Inside the Movement to Grow More Native Seeds—and Why It Matters More Than Ever

It was a golden afternoon, the sky velvet at its edges with dust and smoke and distance. Long hills smudged blue-gray spread away from the draw where botanist Molly Boyter led a small band of helpers. The view encompassed some of Washington’s last fragments of shrub steppe that haven’t disappeared under farms. By this time in late August 2024, most plants that thrive in these intact habitats—­including where we stood, on a high plateau east of Wenatchee—had gone to seed. And that’s why we were here: for seeds. 

The first of our target species, mountain coyote mint, grew in short clumps of silvery leaves along the bottom of the draw and smelled of chocolate. Long-tongued purple blossoms spangled some of the mint’s flowerheads, but most had desiccated into orbs of papery chambers. The second, nettleleaf giant hyssop, poked up among shrubs along the draw’s flanks, its tall stems topped with columns of dry flowers that smelled like cleaning products when I crushed them to firework scatters between my fingers. 

Boyter, who has worked for the Wenatchee Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) since 2010, crunched through brittle grass and leaves, her braids swinging as she pinched hyssop heads into a paper lunch sack. Below us two more BLM seed collectors and an American Conservation Experience intern rustled on their knees, filling bags with coyote mint.

The task of harvesting these seeds didn’t look like much, but it was part of a quiet revolution. Since 2000, the BLM has worked with other federal land agencies and many partners on a nationwide initiative to increase the availability and use of native plant seeds for projects meant to restore natural resilience to damaged landscapes. Washington’s shrub steppe, reduced today to 20 percent of its historic extent, is just one area of great need. Across the country, intensive development practices, invasive species, and increasingly extreme wildfires and storms have degraded native plant communities that are important for wildlife, clean water, tourism, ranching, fishing, and hunting. These denuded habitats are, in turn, more vulnerable to harm from future natural disasters—and less capable of buffering human communities from these events.

But not just any native seed will do. Unlike food crops that people have bred over millennia to thrive in a wide range of conditions, seeds from wild plants grow best in particular climates, soils, moisture, and elevations. Depending on where a seed was harvested, it will fare differently in different parts of its species’ range. A bluebunch wheatgrass from the Great Basin, for example, is more likely to endure the vagaries of that place than one from the more northerly Columbia Plateau. To ensure that a restoration project is successful, it’s best to use locally adapted native plants. 

That’s not as simple as it sounds. In this particular spot, the Wenatchee BLM team planned to collect at least 10,000 seeds—and hopefully as many as 250,000—from each mint species, following methods laid out by a BLM program called Seeds of Success, or SOS. Earlier in the year, team members scouted these and other plant populations several times to hit the brief window when seeds are ripe but have yet to fall. Sometimes collectors miss their chance because of challenging weather, or when a wildfire destroys a population before they arrive. “Nature does its own thing,” Boyter said. “We try to coordinate the bureaucratic machine to keep up with it.”

We moved deliberately, taking a fraction of the heads from many different plants to capture genetic diversity while ensuring that enough seed remained to sustain these populations. Later, Boyter would send the collections to a facility that cleans away excess plant material and returns seeds in vacuum-sealed bags. Some would go to a farm, which would grow them to produce larger quantities of seed for future use. And some would be sown nearby, on a stretch of parched federal land along a waterway called Duffy Creek. 

There, where historic cattle grazing and agriculture had narrowed the stream to one channel, the BLM planned to restore braids to slow and spread the water so that it could infiltrate the soil. The agency would also replace nutrition-poor exotic grasses with native species that support wildlife like the dwindling Greater Sage-Grouse, which needs sagebrush, bunchgrass, and dozens of kinds of wildflowers and forbs for cover and food. The restored moisture would help sustain those plants through blazing summers, and the wetter, more diverse ecosystem should, in turn, moderate wildfire severity if one burned through. Because the two mint species we collected bloom late, Boyter explained, pollinators would have nectar to eat through summer’s end, with cascading benefits for plants and other animals, from the smallest songbirds to big game like mule deer.

The project is the latest in a 25-year legacy of successful restoration efforts in this area, and it’s exactly the kind of work that the agencies behind the nationwide native seed effort have labored to support and spread. But if this revolution is quiet, it’s also slow. Only in the past few years has federal funding approached the levels needed to surmount the thorniest obstacles and ensure a diverse and abundant native seed stock. And the urgency of building that supply chain to restore natural resilience to landscapes has perhaps never been greater, said Peggy Olwell, who retired as lead of the BLM’s Plant Conservation and Restoration Program in 2025. Climate change is supercharging storms, fires, floods, and droughts. “These disasters are disasters for all Americans,” said Olwell. One solution to help protect us lies within a seed’s tidy package.

Many ecosystems evolved with fire. Often low in intensity, natural fires tend to leave islands of plants and larger, older trees that reseed burned areas. Some habitats, like oak savannas, require fire to sustain them. But the 21st century is an age of escalating megafires, fueled by historic land-use practices such as logging, decades of wildfire suppression, and today’s extreme levels of drought and heat. Larger and hotter than their predecessors, these monster blazes can devour everything in their path, complicating natural regeneration and sometimes remaking ecosystems. 

In the Great Basin’s sagebrush steppe, for example, perennial native shrubs, grasses, and flowers once kept the water table higher and fed scores of creatures. But overgrazing by cattle drove a large-scale invasion by cheatgrass and other exotic annual weeds that favor bare earth. Cheatgrass grows fast and early, outcompeting more palatable native plants, and dies in a few weeks, forcing hungry wildlife and livestock to forage elsewhere. Worse, its dry blades fuel more wildfire, creating a vicious feedback loop that allows yet more cheatgrass to overtake sagebrush landscapes with each successive blaze. The conversion harms species that require sagebrush to survive, including Greater Sage-Grouse, Sage Thrashers, and Brewer’s Sparrows, as well as other birds, like Loggerhead Shrikes and Long-billed Curlews, that use the habitat. 

“Birds are very attuned to the particular vegetation of the landscapes that they occupy,” said Trina Bayard, director of bird conservation for Audubon Washington. Native plant communities ensure bird species have the food, nesting sites, and structural complexity that they require, each in their individual ways. Degraded landscapes have less to offer.  

After particularly devastating wildfire seasons in 1999 and 2000, Congress moved to address the nation’s new fire reality, directing the Interior and Agriculture Departments to develop programs to reseed landscapes with native plants after natural disasters and other disturbances. This was relatively new ground for the BLM. The agency had historically planted fast-growing nonnatives, like certain forage grasses, to prevent erosion of exposed topsoil and feed cattle. But those go-to species reduced biodiversity—and some areas were still eventually invaded by cheatgrass. “We decided, ‘Okay, we’re going to have to go out and really start from the beginning,’ ” Olwell said.

First, they needed more wild seeds. So in 2001, the BLM launched its SOS program, which trained collectors and planned which seeds to gather and from where. The aim was to preserve a cross section of U.S. plant diversity in seed banks and develop a supply chain for use in restoration. In the years that followed, SOS trained thousands of people who collected seed over a broadening sweep of the country. Collaborations began to bloom with state and local governments, as well as universities, tribal organizations, farms, botanical gardens, nurseries, and nonprofits. Land managers used more natives in small, planned restorations like those at Duffy Creek, or to quickly reseed tens of thousands of acres after Great Basin blazes, or to rehabilitate oil drilling pads, mining sites, and bare earth from highway construction. 

But aside from bursts of funding when hurricanes, fires, and other disasters hit especially hard, federal investment remained far below the vision, as did the quantity and diversity of the native seed supply. Meanwhile, Olwell said, what native seed market did exist was still dominated by easier-to-use cultivars developed from wild plants collected in northerly places like Washington and Oregon and selectively bred for easier farming and better performance. 

Hoping to set a clearer, more consistent path forward to achieve native seed goals, in 2015, 12 federal agencies, along with hundreds of collaborators, doubled down with the National Seed Strategy. The new framework emphasized using “the right seed at the right time in the right place.” In practice, that meant trying to plant mostly source-identified native seeds—those drawn from a specific place and grown into larger quantities without selective interference—in similar habitats within that species’ range. An accompanying business plan set forth a blueprint and proposed (but didn’t provide) $358 million in spending over five years to vastly expand seed availability through more collections, processing capacity, farm grow-outs, research, and climate-controlled storage facilities to preserve viability until future use.

Even with a solid plan, the challenges ahead remained steep. New native seed farms had proved hard to jump-start, with no crop insurance available and a precipitous learning curve. Many well-understood native plants demand complicated or unconventional farming methods. Untested species may require tricky trial-and-error experiments. Plants might, for instance, need to pass through the intestines of a bird to germinate. Maybe, if they are desert plants, they remain dormant until the exact right conditions appear—but those conditions are a mystery. “They have a lot of secrets, and they don’t give up their secrets easily,” said Robby Henes of Southwest Seed, a Colorado-based seed producer.

Perhaps the most troublesome issue was a persistent mismatch between what land managers wanted and what growers could provide. Wildfires don’t give advance notice of where they will burn, for example, making it harder for managers to plan what plants they might need in the future. Meanwhile, fire season typically winds down in the autumn around the same time as the federal government’s fiscal year, leaving managers scrambling to spend their remaining budget on seeds and seedlings to replant. Land managers must also move quickly after a disturbance to keep weeds from moving in and gaining the upper hand. 

But often, species that managers want to plant aren’t available on short notice, forcing less appropriate substitutions. Growers can’t turn on a dime; it takes several years to produce commercial quantities of native seed from a wild collection. By then managers may no longer be motivated to purchase them. Confronted with volatile demand, the industry couldn’t stabilize or grow, making it hard to boost the native seed supply. It was a market problem, and it would require a market fix.

A combine raised a plume of dust against a wan blue horizon. Irrigation water gurgled en route to sprinklers that sent it in rooster tails over green fields. The farm would look like any other in this flat stretch of land near Warden, Washington, if it weren’t for all the vivid wildflowers. Rather than food crops, the 2,500 acres farmed by BFI Native Seeds produce hundreds of thousands of pounds of native seed for restoration. With mostly source-identified seed for 1,000 plant varieties in stock and about 350 currently growing on-site, BFI is one of the industry’s largest such operations.

Most of the wildflowers had already crisped in the heat by the time I visited in late summer, but waist-high blazingstar still bloomed with palm-size yellow flowers, their seeds bound for soil left bare by the removal of four dams from the Klamath River in California. Nearby grew a tangled plot of showy goldeneye sunflowers for Colorado’s Uncompahgre Plateau and rows of diminutive Pacific lupine for Oregon’s Umatilla National Forest. Boyter’s mint seeds would eventually land in a field here, too.

Co-owners father and son Jerry and Matt Benson began growing source-identified native plants for seed here in 1995, on land the family had farmed conventionally for decades. At the time, Jerry was also a botanist working for the state of Washington and had found that restoration projects fared better with locally harvested wild seed. After retiring, he ran with that idea at BFI and found a willing partner in the BLM for the first restoration projects around Duffy Creek.  

Since then, BFI has expanded into a 45-person operation that serves projects across the West. Huge red metal boxes of yet-to-be processed seeds and sofa-cushion-size bags of those ready for planting fill its warehouses. Giant seed cleaners with tubes, conveyor belts, and shaker screens occupy one wall, and contraptions for more finicky plants like flowers line others, along with seed mixers that resemble giant drip coffee cones. In addition to specialized equipment, working with idiosyncratic plants requires specialized knowledge and creative use of traditional tools. Lupine, for instance, explosively ejects seeds over time. “You might lose an eye because it’s like a BB war out there,” Matt joked as we surveyed a field. Covering the soil around rows of those plants with landscaping fabric—and sometimes surrounding them with walls and a ceiling of the same—keeps seeds contained for collection with a vacuum or broom and dustpan.

When the National Seed Strategy launched, many parts of the country still had scant or no native seed farmers and few compared to BFI’s scale with source-identified seeds. But with the backing of the new federal framework, existing regional and state-level partnerships gained momentum and new ones formed, helping reduce barriers to grower entry and to a larger, more diverse seed supply. 

In New Mexico and Arizona, for example, a new Southwest Seed Partnership—administered by the nonprofit Institute for Applied Ecology with the BLM, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, and other agencies—began offering contracts that guaranteed farmer income by paying per acre, even when fields failed. As incentives improved, the region went from having a single farm growing local native seed to 15, along with 6 nurseries producing seedlings. At the national level, the BLM also offered multiyear contracts that ensured farmers received some income to cover costs regardless of yield. It was literal seed money: Once farmers sent the contracted amounts to BLM storage warehouses in Idaho and Nevada, they could sell from the same fields on the open market indefinitely.

Yet it wasn’t until Congress passed the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that an infusion of money approaching the seed strategy’s lofty vision flowed into the local and regional networks, plans, and partnerships that had coalesced over two decades. That included $200 million for National Seed Strategy implementation, such as through plant community restoration projects; $325 million to develop native plant materials for rehabilitating burns; and funding for a new interagency coordinating center and seed bank. 

Money from the laws, for example, is helping the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana with plans to significantly increase the size and output of their forestry and restoration nursery. That in turn will help extend their sales to other states and tribal nations. It will also allow the tribes to step up efforts to replant whitebark pine in areas of their reservation where it’s been extirpated by blister rust, said Stephen McDonald, head of the tribes’ Forestry Department. The culturally important tree is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and its nuts feed Clark’s Nutcrackers and grizzly bears. 

The Southwest Seed Partnership, meanwhile, is using the money to develop planning tools that help the Forest Service forecast locations for wildfires and other restoration needs, which will complement seed “menus” made for those specific habitats. The Nevada Native Seed Partnership, another regional collaboration that coalesced in 2017, also received millions. Plant ecologist Beth Leger at the University of Nevada, Reno used some funds to buy a walk-in refrigerator to expand her lab’s seed cleaning and storage facility. In 16 months, the operation went from processing a few collections a year to hundreds, and in 2025 employed 12 people. Another participant, the Great Basin Research Center in Utah, is now studying how to crack germination requirements, water needs, and weed control for impor­tant regional plants. At the Nevada Department of Agriculture, the money indirectly helps support a program offering free seed and expertise to new growers. In 2024, seven participants planted 70 acres.

Through his family’s business, Matt Benson also noticed clear progress. Above all, he credits this to a cultural shift among land managers. BLM has a long history of prioritizing livestock grazing over managing for the whole health of the landscape. But now, he said, “you have a lot more people who have come out of school with a bigger ecological look, saying, ‘You know, I’d like to do something better.’”

Boyter is among those innovators, and her work shows what’s possible when real funding and long-term strategy connect with generational change. Amid BFI’s fields of blazingstar and lupine, I saw a plot of woolly plantain that Boyter had contracted for seed. She was experimenting with the annual plant and other “scrappy natives” at restoration sites to see if they could shut out early invaders like cheatgrass.  

She and other managers also had new tools to better prepare for an uncertain climate future, such as an app that debuted nationwide in 2024. Back in the draw outside of Wenatchee, she offered input as SOS crew lead Alex Krause entered the day’s mint collections on an iPad. Data like these feed into interactive maps of all SOS collections divided by region, allowing managers like her to see what seeds are available and guide efforts to fill gaps. Boyter wanted to use the app to focus some of her collections on hotter, drier seed zones that may mirror conditions that other places experience in a warmer world, which could facilitate better restoration outcomes.

The broader SOS effort was also growing. Thanks to a 2023 collaborative agreement among the BLM, the NPS, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the number of SOS seed collection teams working in 2024 had roughly doubled over the average of the past decade. Later that fall, as Boyter’s team sent the last of the season’s grass, flower, and shrub seed collections—some large enough to support commercial grow-outs—to the program’s usual processor in Oregon, dozens of others did the same. The tsunami of new seeds, the most since SOS’s start, overwhelmed the facility into 2025 and flowed over into newly fitted operations.

Meanwhile, even more SOS teams got to work in 2025. But they did so against a tumultuous backdrop at federal ­agencies as the incoming Trump administration moved to cut their staff and spending. While the long-term ramifications for native seed and restoration programs remain unclear, setbacks mounted through last year. Some key leaders took the administration’s buyout offer. Hiring freezes and the firing of probationary employees chipped away at the next generation of talent. Agency grant programs abruptly withdrew funds. The Institute for Applied Ecology (IAE) was hit particularly hard with 30 grant cancellations in September, forcing the Southwest Seed Partnership to reduce the number of native plant fields it anticipated contracting for production in 2026 from 27 to just 8.  (Update: After this article went to press in March, a federal judge ordered the Interior Department to restore the canceled grants to IAE and other groups.) 

Still, there were indications that efforts to advance the National Seed Strategy would continue, though at a reduced scale and clip. “Folks on both sides of the aisle see value to this,” Fred Edwards, acting BLM plant conservation and restoration program lead, told me last year. This January, Edwards confirmed that the new interagency seed center was on track. More broadly, the seed strategy aligns with Trump administration priorities including “responsible minerals and energy production, livestock and timber harvesting, and restoration of habitat connectivity and big game migration corridors,” he said. “Native seed plays a critical role in supporting these efforts by enabling the reclamation of public lands.” 

Even if federal funding or collaboration contracts further, the capacity and physical infrastructure built by expanded federal investments over the past few years has created at least some resilience among the seed initiative’s local, state, tribal, and nonprofit partners. Though discouraged by recent developments, most participants I talked to planned to press on however they could. 

There is, inside all these efforts, an endemic optimism that persists. That makes sense: What’s more hopeful than a seed and the potential life it contains? The extreme storms and wildfires predicted by climate models are already here and will only worsen. There is no alternative but to keep rebuilding and bolstering the native ecosystems that protect, delight, and enrich us; that provide clean water, fresh air, and abundant wildlife. 

As Boyter drove us back to Wenatchee, several large wildfires burned around Washington, part of the record-breaking 2024 fire season in the Northwest. She pointed out a big gap in the sagebrush from an older blaze, and my phone buzzed with an alert for yet another. The fire had started in a place where Boyter’s crew had recently collected grass seed—just in time.

This story originally ran in the Spring 2026 issue as “Seeding a Movement.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.