Article: The History of Tree Seed in Ontario

By: Peter Kuitenbrouwer

Trees make seed. Oak trees produce acorns; maples grow keys; each cone that hangs from an evergreen tree could contain several seeds. Most seeds have the potential to grow into a tree.

Trees produce seed on cycles. A White Spruce tree, for example, typically produces cones every two to three years.

Prior to arrival of Europeans in the New World, trees did a fine job regenerating themselves: the trees produced seed, which fell, caught the wind or got eaten by a bird, or sometimes stashed or buried by a mammal, and thus the seed spread to grow the next generation of trees. But settlers changed the pattern. The pioneers cleared and burned the forests in many parts of Southern Ontario for farms. Problems arose when some soil, too thin and unproductive for agriculture, were abandoned and eroded. Blow-sand deserts spread across the province and sawmills began to run out of wood. Southern Ontario had a tree shortage and large tracts of marginal lands. Something had to be done.

Visionaries had an idea: plant trees. Ontario’s first tree planters, in Norfolk County in the southwest, imported pine seedlings from nurseries in Germany. But some of those seedlings did not thrive. The solution was obvious: collect seeds from existing, local trees in Ontario, and grow our own seedlings.

About a century ago in 1923, the province opened the Ontario Tree Seed Plant in Angus, 100 kilometres north of Toronto, to cure, extract, clean, test, and store billions of tree seeds. Cats, their vet bills paid by the province, patrolled the plant to control rodents. Ontario’s department of Lands & Forests hired and trained an army of tree seed collectors, to gather cones, acorns, keys and nuts and send them to the plant in burlap bags or sometimes transported in bulk by the truck load. Ontario paid the collectors on a volume basis. (by the hectolitre (100L)).

Extracting seed from a pine, spruce, fir or larch cone is a bit of a process. After curing the cones for several weeks in open air sheds, the workers put the cones first in a heated kiln followed by a rotating drum. The heat of the kiln prompts the cones to open and the action of the spinning drum encourages the seed to fall out. Other machines called the Scalper, Dewinger and Aspirator then separated the seeds from wings, needles and other debris.

The seed was stored in huge -20 Celcius freezing units and each seedlot and container identified. The staff recorded the collection details for each seed lot – identifying locally-adapted tree seed that was made available to the government nurseries to grow the next generation of forests. Brian Swaile served 20 years as Superintendent of the tree seed plant from 1979 to 1999. He recalled that each district office of the Ministry of Natural Resources had a senior technician in charge of seed. “He knew the people, he knew who did the best collections, and he knew who not to get collecting,” Swaile said.

In the north, loggers’ spouses would join them in the forest and bring a trailer. “The wives ended up picking cones while the husbands were on the harvest,” Swaile said.

Some seed years are better than others. The philosophy, Swaile said, was, “if it’s a bumper crop we should be getting everything we can, because ideally and biologically everything was set to produce good seed.” Sometimes the plant would get literally buried in seed.

“In 1974 when the White Spruce in Northern Ontario hit, the northern region turned it on,” Swaile recalled. “Normally it ran to about 1,000 hectolitres one hectolitre is 100 litres. It was so heavy everywhere, people found out what they were paying, and in the next two weeks we ended up with 7,000 hectolitres. Property owners went to bed in the village of Cochrane, they woke up in the morning and the top third of their spruce trees were gone. People came in the night and cut them off and took them home.”

One challenge was transporting cones across Ontario to the seed plant. Swaile approached Home Hardware, whose trucks supplied hardware stores across the province, often returning empty. In seed season, Swaile arranged for Home Hardware trucks to return from Sioux Lookout, for example, laden with pallets of pine and spruce cones for the seed plant.

“They got their gas money coming back,” he recalled. “So that worked out well.”

Collectors, especially in Southern Ontario, often take cones from caches made by squirrels, who stockpile cones to eat in winter. Some seasoned collectors would build a brush pile as a spot for squirrels to hide cones, or leave an old boat in the forest; industrious squirrels would climb a pine tree, cut its cones, and—one cone at a time—fill the spaces between the seats in the bow with cones. A collector would then take the cones and leave a percentage behind or in their place leave sunflower seeds or peanuts, so their furry workforce would not go hungry.

It was vital, Swaile said, to agree on a seed price province-wide. One year, the seed plant paid $25 per hectolitre for Black Walnut; a seed technician in Eastern Ontario paid $50 per hectolitre. “That year there was lots of Black Walnut coming from Eastern Ontario,” Swaile recalled.

At the height of provincial investment in the tree seed business, Ontario in the 1970s began tree improvement programs. Ministry staff scoured the province to find “plus trees,” i.e., superlative-quality trees that would produce genetically superior offspring versus general collections. Other staff then shot branches off the tops of “plus” trees to get a small branch called a scion, graft it to rootstock and plant it in what’s called a clonal tree seed orchard. “It was a huge program, heavily funded,” says Kerry McLaven, CEO of the Forest Gene Conservation Association (FGCA).

“And there were multiple installations of multiple species across Ontario. And that was ahead of the B.C. program.”

In the early 1990s, tree seed collection in Ontario, was supporting the production of seedlings peaking at a whopping 120-million trees per year. Later that same decade, the Ontario government began to withdraw financial and infrastructural support from tree seed, tree improvement and the tree growing business. A significant and impactful decision was the closure of the Ontario tree seed plant in 2018. From this point on, organizations requiring seed services looked to the private sector, mostly nurseries, to take over these functions.

When the province left the tree seed business, the genetic associations and the forest industry picked up and stewarded what tree seed orchards they could. The FGCA today manages or supports management of eight White Pine seed orchards. These trees produce excellent seed, McLaven said.

“I would argue you will never find a collection of this high-quality White Pine in Ontario, anywhere,” McLaven said.

Swaile guessed that across Ontario they had 300 to 400 tree seed collectors in the heyday; Mark McDermid, Seed and Stock Specialist at Forests Canada, estimates that he has 30 to 40 collectors across Southern Ontario today, often the same people, or children of people with whom Swaile worked with years ago.

“The scale of tree seed collection and processing has diminished substantially since the ‘hey days’ when the provincial government was involved,” McDermid says, “but the overall processes of how we get seed have not changed that much.”

After Swaile left the seed plant, he worked as a consultant on seed related functions - one such undertaking was helping to develop a seed collector course. It was recognized that training on tree identification, forecasting, collection, handling and other best management practices would be beneficial to both existing and new collectors.

Today, it’s the FGCA that trains tree seed collectors; this year the association trained its 1,000th collector.

“Not everyone collects,” McLaven said. “I would say the percentage of collectors is pretty low. But they are trained on the foundation of things.” Canada seeks to ramp up tree planting, with a federal target to plant 2 billion trees by 2030. It’s imperative to increase the number of tree seed collectors nationwide, McDermid said. He suggests a mentorship program where experienced seed collectors can help train the next generation would go a long way in supporting the Certified Seed Collector course and get more folks collecting good quality seed.

McLaven is confident that, working together, gatherers can collect the cones and keys and acorns we need to reach tree planting goals.

“We don’t know the implications of our decisions in forestry for many many years,” McLaven said. “We have to focus on the best bets. Best bets no regrets. So the best bet we know right now is collecting from healthy trees and from healthy populations. That is giving us the most options for the future.”

This article was originally published in the Winter 2024 issue of Our Forest Woodlander, a Forests Canada and Ontario Woodlot Association collaboration.