LOS ANGELES — Tucked away at Paramount Ranch is a small seed farm that’s doing a very big job — growing native species that will restore the burn area still left behind by the Woolsey Fire.
Deanna Armbruster, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Fund which runs the farm said the work is tied to fire prevention and resiliency.
“If you don’t have native plants, the invasive plants that are in the mountains create more fuel, and the fires can escalate much faster, much more intense, and become much more uncontrollable,” she explained. “By having native plants… refurbishing the land that has already been damaged and being put in places where fire may become a problem, it reduces that fuel energy.”
Unfortunately, she said, the future of the program is uncertain.
SAMO Fund is the official partner of the National Park Service in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. It’s a nonprofit that gets over half of its annual budget from federal government contracts.
The seed farm, Armbruster said, was awarded one contract worth $3 million over three years under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed by then President Joe Biden.
“Those funds, unlike other funds that were frozen and then unfrozen, we understand have been impounded,” she said. “We’re not able to access them at all.”
Even though, she said, some of that money has already been spent.
As part of its ongoing effort to downsize government agencies, The Trump administration recently fired about 1,000 newly hired National Park Service employees — including more than a half a dozen in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
Now with the loss of federal funding, Armbruster estimates she too will have to layoff close to 20 members of her staff, including nine who work at the seed farm.
That’s a lot of jobs lost in this one park and she says the losses won’t end there.
“We have a potential loss of volunteers if we don’t have a staff to welcome volunteers to help support the work that happens,” Armbruster said.
It’s a major loss considering that the nonprofit attracts roughly 3,000 volunteers a year whose work equates to about $350,000 worth of labor hours a year.
Tess Blankenship is one of them.
The Thousand Oaks resident says the park is literally her backyard, and she recently joined the board at SAMO Fund to take an even more active role in its preservation.
“I really enjoy giving back to a place that is somewhere so near and dear and with people who have that same sentiment,” she said. “We’ve continued to nurture that nature connection, you know, acknowledging the spaces and the people who’ve been here before us and continuing to say that we will [take care of] them.”
“It is really, really frustrating and disheartening and sad,” she added, referring to the cuts, the layoffs and general certainly.
Without staff and volunteers, seed program manager Takuma Chipman worries tens of thousands of native plants at the farm could die and seed collection could be sidelined, which would be detrimental.
“If we aren’t actively putting our hands in and, like, removing the weeds, they’ll overtake these plants that we work so hard to grow, collect seed for,” Chipman said. “It would be really difficult to… out-compete these invasive plants.”
“On top of that,” he added, “seed collecting in general is very seasonal. If we had a pause during the summer, we lose our entire year for seed collection. So it’s really important that we don’t have that lapse. Because any pause will somehow down the road slow down our restoration projects.”
Other programs are in jeopardy as well.
SAMO Fund works with the national Park Service on their native plant nursery at Rancho Sierra Vista, which helps grow and distribute tens of thousands of milkweed plants to the community to support the Monarch population.
“Loss of the program is also the loss of the monarch butterflies,” Chipman said, adding that if they are short staffed and under funded, “we definitely wouldn’t be able to uphold the program how it was the past two years.”
But perhaps the longest term effect could be the loss of a generation of environmental stewards. Armbruster and Chipman worry that young ecologists and biologists being laid off may leave the field entirely.
“If there aren’t any jobs and it’s not consistent and stable, I could see people not wanting to choose this field,” Chipman said, “which is really unfortunate because it’s a really giving field.”
“I think the saddest thing about this is the loss of hope,” Armbruster explained. “If we don’t have these funds for the federal contracts that we’ve already signed to, we don’t know where those funds are going to come from.”
She said they’ll be looking more to the community for support but adds that the community won’t be motivated unless they feel hope too, a reassurance that all of the work they’ve been doing to protect and the preserve the park won’t be uprooted.
