By Laynie Saidnawey and Maria Mullins February 2020
By the time seed arrives at the IAE Southwest Office Seed Studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to be processed and cleaned, some collections have traveled close to 300 miles from their source populations. However, this move is temporary; the seed will eventually make its way back to the region where it is genetically adapted to survive. After all, what better role could it play than in the ecosystem where it evolved with the soil, climate, pollinators, and herbivores of the area?
The Seed Studio is a central hub for wild collections of native grass, shrub and wildflower seed collected across New Mexico and Arizona for the Southwest Seed Partnership. During the 2019 field season, IAE SW partnered with the Bureau of Land Management, US Forest Service, National Park Service and the NM Department of Transportation to coordinate 6 seed crews collecting across 7 ecoregions in NM and AZ. After weeks and weeks of scouting for healthy populations and collecting mature seed in the hot sun, all of the crew’s work culminates here at the Seed Studio, where their collections wait patiently in a temperature-controlled environment to be processed and cleaned.
How do we clean seed? Collected seed often arrives in a bag with other plant parts (stem segments, bracts, fluff, etc.) that need to be separated from the seed. Seed cleaning involves two steps: a coarse clean, which physically breaks or pulls off other plant parts from the seed, and then a fine clean, which separates the seed from this debris, unfertilized seed, and foreign seed. We clean seed using three pieces of mechanized equipment, starting with the Westrup Brush Machine (coarse clean). This machine uses rotating brushes against different size mantels (round metal sieves with various size holes in them), to break apart seeds from pods, husks, or other plant material. The fine clean can happen in two ways: (1) using a continuous air separator, a machine that utilizes airflow and gravity to separate the usually heavier seed from lighter dried plant materials, or (2) a Clipper Office Tester, which uses a set of two screens and airflow to separate material based on size and weight. Finally, we have a variety of hand tools such as sieves and screens that result in beautiful clean seed with unique shapes, sizes and colors.
