By: Annalise Kenney

In California’s San Joaquin Valley, fields planted with tomatoes, cotton, pistachios, almonds, and more than 200 other crops stretch across the valley from the coastal mountains in the west to the Sierra Nevada range in the east. For generations, the region’s farmers have perfected methods for harvesting from the land. Now Great Valley Seed Company is applying that know-how to a new growing challenge: native plants.

They are assisted by Bowles Farming Company, a sixth-generation company with deep roots in the Valley – and plenty of farming expertise and assets to share. Great Valley Seed aims to help farmers and other landowners improve the health of their soils and ecosystems by lowering the cost per acre of increasing the presence of native species in the landscape.

“We are closing the gap between farming and conservation,” says Doug Iten, general manager of the company. ”

The Valley’s agricultural landscape has historically been hard on native plants, which provide habitat for wildlife, fuel pollinator species, store carbon, and keep the treasured soil and water supplies of the Valley healthy. “California is a huge biodiversity hotspot in the U.S.,” says Miles Dakin of Pollinator Partnership, a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation of pollinator species. Of around 4,000 native bee species inhabiting the U.S., nearly 2,000 of these species are found in California.

Native bees need native plants for food and shelter, but widespread agriculture is a major industry in California. A system reliant on monocultured fields does not leave much room for native species. Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly Farms program, led by Dakin, is a certification program that recognizes farmers and landowners who support pollinator habitat on their lands. Investing in pollinator habitat filled with native plants pays off when greater numbers of pollinators improve harvests, says Dakin.

As interest in habitat restoration grows among the next generation of Valley farmers, the native plants of San Joaquin Valley that were once regarded as unproductive weeds—hardy, drought-resistant grassland species like milkweeds, grasses, and the medicinally useful yarrow—are now desirable.

But there are challenges in restoration. Many of these native plants have never been cultivated. Some of the seeds are eye-strainingly tiny and their growing preferences are less known. Varieties of natives that grow well in other parts of California will not necessarily do well in the dry environment of the Valley.

Bowles Farming Company, located on a Los Banos ranch, picked up on this need for a seed supplier. Operating under a philosophy of environmental stewardship, the farm uses drip irrigation technology, operates solar panels, and has restored, enhanced, and protected hundreds of acres of land as wildlife habitat. But when the farm’s leadership showed off an example of their restoration effort to an Audubon group touring the ranch, they realized the farm was missing an important component in their stewardship work.

Bowles and Audubon had different ideas of what habitat looked like, says Bowles Farming Company’s executive vice president Derek Azevedo. The Audubon folks explained that what Bowles was growing in their habitat area was mostly non-native weeds. The pollinators and other animals that Bowles courted with its restoration practices would not receive the nutrition and habitat they need from non-native plants.

Photo of Bowles Farming Company’s executive vice president Derek Azevedo.

Bowles Farming Company stepped up to the challenge of using native plants to restore habitat areas. They learned about new practices and partners, but also struggled with the high prices and limited availability of California native seeds. That’s when an idea struck Bowles’ trailblazing leadership team, including Azevedo and the farm’s CEO, Cannon Michael, himself a descendant of Henry Miller, the farm’s founder and agricultural pioneer who settled in California in the 1850s.

“We saw an opportunity to leverage some of the technology we use in agriculture and apply that to native plants to grow seeds,” says Azevedo. Great Valley Seed Company sprouted from this concept, its goal to help farmers and other landowners grow regionally important ecotypes of California native plants – plants that are accustomed to the dry environment of the Valley.

Doug Iten, with extensive vegetable farming and seed production experience, came on to manage the operation in 2020. The Bowles Farming Company production team helped the seed company to harvest seed from 40 species last year.

These species were largely harvested by hand from the natural areas near the Bowles ranch, recalls Azevedo. He and his daughters gathered the milkweed foundation seed by “cruising around the farm vacuuming up the white floss with dustbusters, then painstakingly sorting by hand, seed by seed.”

With seeds collected, the company has now entered the growing stage, a learning process led by Iten. Many of these plants have never been grown on a commercial scale, leaving a lot of unknowns like ideal growing conditions, harvesting timelines, and pest interference.

The company is also working to understand the needs of their customer base. As native plants catch on through programs such as Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly Farms program, demand will only increase. The seed company offers a large-scale contract growing program to organizations needing greater quantities of plants.

In addition to revolutionizing commercial native plant growing, Great Valley Seed Company is considering new ways to use and market native plants. Iten and Azevedo are investigating other potential sources of income from native plants, including selling milkweed fiber’s as a substitute for hemp and its downy “floss” as a substitute for down insulation in things like jackets and sleeping bags. Pollinator Partnership’s Dakin says innovation will be important in this new corner of agricultural production. “You need to be able to make money from pollinator habitat so you can continue to support pollinator habitat,” he says.

A successful season of production will be the seed company’s key to success. Iten says the company has a lot of advantages on their side: “With being on a working farm, my vegetable farming background, connections to local conservation groups and needs – it’s going to be fun.”

Sources

Interview, Feb. 15, 2021. Derek Azevedo (derek@bfarm.com) of Bowles Farming Company and Doug Iten (doug@bfarm.com) of Great Valley Seed Company.

Interview, March 4, 2021. Miles Dakin (miles@pollinator.org) of Pollinator Partnership.

Borders, Brianna D., et al. “The Challenge of Locating Seed Sources for Restoration in the San Joaquin Valley, California.” Natural Areas Journal, vol. 31, no. 2, 2011, pp. 190–199. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43914281.

Pollinator Partnership. Bee Friendly Farming Handbook. https://www.pollinator.org/pollinator.org/assets/generalFiles/BeeFriendlyFarming_Handbook_Final_9_29_20.pdf

Sprouting Stewardship: Great Valley Seed Company Fills a Need for Native Seed