AP News, August 8th, 2007
To connoisseurs of cactus, Steven Brack is the prince of prickly, the sultan of succulents _ the man who keeps them flush with seeds both rare and common.
His kingdom of cacti sits on a sandy patch of desert atop a mesa in the heart of New Mexico. He guesses he's about the only full-time producer and exporter of cactus and succulent seeds in North America.
His business, Mesa Garden, might be helping to protect species of rare cacti from poachers.
"It's not worth it any more because of all the work tramping around in the heat and the hard conditions," Brack says of cactus poaching.
"Another factor is the ethics of the growers. Most growers won't touch the selling of wild plants."
His 14 greenhouses _ which he cobbled together with boards and sheets of plastic _ hold about 15,000 kinds of plants. The plants come in a rainbow of colors.
Each year, Mesa Garden ships about 150,000 packets of seeds and about 35,000 live plants, Brack guesses.
On this summer day, packages were ready to be mailed to Ukraine, Great Britain, Brazil, Romania, South Korea and China. The previous day, he sent 500,000 seeds to China, which accounts for almost 40 percent of his business.
"They're crazy about American culture in general and there's a lot of interest in American plants," he says.
Sales to Europe total about 30 percent, while Russia accounts for about 20 percent and the U.S. makes up the rest.
"I think people want to have something new and exotic and unusual. The American deserts are very exotic to the European psyche. It goes back to the lore of the Westerns and cowboys," Brack says.
The seeds can be as big as peanuts. Or as small as? "Gnat dander," says Elsie Chavez, who has been separating, cleaning and stuffing them in envelopes for 11 years.
Brack says nearly all the seeds are sent to private individuals. "They are completely passionate about it and stick to it for a lifetime," he says.
Janet Rademacher, sales and marketing manager for a wholesale nursery in Phoenix, says the demand for drought-resistant plants for landscaping has grown about tenfold in the past 15 years.
"A lot of the cities and the municipalities have all been working on educating the public on using desert plants to save water," Rademacher says.
Brack, 58, started the business 37 years ago.
"We started as a nano-business and made it up to micro," he says. "I started on a shoestring. Then it just snowballed."
The business is Web-based _ no images, but thousands of names and prices. And no visitors, please, to his greenhouses.
"This is not a tourist destination. We're too busy," he says.
In the fall, there are 10,000 flowers to pollinate each day. Some need pollinating at night. Seeds must be harvested, cleaned, packed and shipped _ all by hand.
Brack became hooked on cactus as a child growing up on a dairy farm outside Eau Claire, Wis., where he was active in the 4-H club.
"When I was a kid, I guess I saw some of these plants on a window sill, and that led me to the library, and one book led me to another," he says.
"Some books I discovered were seed books from Europe," he says. "It was real fun, and it excited me that these plants had a Latin name on them."
Brack is a stickler for Latin names and eschews his plants' common names.
Creeping devils are genus machaerocereus. Elephant cactus are genus pachycereus.
Living stones and baby toes are genus lithops. They are camouflaged among small stones or pebbles in small patches in Africa and watered only by nighttime fog.
"It's insanely difficult to find them in nature," Brack says.
Though Mesa Garden might not be squeezing out the cactus poacher, there seems to be a drop in the removal of exotic cacti, wildlife officials say.
"We don't hardly ever see people any more target an endangered species and just take all of them," says Jackie Poole, a botanist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
Exportation laws and a variety of state and federal agencies enforcing regulations probably has helped, says Doug McKenna, resident agent-in-charge of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Arizona.
Brack says cactus poaching is only a fraction of what it was 40 years ago because more exotic plants are available from seed.
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On the Net:
Mesa Garden: http://www.mesagarden.com/
