Farmworkers Heal Climate-Scarred Land With Native Seeds

Irma Quiroz pulled her bandana over her face, lowered her hat, and flicked a switch. A towering seed-cleaning machine roared to life, sending a cloud of dust and residue into the air. Quiroz shoveled native grass seeds into the machine as her husband, Juan Gómez, held out a palm to inspect the stream of cleaned seeds, looking for any that were empty or underdeveloped, as they cascaded out of the machine into white sacks. They were now ready for restoration sites across California.

Quiroz and Gómez are seed-cleaning specialists and field workers at Hedgerow Farms, a native seed farm near the Central Valley town of Winters. Hedgerow’s collectors gather seeds from native plants in the wild, and field workers grow them out at the 300-acre farm to produce more seeds. This spring, neat rows of mugwort, purple needlegrass, and California poppies sprouted in the midst of neighboring almond orchards, tomatoes, and alfalfa.

Government agencies, tribes, and other land managers use the seeds to revegetate fire-ravaged areas, transform abandoned farmland, reestablish wetlands, and repair other damaged or altered lands, creating environments that support local ecosystems and biodiversity.

“We’re doing something for the planet,” Quiroz said in Spanish.

Recreational areas have benefited too: Hedgerow Farms’ silverbush lupine grows in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and its native grasses can be found in the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area outside Sacramento. The farm also supplies native seeds to seed packet retailers, helping sow drought-resistant plants and establish pollinator habitat in urban environments.

Some projects, such as the ongoing restoration of the Klamath River Basin in Oregon and California, involve billions of seeds—from various suppliers, including Hedgerow—spread across thousands of acres. “Native vegetation is the foundation of a healthy ecosystem,” the Yurok Tribe said in a social media post showing wildflowers blooming this spring in the scar of a former reservoir. After four dams were removed from the Klamath River, the tribe began revegetating the riverbanks last year, planting species such as milkweed—a key food source for monarch butterflies—that once flourished in the watershed.

Research has shown that native plants play a powerful role in slowing climate change and restoring ecosystems. They create wildlife habitat, sequester carbon, limit dust and erosion by stabilizing soil, and deter future wildfires by preventing highly flammable invasive grasses from taking root.

“Having native seed ready and getting native plants back in the ground after these big fire events is critical,” said Justin Valliere, assistant professor of cooperative extension at the University of California, Davis, who studies native plant restoration.

Spanish clover, miniature lupine, and white yarrow are already growing at sites devastated this year by the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles. The seeds were supplied by Rancho De Las Flores, a native seed farm in Los Alamos, near Santa Barbara, which is owned by the same company as Hedgerow Farms. Las Flores and Hedgerow Farms coordinate production, each specializing in plants native to their regions.

Hedgerow Farms has grown seeds for restoration projects on all fronts of the climate crisis. This spring, the farm’s collections experts left their homes before dawn to scout for irises and cinquefoils in the hilly pasture that runs along Gleason Beach, north of Bodega Bay on the Sonoma Coast, for a project restoring the first site in California where a highway was moved inland due to sea level rise.

Meanwhile, the farm has ramped up seed production for tarweed, phacelia, and saltbush, plants native to the San Joaquin Valley. As groundwater depletion threatens to dry up half a million acres of agriculture in the nation’s top-producing region, farmers and land managers have begun begun using native seeds to transition dairies and other farmland to desert scrub habitat.