Nebraska company turns milkweed into moneymaker

JOE RUFF, Associated Press Writer Thursday, August 30, 2001

(08-30) 21:03 PDT OGALLALA, Neb. (AP) --

A company that has figured out how to make money from milkweeds hopes to transform the nuisance plant into a cash crop.

After 14 years of research into the weed's properties and growth patterns, Natural Fibers Corp. is finding promising ways to use the 4-foot-tall, pink-flowered plant.

Company founder Herb Knudsen discovered that when mixed with goose down, milkweed's hollow fibers create light and fluffy, hypoallergenic pillows and comforters.

Natural Fibers' subsidiary Ogallala Down last year sold $1.4 million of those bed products to specialty stores and the Four Seasons hotel chain.

"Ogallala is the only down company that I carry," said Joan Miller, owner of Early to Bed, a bath, bed and wedding store 300 miles east in Omaha. "It sells very well."

Milkweed fibers also are being studied as a way to improve sound quality in stereo speakers and oil from the plant's seed is being developed by cosmetic companies as a skin moisturizer.

The plant's pressed seed cake is showing promise as a natural enemy of nematodes that feed on potatoes, and Natural Fibers sells milkweed as a wildflower used by butterfly farms and for highway beautification and land reclamation projects.

Knudsen first saw promise in milkweeds when he headed Standard Oil of Ohio's new ventures division. Standard Oil, now part of British Petroleum, was studying milkweed in the 1970s to produce synthetic crude oil, but that did not prove to be cost effective.

By 1987, Standard Oil was closing down its new ventures, and as head of that division Knudsen was laid off. He promptly bought the milkweed fiber operations, which were based in Ogallala. Three years later, Knudsen founded Ogallala Down.

Growing a weed may sound easy, but think again.

Challenges to turning milkweed into a cash crop include germination, uniformity in growth, fungal infections -- and other weeds like pigweed, kochia and other broadleaf plants.

"You're taking a wild plant and trying to take wildly collected seed" and grow it like a crop, said Dave Twomey, crop production manager at Natural Fibers.

"It's just a natural defense system that they don't all germinate at the same time," he said.

Operating on a 37-acre experimental plot, Twomey said he hopes to have developed reliable growing techniques for milkweed in a year or two.

"Knowing how farmer's mentality is, I think we get one shot at it," Twomey said. "And we better know exactly what we're doing."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has hope for the company. As part of a national effort to help start-up businesses in agriculture, the agency bought $1.8 million in the company's stock over a four-year period and owns 25 percent of Natural Fibers.

The Ogallala company has found a good market for milkweed fibers, and it may not be far from developing milkweed as a crop, said Tom Abbott, a USDA research leader for new crops and processing technology in Peoria, Ill.

"I'd say within two years they will have cropping guidelines and be buying milkweed pods, fiber and seed from farmers," Abbott said.

Varieties of milkweed useful to Natural Fibers grow best in the northern two-thirds of the United States, Twomey said.

As Natural Fibers works to develop the weed into a crop, the company hires Marwyn Layne of Lovell, Wyo., to collect milkweed from ditches, meadows and along rivers in northern Wyoming in late August and early September.

The orders have varied from 25,000 pounds of dried milkweed one year to 126,000 pounds another, Layne said. As many as 250 people are hired as milkweed pickers, earning about $10 an hour.

"We have people who have their tiny children pick for them," she said. "We've had people in their 80s pick for us. It's something everybody can do."

-- Anonymous, August 31, 2001

Answers

Schoolkids picked milkweed pods during WW2 as part of the war effort.The seed "fluff" was used as a filler in life preservers for the Navy after the source of kapok from SE Asia was cut off.

-- Anonymous, August 31, 2001

I wonder if anyone checked into Edison's records.

-- Anonymous, August 31, 2001

Weird...yesterday one of my co-workers was telling me about collecting milkweed pods for the military when she was a kid. When I was little, we used the pods for "hand grenades". They hurt, too, lol.

-- Anonymous, September 01, 2001