A growth industry

Nation's Business, Jan, 1997 by Carla Goodman

For Ed Kleiner Jr., the seeds of native Western plants are the seeds of a successful small business. The 39-year-old owner of Comstock Seed Co., near Reno, Nev., sells tons of seeds in hundreds of varieties and special blends.

The U.S. Forest Service, a frequent customer, requests truckloads of seeds for fire restoration and erosion control of prime national parklands. Mining companies, which account for 65 percent of Kleiner's business, need seeds to rehabilitate lands scarred by gold and silver extraction.

Homeowners, too, call Kleiner for an ounce or two of rare flower seeds for their gardens-Western red columbine is a favorite request, even at $350 an ounce.

"We're specialists," says Kleiner, who is assisted by his wife, Linda-the firm's accountant-and two fulltime employees. While his competitors deal in volume and may sell generic seeds throughout the West, what they sell is not always locally adaptable, Kleiner notes.

"A plant seed that does well in Arizona won't grow in Washington. The plant's genetic programming can't handle the extreme fluctuations in weather," says Kleiner, who concentrates on providing the right seeds to the right market.

Kleiner scouts the Western states for seeds, primarily on public lands under permits from the Forest Service or the federal Bureau of Land Management. Part-time pickers are hired to help harvest.

Using old tennis racquets purchased at thrift stores, they beat away at bushes and shrubs and toss the seeds into a large catcher, made of canvas and tapered at one end so the seeds can be easily poured into bags. " It's a 1,000-year-old technique," says Kleiner. "We added electrical conduit around the outside edge of the canvas to make it more secure."

During a typical season, Kleiner and his pickers gather 30,000 pounds of seeds; about 70 percent of the work is done from October through December. The harvest is cleaned to remove plant stems and other debris, then bagged and tagged for identification.

As required by federal law, the seeds are sent to an independent laboratory, where they are tested for purity, germination, and weed content. Only part of a day's harvest-anywhere from less than 1 percent to 50 percent, Kleiner notes-turns out to be suitable for sale.

Kleiner enjoys working on large, complex projects. Comstock recently provided seeds to restore land along a 230-mile pipeline that carries natural gas from Malin, Ore., to Reno. The pipeline, constructed by the Tuscarora Gas Transmission Co., passes through five ecological zones.

"To maintain the area's genetic integrity, we were required to select seeds in species that occurred in these five areas and pick them within a 50-mile corridor of the pipeline," Kliener says.

For U.S. Borax, Comstock is providing seeds for test plots for a massive reclamation project at an open pit mine in the Mojave Desert in California.

Kleiner is optimistic that the plots will eventually lead to a contract to provide enough seeds to fill 5,000 acres, a project that would keep Comstock busy into the next century.

Big contracts like these are generating healthy sales for the small operator. In 1995, Comstock grossed $300,000 in sales, up from $200,000 in 1993. Most of Kleiner's business has a high margin, which can reach 1,000 percent, depending on supply and demand for certain choice seeds. "With seeds we hand-harvest and collect, there's a higher margin, because the seeds are rare," he says. Only a small portion of Kleiner's inventory-seeds free of weeds and other debris-can be harvested mechanically.

Kleiner says he's had a lifelong fascination with seeds. As a youngster, he helped his father, a botanist, complete work on his doctorate in grassland ecology by counting and recording seeds.

Years later, after earning a business degree from the University of Nevada, Kleiner worked briefly for a local firm, but he quit to harvest and wholesale seeds for coal mines in Wyoming. He cut short his study of law at Lewis & Clark College, in Portland, Ore., to return to the land permanently.

"Instead of clerking for a judge during school breaks, I'd pick seeds in the Mojave Desert," recalls Kleiner, whose company is now 12 years old. "But what I learned about public-land law, property law, and environmental legislation has been very helpfull to the business."

Kleiner also has learned that working closely with public-land agencies and abiding by the permit process, which can add 15 percent to his costs, are good for business, too.

"We've received so many referrals from public-land agencies by doing business the right way," says Kleiner, who frequently is asked to draw up specifications for projects that public agencies want to put up for bid. "This makes Comstock Seed part of the permit process, which is an exciting place to be."