Family farm pulls state back to its roots (complete article from source)
Source: DesMoinesRegister.com, by JERRY PERKINS
August 07, 2007
Iowa's prairies once teemed with wildflowers such as these. A Winterset seed company is helping restore their color to the land.
Winterset, Ia. - As prairie restoration has bloomed, Dan Allen's seed business has grown along with it to become the largest of its kind in the United States.
"We just kind of grew into the business," said Allen, 59, founder of Allendan Seed Co., which he has been operating for more than 25 years.
Before European settlers turned Iowa into farmland, tallgrass prairie covered much of the state's 36 million acres. It took only a few generations to destroy with a plow what nature had built up during millions of years.
But Allen's customers, including government agencies and private landowners, are restoring patches of prairie on farm ground and roadsides for hunting and conservation reasons.
Prospects for making ethanol out of switchgrass and other native prairie grasses also promises to give another stimulus to the prairie seed business, said Kirk Henderson of the Iowa Ecotype Project at the University of Northern Iowa's Tallgrass Prairie Center.
Iowa is ahead of other states in restoring its lost prairie landscape, he said, in part because of a roadside prairie planting program established by the Iowa Department of Transportation.
The department spends about $800,000 a year to buy native grass and prairie flower seeds, said Mark Masteller, chief landscape architect at the Iowa Department of Transportation.
"Allendan sells us a lot of seed," Masteller said.
As of June 30, 46,000 acres of state highway rights of way have been seeded to native grasses and wildflowers, and an additional 148,000 acres are suitable for prairie seeding, he said.
That does not include the acres of county roadsides that have been planted to prairie, Masteller said.
The Department of Transportation tends to seed prairie plants in road ditches because the native plants control blowing and drifting snow across the pavement. That keeps the pavement warmer.
Massive root systems of prairie plants promote the infiltration of storm water and keep it out of streams and lakes, he said. The plants also help control erosion, provide habitat for animals and birds, and cost less in maintenance, although it costs more to establish prairie plants than more traditional grasses, Masteller said.
Nobody tracks the acres of privately owned land restored to prairie, Henderson said, but the trend is accelerating. Annually, Iowans spend more than $5 million on native seed, not including Department of Transportation purchases, according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
Volunteers collect seeds from Iowa's surviving prairie remnants and give the seeds to the Tallgrass Prairie Center, Henderson said, and the center increases the seeds and releases them to growers like Allendan for commercialization.
"The Allens are the big players on the block," he said.
Dan Allen said he developed an interest in prairie ecosystems when he attended Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville.
After college and jobs with the Farmers Home Administration and Firestone, Allen and his wife, Sonia, started farming full time in 1976 when they bought their farm in Madison County.
Although he grew up on an acreage near St. Charles, Allen said, "I wanted to farm ever since I was 5 years old."
He began growing and selling some native prairie grass seed soon after he started farming and has watched the business slowly grow.
When the Conservation Reserve Program was created by the 1985 farm bill, the prairie seed business got a boost. The program has been part of every farm bill since 1985. It pays owners of erodible farmland to plant the land in grass, trees or other conservation uses.
The establishment of the largest reconstruction of tallgrass prairie in the nation, at the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge and Prairie Learning Center near Prairie City, gave another boost to the business in the 1990s.
Rapid growth in the prairie seed business has allowed all four of Dan and Sonia Allen's children to return to the Allen's Madison County farm, where they work for the seed business or in the farming operation that operates with it.
Allen siblings involved in the business include daughters Angela Barker, 36, operations manager in charge of sales and inventory; Kelly Hayes, 32, who manages the company's greenhouses and experimental fields; and sons Chad, 38, production manager and financial officer; and Scott, 34, who runs the sod business and row crop operations.
Dan Allen describes his role as "the glue that keeps everything together. I don't deserve the credit for what you see. ... They've put it together since they came back."
The Allens don't release their sales, but Barker said the company sells its prairie seeds to markets in the United States and Canada.
"I ship a lot to Kansas, Missouri and Pennsylvania," she said. "People want Iowa-origin seed. It's a good quality product."
There are at least five other prairie seed producers in Iowa of varying size and scale, said Dan Allen, who is president of the Iowa Native Seed Growers Association.
"Everybody knows us," Allen said. "It's just about doing good business, providing people with what they want. As we listened to our customers, we gave them what they wanted."
Farm Editor Jerry Perkins can be reached at (515) 284-8456 or jperkins@dmreg.com
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