At California’s Hedgerow Farms, specialists produce seeds to revegetate burned areas, reestablish wetlands, and transform drought-prone farmland.
X
At California’s Hedgerow Farms, specialists produce seeds to revegetate burned areas, reestablish wetlands, and transform drought-prone farmland.
July 7, 2025
A crew at Hedgerow Farms hand harvests Lasthenia californica in Winters, CA. (Photo credit: Joshua Scoggin/Hedgerow Farms).
A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.
Expand your understanding of food systems as a Civil Eats member. Enjoy unlimited access to our groundbreaking reporting, engage with experts, and connect with a community of changemakers.
Already a member?
Login
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.
A crew at Hedgerow Farms hoes a Lupinus bicolor field in Winters, California. (Photo credit: Joshua Scoggin/Hedgerow Farms).
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.
“Having native seed ready and getting native plants back in the ground after these big fire events is critical.”
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.
“If fields are just abandoned, they can turn into sources of dust or weeds,” which can harm nearby farms and communities, Valliere said. The region, home to many of California’s farmworkers, already suffers from the worst air quality in the country.
As the climate crisis accelerates the need for ecological restoration, native seeds are in high demand. In 2020, for example, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced a plan to conserve 30 percent of the state’s lands by 2030 to mitigate climate change and protect biodiversity by preserving nature. The plan includes land stewardship, which requires native seeds for measures such as rehabilitating wetlands to enhance wildlife habitat, and calls for accelerating restoration projects.
But only a handful of California farms—Hedgerow, its partner farm Las Flores, and a few others—grow native seed, and there isn’t enough inventory or production to support the state’s conservation goals, according to a 2023 report by the California Native Plant Society. The native seed shortage is “one of the main bottlenecks” delaying restoration work, Valliere said. “It’s a nationwide—even a global—problem,” he added.
During the past few years, catalyzed by the California Native Plant Society’s report, government agencies, land managers, and native seed producers formed working groups to improve coordination, discussing which native plant species might soon be in demand. “We’re trying to really listen and keep our finger on the pulse of where restoration is going,” said Julia Michaels, restoration ecologist and designer at Hedgerow Farms, adding that the company has scaled up its production in recent years.
Hedgerow Farms is the longest operating native seed farm in California, and together with Las Flores, it is the largest. The farm’s biggest contracts, multi-year agreements that include seed collection and growing, are worth millions of dollars. For some species, Hedgerow Farms is the only supplier that can provide the quantity of seed—often delivered by the truckload—needed to reestablish huge swaths of native vegetation. All told, Hedgerow has enabled the restoration of hundreds of thousands of acres of California landscapes.
Michaels said the farm’s team of roughly a dozen farmworkers has been critical to that legacy. Their expertise in this unique field, she said, makes them some of the most important and irreplaceable people working to restore California’s ecosystems.
Founded in the 1980s by John Anderson, a local veterinary professor turned native plant guru, Hedgerow Farms has always hired farmworkers laboring in the surrounding fields and orchards for seasonal jobs. Some stayed on, developing expertise in the collection, growing, or processing of native seed.
“They’re the ones who hold all the knowledge,” Michaels said of long-serving employees who helped keep the farm running after Anderson’s death in 2020.
Not many people have applied farming techniques to native grasses and wildflowers, so Hedgerow Farms developed its own best practices, maximizing seed yields for 400 species through years of trial and error.
Like others at Hedgerow Farms, Alejandro García, one of the farm’s collections experts, grew up in an agricultural environment in Mexico, working with his family in corn fields in Michoacán. In California, García found work in orchards and vineyards, pruning and tending vines in Napa Valley before learning wildland seed collecting from some of the industry’s early leaders.
For the past two decades, García has scoured the state for native seeds. With permission from private landowners such as farmers and ranchers, or a permit to collect seeds on public land, he treks through marshes, grasslands, forests, and deserts.
“I learned to look at the flowers and see the differences,” García said in Spanish. He added that he can identify hundreds of species and subspecies, as well as their varying behavior, localized traits, and genetic diversity. He knows which seeds must be collected ripe and which can be gathered green and left to ripen off the plant.
With lupine, a native wildflower especially good at fixing nitrogen and restoring soil health after wildfires, “you can tell it’s ready when you see the veins” in the flower petals, García said.
Around 2010, he began teaching the intricacies of native seed collecting to Manolo Sánchez, who had been working in peach orchards near Yuba City. Both were hired as collections experts by Hedgerow Farms in 2017.
“They’re some of the best botanists in the state,” said Michaels, who has a doctorate in ecology and serves as vice president of scientific and public affairs at NativeSeed Group, which owns Hedgerow Farms and Las Flores. “What they do is really, really impressive.”
Hedgerow has enabled the restoration of hundreds of thousands of acres of California landscapes. The farm’s team of roughly a dozen farmworkers has been critical to that legacy.
Back at the farm, field workers grow out the wild seeds, turning handfuls into hundreds of pounds. Not many people have applied farming techniques to native grasses and wildflowers, so Hedgerow Farms has developed its own best practices, maximizing seed yields for 400 species through years of trial and error, said farm manager Jeff Quiter. When the crops are ready, a combine harvester moves through the fields, chopping up row upon row of wildflowers and separating out the seeds.
The seeds then go to the cleaning shed. Gómez, the seed-cleaning specialist, began working at Hedgerow Farms more than three decades ago after leaving Mexico to join his mother transplanting tomatoes near Winters. He modified equipment designed for corn and barley to clean grass and wildflower seeds, dialing the machine’s air flow up for one species, down for another. The process improves the seeds’ chances of germination, Gómez said in Spanish, and ultimately, the success of restoration projects. “You have to take it very seriously,” he added.
Quiroz, the farm’s other seed-cleaning specialist, initially preferred the exotic flowers she grew for garden centers while working at a nearby plant nursery. In comparison, she thought native plants “were ugly,” she said. But at Hedgerow Farms, where she has worked since 2021, Quiroz was soon preaching their virtues during farm tours, which are open to the public once a year. Unlike the flowers she had grown for sale at Lowe’s and Home Depot, which were bred to reproduce aesthetic qualities, native plants “are more resilient,” she said, having adapted to survive in their natural environment.
When Quiroz passes a cluster of lupine or poppies, and her children point out “her” flowers, she takes pride in her work—and the little ways she has changed the world around her. “If one can play a small part in a larger effort,” she said, “I think that’s beautiful.”
July 30, 2025
From Oklahoma to D.C., a food activist works to ensure that communities can protect their food systems and their future.
Leave a Comment