Happy Trails, Paul Albright

S&S Seeds bids farewell to an industry pioneer

© 2010 Wendy Dager

After nearly five decades studying, improving and selling seeds, plants and related products, Paul Albright announces his retirement from S&S Seeds. The LEAF-let spoke with him about his trailblazing efforts.

LEAF-let: In 1961, you received a BA degree in psychology from U.C. Berkeley, with a minor in agricultural economics, which means you’ve spent about fifty years in the business. Obviously, a lot has changed, but what are some of the things you learned back then that remain constant even today?

Paul Albright: Studies that were done at the time were a lot more time-consuming than at present. Consequently, all this drudgery put an obvious emphasis on getting the design and the logic behind it clean and well-researched before the experiment started and the real tedium began. We couldn’t just use a computer or the Internet to get our information. I took courses in experimental design and statistics back in the days when computers were huge, expensive monsters that not many undergraduates and few graduate students got to use, yet there was a clear understanding that no matter the accuracy of the program and equipment, if you put in inaccurate data, the resulting output was inaccurate—thus the aphorism “garbage in-garbage out.” All the data was tabulated by hand, entered on physical spread sheets and analyzed on mechanical calculators. Contrast that with today’s computers with data-loggers and statistical programs that speed the garbage in and print the garbage out with beautiful, multicolored graphs and pie charts. Case in point: Caltrans recently gave a major California college a grant to study native grasses as erosion-controlling plants. They measured plant growth over time and collected sediment from the runoff. The graphs looked great, but they’d planted the grasses in topsoil. Caltrans almost never deals with topsoil on highway construction site erosion control!

LL: After spending four years in the United States Navy, where you achieved the rank of lieutenant, you worked for Berger and Plate, a division of Pacific Molasses. In 1970, you hand-harvested and introduced Arroyo lupine (Lupinus succulentus) and Tidy Tips (Layia platyglossa) for Bodger Seed Company to produce for sale under contract. How did these new techniques influence future harvesting and distribution of seed?

Paul Albright enjoying retirement with wife Robin.

PA: When working at Berger and Plate, I was initially selling turf grasses, but as a sideline, I worked in a fairly new field-hydroseeding and erosion control, which mostly used barley and ryegrass. As a salesman, I was traveling around California and I would stop in and look at these projects. Barley and rye are good for erosion control, but the problem was, a couple of years later, some of the surrounding plants would move back in. That’s when I began to wonder, “Why not use native wildflowers initially if that’s what’s going in anyway.” It was not unusual for retail packet or flower seed companies to get their stock seed from nature, but it was unheard of for a seed company to sell wildflower seeds for direct seeding into the landscape or hydroseeded in an erosion control treatment. It was one of my crazy ideas that finally paid off. I spent a good deal of time trying to sell this idea to Caltrans with only limited success. It didn’t catch on until Lady Bird Johnson got the Department of Transportation to make planting wildflowers a requirement for states that took federal funds for highway construction. Then, since good erosion control requires fast-establishing seed, before something else takes over, I brought in a hydroseeding binder—which S&S Seeds still sells today.

LL: Thirty-plus years ago, xeriscapes were virtually unheard of, yet you understood the need for drought-tolerant landscapes. As a pioneer in this field, what did you do to get your peers to realize this was the wave of the future?

PA: The need was perfectly obvious to me, because when I started my own company, there was a drought. I didn’t have the money to do the promotion, so I had to do it the “viral” way—by being an active member of the California Landscape Contractors Association (CLCA) and a founding member of the International Erosion Control Association (IECA), simply to share erosion control data. It was a great opportunity because it brought the U.S. Forest Service and the California Department of Transportation together with these organizations to support erosion control.

LL: When you began Albright Seed Company in 1976, what were your goals? What one project stands out?

PA: My goal was to bring erosion control to the industry, because there were very few seed companies back then that realized the importance of that area. I wanted to pay attention to the needs of the customers, so my company motto was “Products and Solutions That Work.” There are a lot of projects that stand out, but the one that stands out the most was the sale of the erosion control seed to the City of Oakland after their big fire in 1991. That was one of the first major uses of California grass in a mix that included my Lupinus succulentus. It also stands out as an example of just how important good employees are to any small business. The City of Oakland called at about 5:30 p.m. on a Friday to ask if we were given the job, which was approximately 130,000 lbs. of mix, could we deliver it to meet the schedule of the helicopters that would fly it on the burn areas starting the following Monday morning. That would have been impossible, but for my manager at the Martinez branch, John Walsh, who met the challenge. John is now in charge of seed-cleaning at the S&S Seeds’ production facility in Los Alamos.

LL: In 2000, you began working in Program Development, seed mix design and erosion control projects for S&S Seeds. What happened in the last decade or so that was particularly exciting and what do you see for the decade to come?

PA: In the ’80s I introduced the Living Channel Liner, but now it’s gotten a lot more interest because of the concern with water quality and people becoming more comfortable with the idea of native plant use. As we’ve pointed out in the LEAF-let over the years, the usability and function that native plants play in landscaping, turfgrass and vegetated channels is too important to stormwater runoff and heat mitigation to abandon. Ultimately, though, the real importance is not the sale itself, but having the right product to make that sale.

Seed Mixes: Wildflowers | Turfgrasses | Reclamation / Erosion

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