Native seeds are a hot commodity in the era of climate change. Take Northern Wildflowers, a 40-acre seed farm north of Sudbury, Ontario. It is on a rapid growth trajectory, at least doubling its native seed production volume year over year in the past three years. Last year alone, it supplied native forbs, trees and shrubs to more than 60 large-scale restoration projects across Eastern and Central Canada, according to Jenny Fortier, its CEO and founder.
Fortier says the demand for native seed is coming from several directions at once, including municipal naturalization and mine and infrastructure reclamation. “I would say the sector is evolving very quickly,” says Fortier, who is also chair of the board for the Native Seed Producers of Canada, an association representing Canadian farmers producing native forbs and grasses.
As demand grows, so does the awareness that there aren’t enough native seeds to meet it. A 2023 Natural Resources Canada assessment found that 78% of restoration and reclamation practitioners identified a lack of native seeds as a limiting factor in their landscape renewal projects, particularly when it came to trees, shrubs and forbs.
“A lot of these types of projects aren’t new,” Fortier says. “What has changed over the last few years is increased public awareness and interest in sourcing seed from Canadian growers, coming from both the public and restoration practitioners.”
The climate change accelerant
The ideal in landscape restoration is to use local plants and seeds that have developed symbiotic relationships with the local soil, climate, and the wildlife that depend upon them for forage. As climate change accelerates, these plants are playing a critical role. Because of their local adaptation, they are better able to withstand climate shocks such as drought, intense rainfall and wildfire. Many native species have deep root systems that tap into the underlying layers of the soil, improving soil stability, reducing erosion and acting as buffers against flooding.
In Eastern Canada, Akène Native Seeds was founded in 2020 and has seen a steady increase in demand for native seeds to plant along waterways, agricultural watercourses, and roadsides that act as vegetated buffers against soil erosion and flooding. “The mere appearance of a producer dedicated to native seed was enough to surface demand that had been sitting there unserved,” says founder Philippe Denis. “Our seed sales have grown roughly 4.5 times between 2023 and today.”
The growing demand for native seed has also prompted conservation organizations to invest in seed orchards. In 2021, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) of Canada’s strategic plan identified habitat restoration as a priority for the non-governmental organization and set a goal of restoring one million hectares of lost complex ecosystems that provide essential wildlife habitat and sequester carbon in nature.
“We do not have enough seed for growing all the native plants that we need to do all the restoration we have committed to in this decade,” says Kate Landry, senior manager of community action at WWF. There isn’t reliable national market data to know how much seed is needed, but according to Landry, Canada needs billions more native seeds than are available.
A native seed strategy takes root
To help increase supply for their restoration projects, in 2025 WWF-Canada awarded grants to 13 First Nations, organizations and businesses in five provinces to support the establishment and expansion of seed orchards.
As producers scale output, the need for a national native seed strategy grows. Working with Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Canadian Wildlife Federation will soon release a national native seed strategy that will not only describe the state of the native seed sector in Canada, but will focus on how to grow the industry sustainably through better coordination between growers and buyers, and through the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge. That knowledge is already shaping post-wildfire restoration in British Columbia, where WWF-Canada has worked with the Secwépemcúl’ecw Restoration and Stewardship Society (SRSS).
Longer, hotter and drier periods caused by climate change have increased wildfire risk across Western Canada. In 2017, almost 193 hectares of traditional Secwépemcúl’ecw territory were scorched. Much of the land devastated by the wildfire was monoculture forest. The SRSS has replanted the area using traditional knowledge that suggests a mixed canopy of trees is more likely to retain moisture, potentially lowering wildfire risk and intensity. Incorporating this knowledge into a national native seed strategy will help growers know what to plant and will play a role in mitigating financial risk when demand is uncertain.
According to Landry, part of the problem with scaling native seed production in Canada is that producers are often investing and planting on speculation, without funding in place for restoration work. “There is no assured demand,” she says. Growers don’t always know if they will be able to sell their seeds, and so, according to Landry, it’s a lot of upfront investment that may or may not pan out.
To overcome this, Native Seed Producers of Canada has recommended that, if public funds are used to support the sector, one valuable investment would be a national study of the native seed market that looks at how much seed is imported into Canada each year, which species are being imported, and to which regions. This kind of market intelligence will become increasingly important.
“The question will be less about simply producing more seed and more about scaling intelligently to meet real market demand – understanding which species, regions and volumes are genuinely undersupplied and directing new production accordingly,” Northern Wildflowers founder Fortier says.
Jennifer Cole is a Vancouver journalist writing about the people and ideas restoring ecosystems and building a more sustainable future.
The Weekly Roundup
Get all our stories in one place, every Wednesday at noon EST.