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Native ingenuity

Teresa Carson

Lee and Maggie Arbuckle stand with their invention, the Arbuckle Native Seedster, near Townsend, Mont. Photo by Randy Wimberg

At many golf courses in the United States, superintendents seeking to conserve water and curtail maintenance costs have created naturalized areas by planting native grass and wildflower seed. Converting turfgrass or weedy or out-of-bounds areas to native grassland can be an expensive project because of the high cost of native grass seed, which often runs about $20 a pound and can be as high as $60 to $100 per pound.

Native grass seed can be costly because, until now, much of it — in fact, more than 100 of the economically important species — has been difficult to harvest because native grasses quickly clog traditional harvesters.

This was the situation Lee and Maggie Arbuckle faced in 2001. They had produced a crop of native grass seed on their Montana ranch, but they had no efficient means of harvesting it. From their predicament, the Arbuckles developed the concept for the Arbuckle Native Seedster.

The semi-retired couple did not intend to spend the next five years developing a new kind of harvester, but years spent working in agricultural and rural development with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Honduras had turned them both into tenacious problem-solvers.

With assistance from USDA Small Business Innovation Research grants and the SBIR support program in Montana, the Arbuckles were able to put together a team that included a grass scientist, Brian Sindelar, Ph.D.; a design engineer, Wade Wolf; and Dale Detrick of the Montana Manufacturing Extension Center at Montana State University in Billings, who contributed his design expertise to make the final product easier to manufacture and repair. Dave Stoltenberg of the Montana Business Incubator has steadily championed the project.

The Seedster, which mounts onto a tractor loader, harvests seed from plants that are 1 foot to 6 feet or taller. Unlike traditional combines that cut down the entire plant and then separate the seed from the straw and chaff, the Seedster uses a spinning brush and combing drum to pluck only the ripe seed, leaving the unripe seed to mature and be harvested later in the season. After the final harvest of the season, the plants remain in the field, where they can be used for forage and ground cover.

The first Seedsters will be available for sale this month, and the Arbuckles hope that native grass producers will be using the machine for harvest in April and May.

With an additional grant from the Montana Board of Research and Commercialization, Sindelar and Lee Arbuckle are currently using physical characteristics that affect harvesting to classify native grasses of the states west of the Missouri. In a funded research study, Arbuckle found that nearly 80 percent of the native grasses in the West have panicle inflorescences that tend to make seed harvest difficult. Consequently, many of these species have been unavailable in the market, and the more easily harvested species with spike inflorescences have dominated restoration and reclamation efforts throughout the country. The Native Seedster team intends to alter this imbalance. As of January 2007, they had classified 206 species.

Thanks to the ingenuity and perseverance of the Arbuckle team, the seed from many species of native grass is now easier to harvest and soon may become more readily available and less expensive.

Teresa Carson is GCM’s science editor.

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