A summer breeze ripples the new grasses where last year's devastating School fire blackened 52,000 acres of southeastern Washington.
The emerald ocean fans out across the rolling Palouse Country south of Pomeroy, through fire-scorched pines and firs in the foothills of the Blue Mountains fringing the rugged Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness.
Few people passing by on State Route 124 and other rural roads realize the area represents a quiet revolution in federal wildfire restoration.
The School fire erupted Aug. 5, and crews finally got it under control Oct. 1. Once they did, the U.S. Forest Service used helicopters to scatter an unprecedented 21,000 pounds of native grass seed -- not the usual non-native species -- across the charred terrain.
"This planting . . . likely exceeds all the post-fire native seedings combined nationally," said U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman Joani Bosworth.
The burned area now is covered in Idaho fescue, bluebunch wheat grass, mountain brome, prairie junegrass and blue wild rye -- some of the same grasses Lewis and Clark traveled through on their epic journey through the Northwest 200 years ago.
The program to use native grasses in restoration projects is 10 years old, but it's just now gaining momentum, said Vicky Erickson, a Pendleton-based Forest Service geneticist.
"In the past five years, it has really taken off," she said. "I would say we here in northeast Oregon are probably leaders in the Forest Service in this type of work."
She manages a four-person, interagency program that contracts with growers to produce native grass seed for the Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
Her program is responsible for seeds used in the Pomeroy replanting and also for native seeds planted recently on areas of the Mule Creek, Fence, Fly and Spring Creek fires in Oregon's Wallowa-Whitman National Forest.
Increased fire cycles
Native grass species tend to be deep-rooted, fire- and weed-resistant and remain green all summer, but for decades across the West, they've been elbowed aside by aggressive non-native grasses.
The practice probably began in the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s when the government brought in non-native seeds to reclaim lands parched by drought, poor farming practices and overgrazing, Erickson said.
The non-native seeds were inexpensive, fast-growing and filled a niche, and nearly everyone thought it was the right thing to do, she said. But Northwesterners continue to live with a downside of the practice.
The non-native species brought an increase in wildfires, noxious weeds and even, according to some, grasshopper invasions. The jumping and chirping insects appear to prefer non-native grasses for some reason.
The fields of non-native cheat grass, Kentucky bluegrass, orchard grass, red fescues and other introduced species turn dull brown in the summer sun. Their shallow roots produce piles of brittle blades that dry early in the season.
"In most of the range country where these grasses have become prominent, they have increased the frequency of fires," said Barry Schrumpf, spokesman for the Oregon State University Seed Certification Service in Corvallis.
Some rangelands went from 60 years between wildfires to 10-year fire cycles after the non-native grasses took hold, Schrumpf said.
Cheat grass may be the worst, said Rob Fiegener, director of the Native Seed Network in Corvallis.
"It is green in March and it is brown in June and it burns," said Fiegener, whose group helps people find appropriate native seeds for restoration projects. "We have these systems that are out of balance. Once the native component is gone, you have these cascading effects."
The non-native species simply aren't as well-adapted to the soil as native grasses that have grown in the area for hundreds of thousands of years, said Andy Huber of La Grande, an OSU crop and soil scientist who teaches at Eastern Oregon University.
When a wildfire rages through, the native seeds often will survive while the non-natives won't, he said.
Still small part of industry
Huber is one of the pioneers in the effort to use native grasses in fire restoration.
He grows native grasses on a 180-acre private preserve on Pumpkin Ridge north of La Grande that he created in 1992. He began providing commercial seed producers some of the first "starter" seeds to begin growing commercial stocks of native species in 1995 when he saw that federal land managers seemed interested in using native seeds to rehabilitate fire-damaged lands.
It wasn't long before the interagency program run by Erickson got underway on the Umatilla National Forest, and Huber was able to step aside.
The wild seeds he originally contributed to the effort are long gone now: A native plant in a commercial operation produces new seeds for only three years on average. But in many ways the restoration near Pomeroy, the Forest Service's biggest to date, was inspired by Huber's early efforts.
Erickson's program pays for the collection of wild seeds, which then are turned over to contract growers in Eastern Oregon and the Willamette Valley. A 5-pound sack of wild seeds can produce 300 to 1,000 pounds of commercial seeds a year.
The seeds are planted in places similar in elevation and rainfall to the spot where they were collected, she said.
Growing native seeds can be challenging, and commercial producers sometimes earn $5 to $15 a pound, compared with 50 cents to $1 a pound for some non-native grass varieties, Erickson said. She recently accepted delivery of 50,000 pounds of native seeds produced over three years that will be used in Forest Service restoration projects.
Still, native seed production is "a tiny, tiny fraction" of the seeds grown in Oregon, Schrumpf said. Of more than 1,000 Oregon seed producers, perhaps only two dozen produce native plant species, he said.
"I expect it to grow slowly," he said.The Oregonian
