Native seeds a blooming business

The folks at BFI Native Seeds take their grasses and their forbs — a fancy name for wildflowers — very seriously.

So seriously, in fact, they named the warehouse cat Dactylis, after the Latin genus for orchard grass.

“The cat used to be very active out in the warehouse,” said BFI founder and habitat restoration consultant Jerry Benson. “And she was very functional. But in the last couple of years she’s become more of an ornament.”

“When you have lots of seed around, you have lots of mice,” Benson explained.

And BFI has lots of seed in its Warden warehouse, hundreds of giant sacks of “source identified seed” piled high, filled with grass and wildflower seeds of all kinds. Those seeds are specially bred, primarily for habitat restoration projects all across the western United States.

“The Intermountain West is our specialty,” said Benson’s son Matthew, who helps run the company. “Our range is basically the Colorado Plateau through Utah, Nevada, and Northern California. All the way up to the tip of the Olympic Peninsula, and through Oregon, Idaho and Montana.”

The company’s customers are primarily large government land management agencies — the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service, as well as various state wildlife and land agencies and the occasional privately-owned conservancy.

“We deal with quite a spectrum of land management entities. Some are private, but not too much,” Jerry Benson said.

BFI finds and cultivates native and endangered plant species needed to restore habitat damaged by fire or to help encourage the recovery of endangered animals. Jerry Benson said he started the business roughly 30 years ago because as a wildlife biologist, he discovered, no one was really cultivating the native plants needed to make restoration really work.

“In the late 1980s, I started doing habitat for threatened and endangered species like the sage grouse, pygmy rabbits and burrowing owls,” he said. “I was on a project in Okanogan doing work on the sharptail grouse, and the quality of the habitat we produced with commercial cultivars was just not where it needed to be.”

“So, I got some collections of seeds, and started producing native seed grass,” he said.

The company now has seeds from over 200 different species from across the western United States in the warehouse and over 700 in its stock room.

But they do all their growing in the Columbia Basin on small patches of rented farmland. The Basin’s climate is perfect, Jerry Benson said, even for plants that come from far away or much wetter climates, such as Western Washington.

“West Side species all do well here because of the day length and latitude, and we’re irrigated here. We can replicate the wet environment pretty easy,” Jerry Benson said.

It takes a lot of time and work to grow the amount of seed needed to restore hundreds or even thousands of acres of habitat. Jerry Benson said sometimes they have little more than a handful of seed to start from, and must spend several years growing and harvesting before there is enough for a major project.

“We start with small quantities and then blow them up into larger quantities,” Matthew Benson said. “We might only plant a half- or three-quarters-pound per acre. It’s not what you think of for normal farming.”

“A lot of these, when we start, that’s the only seed of that in the world! If we screw up, somebody has to spend several years going back and look for those plants,” Jerry Benson added.

It’s not like a normal landscaping project, both Bensons said, where you roll out bluegrass sod on a bare lot and call it a lawn.

“We can take your remand and grow it out. To rebuild the whole community — grasses and flowers — takes five to seven years before you have a habitat,” Matthew Benson said.

The company also does nearly all of the work of sowing, tending and harvesting, he added, and has even had to build some of its own specialized equipment to plant and harvest seeds that can vary in size from less than a millimeter to more than a centimeter.

“This is a specific enough business that it requires a lot of intensive management,” he said. “We have to manage the acres ourselves because there isn’t anyone else who can do what we’re doing. It’s just not out there.”

In addition to growing native seed, BFI will also evaluate a restoration site, collect native seed if needed, prepare a site for restoration and even plant the seed.

The company also provides “source identified seed” under the guidance of the Washington State Department of Agriculture’s seed inspection program, noting where a seed was collected and where they grew it.

“We keep track. That’s the name of the game for us,” Jerry Benson said.

“Why do customers want that? Because it’s successful. What we put down works. The plants have been there since the last ice age, and they will probably be there until the next ice age. All we do is put it back,” Matthew Benson added.

The company also provides five- and 10-pound seed packs of plants native to the Columbia Basin for local landscapers, and even experimented a couple of years ago growing roughly five acres of bright red zinnias north of Warden “as a favor to a seed company.” But given how many seeds even that small stand of zinnias can produce, Jerry Benson said there’s no way BFI can compete with the low-cost ornamental seed growers of India and Bangladesh.

Which means the company is going to continue doing what it does best — large quantities of native seeds for major habitat projects.

“That was a year or two of seed demand in the U.S. for zinnias,” Matthew Benson said. “The world doesn’t need that many zinnias.”

“By the time it trickled down to us, it was more work than it was worth,” Jerry Benson added.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.