Iowa Ecotype Project

Kirk Henderson
Native Roadside Vegetation Center
University of Northern Iowa
(319) 273-2813
Kirk.Henderson@uni.edu

In memory of John Reid, UDSA, NRCS Plant Materials Specialist, Elsberry Missouri. He was our trusted guide through the early and most critical stages of this project. Everyone he called seeking help with the new project they said, "take good notes John, eventually we'll be coming to you." Thanks, John.

The Iowa Department of Transportation administers something called the Living Roadway Trust Fund (LRTF). It's not a lot of money, about $600,000 a year. But it has been hugely important to the success of Iowa's Integrated Roadside Vegetation Management (IRVM) program. It pays for vegetation inventories, specialized seeding equipment and native grass and wildflower seed. It also pays for education and research. Steve Holland does a great job administering the fund providing money for State, city, and county roadside projects. If your State does not have an LRTF, you should get one.

An ideal seed mix for Iowa Roadsides growing in a remnant prairie.

The LRTF has funded an exciting initiative called the Iowa Ecotype Project (IEP). The IEP is the brainchild of Dr. Daryl Smith, professor of biology and longtime prairie educator and roadside advocate at the University of Northern Iowa. As has often been the case in his life, Dr. Smith came up with a good idea at a very good time.

The design of the Iowa Ecotype Project: The project began in 1990 when Dr. Smith submitted a grant application to the DOT's Living Roadway Trust Fund. He asked for $25,000 for the first year of a project that would eventually result in Iowa seed of 25-30 species being available from commercial growers in large quantities at affordable prices. He chose to work with commercial growers rather than create one more State-run project that unfairly competes with private enterprise. The 25 or 30 native species would be ones commonly used in roadside and other conservation plantings. These include five or six perennial grasses, some early to mid-successional forbs and a few of the more charismatic conservation species.

Each year seed of three species would be collected from native prairie remnants. Seed from several plants within a population would be taken with no consideration given to appearance or growth habit. The goal was to commit as little selection as possible. Lacking funds to pay someone to visit prairie remnants all over the State, the project relied heavily on volunteers for collections.

A key question in the project design involved determining the number of ecotypes or varieties to develop for each species (how many zones to divide the State into). After considering geological regions of the State and differences in growing conditions from east to west, Dr. Smith divided the State into three zones of equal size based mostly on difference in length of growing season ranging north to south. As it turns out demand for the final product is perhaps the overriding factor in choosing zone size. You cannot expect a commercial grower to invest land, equipment, storage, and cleaning facilities in a product with a small market.

The best of partnerships: IDOT, UNI, Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Elsberry, Iowa Crop Improvement Association, Iowa State University, NRCS Des Moines, commercial growers, and volunteer network. One of the key roles was played by the NRCS. Al Ehley was on loan from NRCS to the Roadside Office at UNI from 1988-1992 overseeing county implementation of Iowa's IRVM program. Thanks to Al, we connected with the Plant Materials Centers who have decades of experience developing plants for conservation uses. Ehrling Jacobson, at the Elsberry NRCS Plant Materials Center, introduced us to different categories of certified seed including a recent designation called "Source-identified", seed developed for conservation uses. This seed was certified as to its origin and involved no selection for parent material or specific traits. The end product was to be as much like the original wild seed as possible. This seemed just right for the IEP. The Elsberry facility was able to provide the expertise to clean, plant, and increase our seed and then make it available to growers.

Originally releases were given to growers free of charge. Starting this year, each release costs $500.00. They are also working with the university's intellectual property people to trademark the project seed. Growers will then return a percentage of their sales to the project. Foundation plots have also been planted at the University for land dedicated to the Native Roadside Vegetation Center. In a nutshell the project consists of three steps:

1. collect the seed from Iowa remnants,
2. send it to Elsberry for increase, and
3. release it to Iowa growers for production

Upcoming releases are announced in a statewide publication that potential growers are likely to see. Potential growers then contact our office to receive an application for production rights. The application tries to assess potential growers' experience, equipment, land, facilities and intentions. We look for people who have a strong conservation ethic that will see more than a monetary value in the seed. We have had mixed results.

Another key player in the project has been the Iowa Crop Improvement Association at Iowa State University. Their office provides collection site verification, production plot inspections, certification, and yellow tags. They make sure growers manage weeds properly and maintain quarter-mile isolation between plots of same species. Chemical herbicides are used. Which ones and methods used are trade secrets of the growers.

For most species, it took longer to produce enough seed for a release than we expected. Hindsight is 20/20. We now know it would have been faster to start most species in a greenhouse and use transplants to establish the increase plots instead of planting seed directly in the ground. The greenhouse and transplant method is labor-intensive, but guarantees a successful stand with quicker seed production. Even small plots can produce a lot of seed.

Growers want guarantees: one logical catch has been that growers want some guarantee that someone will buy the seed before they invest. In Iowa, the Iowa DOT is our best hope at this time. Their LRTF budgets $5.5 million annually. The DOT wants growers to provide seed for about 1200 acres of annual plantings before they can specify it. So you have a chicken and egg standoff until the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) and now the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) enhancement funds became available to all State DOTs. ISTEA funds are available for bicycle trails, historic preservation, and natural resource/ beautification purposes. Projects must have statewide significance and the red tape is so immense they only select large projects. We applied on behalf of 75 counties that were eligible by virtue of having an IRVM plan with the Iowa DOT. This year's $460,000 seed purchase will provide each county with enough seed to plant 10-20 acres of roadsides. Two mixes are available. The forb-rich mix has 50 species. When the request for bids go out, "Yellow Tag" seed from the Iowa Ecotype Project is favored. This is a source of "guaranteed sales."