thinking,
“Well, where have these plants evolved to get their nutrients?” We collect leaves from areas where we are going to plant and we compile all this native plant material together. We’re adding compost on the seeds and keep the seeds protected from pathogens.
– Here’s the acorns that we’re actually going to be coating today and these are going to be coated for mine land reclamation. So we’re using them at disturbed sites. So we want to help restore oak in the natural stands that are there typically. Here we have the actual coating that goes onto the seed, this is a mix of compost and asmut.
– We want to look at the compost after we finished making it, so we know what organisms are present and everything and before we apply it. So I was using native plants in the composting process, they’re bringing the native microorganisms along with them. By getting more fungi, more predators like protozoa or nematodes present, you can increase the chance and really set the stage for the plants you want to grow to be successful.
(seeds rustling)
– We also have species that have dormancy mechanisms built in that is great for the long-term survival of that plant.
– Plants are adapted to sense their environment and seeds are no exception. They are mainly sensing temperature, moisture and light conditions and they have different mechanisms to do that.
– But now our systems changed, where that evolutionary strategy may not work well, say in a cheatgrass environment, in particular when we’re trying to get those plants established all at once.
– And our challenge in restoration is that we want to get a lot of plants established quickly and so for us it’s really important to know what those mechanisms are that break dormancy in a plant and allow it to germinate. Seeds absorbing water is the first step in the germination process. So for physically dormant species, you might have methods for what we call scarify the seed coat. So scratch it to allow water to enter. Germination doesn’t happen until that seed coat is broken.
– So those blades are going to turn that seed around and as that goes around, it’s going to wear down the seed coat on the sandpaper One, two, three, four.
(instrument whirring) So here’s untreated seed, then here’s our scarified seed. So now this species is more likely to germinate this coming spring if we were to plant it in the fall. It’s not just a simple one treatment is going to be successful. So don’t want to say we’ve got everything worked out, but little by little, I do feel like we’re making headway.
– Ultimately we think we’ve gotten there just by growing the seed, but as important is how we get that seed in the ground and it has to do with the time you plant, how you plant, what you plant it with.
(vehicles squeaking)
– We kind of have a hierarchy of how we’d like to seed put onto a site. Seed drill is our preferred method in order to place the seed exactly where we want it.
– Today we’re seeding bluebunch wheat grass, bottlebrush squirreltail, sandberg bluegrass and prairie junegrass. This is on some conservation land, native seeds, we’ve got a lot of diversity in the seed and so it’s difficult to get it to go through a conventional planter. There’s three different boxes on these drills. All three different boxes we can do three different types of situations. With this drill configuration and tractor, we can do between 75 and 100 acres per day. Not terribly fancy, but when you’re out here in you might say wild land environments, it’s what it takes to get the job done. On these drills, this is called the disc opener and that cuts a slot here to give yourself some exposed dirt. The seed drops down and those little press wheels push the soil around the seed
– Desire is to see seed soil contact and planting things at the appropriate depths so they have the moisture and the soil that they need to really establish themselves. As far as seed preparation, the competition and preparing those seed beds is a major thing. Cheatgrass is one of the main issues that we deal with in the western United States and those annual species can really hinder the establishment of our seeded perennial species.
– You got to have the native community in place and have it at various stages of successful establishment before it does support the wildlife populations. This bare ground is not too attractive to the wildlife at this point, but give it a few years and we’ll definitely have good wildlife utilization.
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(aircraft whirring)
– What I found from 25 years of doing this is the first hour and a half sets the pace for the day. So you either do it right and you have a good day or you don’t do it right and it ends up being a day of confusion. So in the wintertime, requires a lot of extra effort, because we can’t take off the frost on the wings, we can’t take off the frost on the windshield and nothing likes to start when it’s below about 25 degrees. So we have to put heaters in the cowlings, keep the fuel control units warm, that’s kind of what we’re doing right now is waking everything up. So number one’s off the ground, number two’s picking up his first load, number three’s in the pattern on his dry flight, number four is off the ground on his dry flight and now we’re getting in a flow.
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(aircraft whirring)
(seeds rustling) So all we are is seed transportation specialists, through multiple modes of action, ending in the airplane and the seed in free-fall.
– [Participant 2] Headed toward the range.
– [Participant 3] Okay, I see your seed. On this particular location, we’re going to see about 22,000 acres with four airplanes, two separate load systems, a ground crew of about six to eight people and four pilots. We could do this particular job in around six days and of course that’s all weather dependent. We do have to be able to see the ground so it can’t be snowing, can’t be cloudy, can’t be foggy. So we’re looking for days like this. That was about 2000 pounds of seed. In any of these bags that you see here, there’s generally anywhere between eight and probably fourteen species per mix.
– The seed is kind of chosen for the soil types and the types of vegetation communities that were there, but we also try to pair that with the type of wildlife that we’re kind of looking at. So for example, if we’re in an area that has a lot of sage-grouse, we’re looking for a lot of species that are like forbs and stuff that sage-grouse really rely on that, versus if it’s more like big game, like elk and mule deer, we’ll be looking at slightly different species. It’s pretty mountainous and so most of the time drill seeding in these types of conditions isn’t really an option, because it’s just, the terrain just isn’t favorable.
– It’s too rough to run equipment over, it’s almost always aerially applied through an aircraft, either fixed wing or helicopter. The con is you have to put more seed down, you don’t get that soil contact and the likelihood of finding that micro-site is not as good.
– We’re dropping it on top. The germination rates are less than drilling it, so it’s good to have snow because it’s going to help hold the seed,
’cause it’s no good if we put seed on dirt and then there’s a 50 mile an hour wind, a lot of the lighter species will blow and we want it to stay on the fire. Generally in the sunshine it will melt in, create a little pocket and then when it snows again on top of it in the spring with the snow melt that provides the moisture for germination and of course the softer the soil, the muddier it is, the better seed to soil contact you’re going to have,
’cause the seed’s going to help sink into the soil. There’s a lot of seed that goes out and it needs to, there’s a lot of species that rely on this, there’s a lot of local communities that rely on this.
(shoes crunching)
– I am Kenneth Pete Jr. Most people call me KW. So right now we’re on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation. My role here is to help the tribe grow plants. I grew up here and went to college at University of Idaho and I was lucky enough to return home. We grow native seedlings for mining restoration or fire restoration or even city parks. This year we grew 100,000 sagebrush seedlings. We also like to have a really solid root system, which I think is the most important part, especially in our high desert environments where water’s not always necessarily available.
(precision needle feeder creaking) Our primary species we grow is Wyoming big sagebrush. This machine’s called a precision needle feeder. They’re a little spendy, but I think that they really help us with sewing seeds so we don’t oversew. So that saves seed and saves us money and makes everything a little more accurate. So tiny, tiny seeds, we have tiny, tiny needles to pick them up and each time it goes down, it picks up maybe three to four seeds. We want to make sure that we’re getting as many cells filled as we can. We want these blocks at capacity to maximize our growing space.
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– Nursery, in the terms of restoration. You’re taking these plants, instead of getting their start in nature where nature can be harsh and very unforgiving, you’re giving them a chance, you’re providing an optimal environment to be able to germinate the plants and care for them in those early establishment phases.
– [KW] With the seedling, you’re actually out there planting it and you know where it’s going.
– There’s advantages and disadvantages, like everything to that. The scale at which you can do that is reduced dramatically just because of the labor involvement, but that’s where seeding will always have that advantage is that you can just cover so much, but you need a lot more seed to do it. As far as transplanting, success rates are typically higher. So if you have a species that is a high priority that you don’t have very much seed for, transplanting becomes a very viable option.
– Lomatium and we hang it up and dry it and then just store it forever and then as far as like medicinal use, we use it as a tea or put it over ashes and kind of inhale it, like a smoke almost. We call it doza.
– As a tribal nursery specialist, I like to go visit the folks that I’ve gotten to know over the years and see what they’re doing and try and help troubleshoot some of the problems or the questions that they have.
– When I was at University of Idaho in college, I took a class with Jeremy.
– The class was called the Indigenous Culture in Ecology, and we were trying to cover the intersection of indigenous culture and land management and Western science.
– Jeremy’s still a big mentor to me. If I need any advice, figuring out why something’s not growing well somewhere.
– One of the things that KW’s been doing here is integrating multiple levels, restoration levels. We’ve got some food growing in here, which can be distributed to the community. This greenhouse is tied to a school.
(door scraping)
– Seems like when we hire these students, they bring their friends down, they just start volunteering with us. Next works out pretty well!
(KW laughing) You got to go crazy on it.
(students laughing) We hire high school students year round. With our program working with native seeds, We could show them how to collect and how to store seeds so that there’s always going to be native plants available for them to use and for their kids to use. So we teach them about how these native plants are important and how they serve a role in our ecosystem and why we’re growing them,
’cause people look out in the landscape and see sagebrush and think that we don’t need sagebrush grown. But then I think it really hit hard when we had a fire go right in our backyard. All that’s came back is just grasses and not necessarily native grasses. There’s a lot of cheatgrass up there. That’s where some of our medicinal plants are. We’re not seeing our wildlife in as much as the areas that haven’t burned.
(relaxing music continues) All this sagebrush came from our nursery and flowering, so they’re potentially producing some more seedlings out here. These do look really good. We’re at Table Rock in Boise, Idaho that the city owns. It had burned in 2016 caused by fireworks, so a fire that could have been avoided. In 2017, we were contacted by the city of Boise, looking for some seedlings to help restore the Table Rock area and we had some sagebrush that kind of fit the bill. So these areas are culturally significant for our tribes too, they used to come up here and hunt. It’s one of the areas that we would probably still be inhabiting if we weren’t pushed out in the middle of nowhere in Duck Valley where we are now. Returning here now, these seedlings are five or six years old and they’re looking really well and I always like to return to any restoration site or know exactly where our plants are going and be able to go visit them,
’cause I want to be able to produce quality seedlings. I know the tribe likes to have that status of being a trusted source of native plant materials. Native plants are also first foods, which goes back to the historical land management practice. These are the plants that kept us alive on the landscape, used for restoration, used for food, used for culture.
– So I use these plants. I just want to be able to produce as much native plants as possible and make sure that my kids are able to go utilize them the same way I have.
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