Nestled in the front-range foothills on the outskirts of Fort Collins, the Colorado State Forest Service seedling nursery is made up of some outdoor growing areas, several greenhouses and a small office. Inside the greenhouses, sunlight filters through the translucent roof and rusty fans blow air over thousands of trees only a few inches tall. The tiny ponderosa pines, douglas firs, junipers and willows are organized in neat rows alongside various shrub and wildflower seedlings.
The state-run facility grows half a million native plants a year for reforestation and conservation projects, but it has not been able to meet demand because of aging infrastructure and deferred maintenance. New efforts by state lawmakers are now underway to shore up its capacity in the face of increasingly severe natural disasters.
“It's just been one maintenance project after another: addressing heaters, ventilation, greenhouse lights, digging out from all the mess,” nursery manager Scott Godwin said. “Over this winter, we experienced some sub-freezing temperatures for several days. The heaters couldn't keep up. This building froze, burst some plumbing and flooded out our office.”
The greenhouse heating system has not been updated since the 1970’s and Godwin can no longer get parts for it. Without artificial heat, seedlings can be killed in cold snaps or over the winter.
The irrigation infrastructure is also outdated. It uses more water than it needs , doesn’t water plants evenly and creates standing water that’s a breeding ground for flies and mosquitos.
“With the state of our facility, we're consistently having to manage small crises, again and again and again, which is expensive,” Godwin said. “It threatens the finished quality of the crop, and, just in general, distracts us from the larger projects that we're trying to focus on.”
Because it’s been neglected for so long, the nursery is limited to smaller projects and doesn’t have the capacity to help reforest large areas of the state where wildfires have swept through. Instead, it focuses on providing seedlings for small-scale public projects and selling plants to private landowners interested in conservation.
The facility also doesn’t typically contribute to federal reforestation efforts. Not only does it not have the capacity, but there is no established pipeline for collaboration between state and federal-level US Forest Service nurseries.
The lack of maintenance over the years is largely because of a lack of funding, but Godwin said he is hopeful that new investments from the state legislature can help usher the nursery into a new era. Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill into law earlier this year that earmarks more than $5 million dollars for upgrades.
“This tree nursery becomes even more imperative during those big fire years when we are working towards reforestation of those burned areas, but also stabilizing watersheds,” bill sponsor Rep. Tammy Story said. “Being able to renovate and remodel this tree nursery will provide that they can churn out maybe two to three times as many tree seedlings.”
Sometimes forests regrow naturally after a wildfire, but when a fire produces intense heat, the seeds that would normally regrow don't survive. According to the U .S . Forest Service, as severe, large-scale wildfires become more common due to climate change, the demand for reforestation efforts is increasing and creating a backlog of reforestation needs. Wildfire accounts for about 80% of those needs, but reforestation is also needed after significant flooding, insect infestations and disease, all of which are exacerbated by the changing climate.
Story said shoring up the nursery now, while Colorado is experiencing a temporary lull in large wildfires, is important preparation for future natural disasters like wildfires and floods. Expanding its capacity will allow it to sell seedlings to large-scale buyers, like other states, when Colorado doesn’t need them.
“For the State Forest Service to be able to sell those seedlings to other states that are in need, that helps the tree nursery then be more sustainable,” Story said.
There is plenty of demand for native plants across the Mountain West, but there aren’t many growers. There used to be ten large-scale U .S . Forest Service nurseries across the West. Now, there are only six, the closest of which are hundreds of miles away in Idaho and Nebraska, and they provide seedlings primarily for federal land.
On top of that, those federal facilities are experiencing the same neglect as the state nursery in Colorado.
“All our metal roofs, they're beyond their age of usefulness. Some of the windows in the buildings are still single pane. It just adds up,” Aram Eramian, manager of the U .S . Forest Service nursery near Coeur D’Alene, ID, said. “I have probably two to $3 million in just deferred maintenance.”
Eramian also said that state natural resource agencies should ideally be able to look to their own nurseries because their plants are specifically adapted to the local conditions. In order to get to that point, though, the Colorado state seedling nursery first has to undergo major renovations to expand its capacity. The nursery’s staff hopes the $5 million dollar investment from lawmakers will help make that happen.
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