[APWG] Buy a LICENSE or buy a pig in the poke?

[Craig Dremann - Redwood City Seed Company]

Dear Wayne and All,

Thanks for your email.

Any Performance Standard for weed management, like trying to get 100%
native cover in 90 days or less, must always be pretested in the Tiny Test
plots first, before you attempt the bigger project on a new site.

No matter how robust a weed management or ecological restoration
technology thinks it is, it cannot be relied on for the bigger project
until it has been proven out on a small scale on a new site, with at least
six months of Tiny Test plots first.

There are tens of thousands of reseeding-after-construction jobs or
construction along highways, being done around the country every year for
example, and cuts made into steep slopes with erosion potential, so any
reseeding must work the first time, or else, like you can see at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/slide.html

I got a call last week from a guy in northern California with property in
a 40 inches of rainfall area, and he is in the midst of constructing a 400
foot long, 30 foot wide and 15 foot tall earthen dam, and needed advice on
what to plant on the dam face, to keep it from eroding away and collapsing
in the winter.

That is an extreme case, but you can see that person really needs
Ecological Restoration technologies with Performance Standards, because to
not have them, could put the people down stream in danger of losing their
homes and lives if that dam collapses and a 15 foot wall of water hits
them.

And the need to seed perennial local native perennial grasses and
perennial forbs in the place of the flammable weeds here in California,
like what I show at http://www.ecoseeds.com/flames.html might be an
excellent investment, especially in Southern California at the wildlands
and multi-million dollar homes interface?   Photo on that web page shows
the contrast between the flammable exotic wild oats and non-flammable
native perennials.

In order to achieve 100% native cover within 90 days or less in our 100%
solid fire-prone Californian weed patch that we have, in addition to the
numerous Tiny Test plots you have to do, you also need to invent a whole
lot of new technologies, that are not available as public domain items
yet.

You must invent new methods of analyzing the ecosystems and methods of
figuring out what was the percentage of each native species originally in
the area, plus figure out which natives will counterbalance the weeds,
using the native plants own natural allelopathic effects.

And to achieve solid and repeatable Performance Standards, you must invent
new ways of doing vegetation trend analysis and more robust methods of
conducting vegetation transects.

You have to throw out all the old passive ecological and rangeland methods
of doing vegetation transects, and start from scratch, to invent one that
will hit-the-ground-running and be robust enough for active weed
management and ecological restoration.

If we invent something that works, weed management and restoration
professionals should not be afraid of letting their clients know that it
took some extra effort to become successful, and that all the research to
achieve consistent Performance Standards, costs extra money.

That is why I wrote the article "Does the Lack of Patent filings Indicate
that Ecological Restorationists Fail to See Themselves as Inventors or
Innovators?" ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION. (2001) 19:(2) 70-71.

Plus why should all the government agencies and highway departments, keep
buying a pig in the poke all the time, or paying for experiments that
never seem to go anywhere, like spending $450,000 on six years and five
attempts on only two acres at http://www.ecoseeds.com/road.test.html?

Instead, should all the government agencies and highway departments  start
asking for, and licensing, Ecological Restoration and Weed Management
technologies that have solid Performance Standards supporting them?

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann (650) 325-7333