JUNCTION CITY, Ore. — When the wheels came off the Willamette Valley’s cannery vegetable industry in the early 1980s, Brian and Sandy Parker sought a better way to make a living on their 370-acre farm near Junction City, Ore.

A robust grass seed industry at the time sparked the 1987 formation of Parker Seeds, raising stock seed grasses for commercial use for many of the Willamette Valley’s seed companies.

In short, they are entrusted with breeder seed from research farms from which they bring forth a generation of foundation or registered seed for the commercial growers to plant.

“We’re a service provider,” Brian Parker said. “Our job is to take 5 to 15 pounds of seed and turn it into 5,000 to 10,000 pounds in a year.”

It’s an exacting endeavor, the ultimate in white-glove tests.

“We get paid more than normal grass seed growers do, but we must do an extensive amount of handwork,” he said. “Our fields don’t just have to be weed free; plants must also be genetically uniform and safe from cross pollination to pass inspections by the Oregon State University Seed Certification Service.”

Hand crews comb the fields for extra tall, coarse-leaved or wrong-colored plants in the population. They seek out weeds and other volunteer crops. Once harvested and processed, the seed must meet laboratory requirements, which are stricter than those imposed on commercial growers.

“Once we harvest, our combines, swathers, trucks and seed bins must be taken apart, cleaned and sanitized before we can harvest the next field,” Parker said. “We do this about 50 times a year — we could just about do it with our eyes shut.”

This work is required to prevent cross contamination between seed lots.

The harvested seed is stored in metal bins in the seed warehouse until it is milled, meaning the plant where it’s processed must be completely disassembled, cleaned and sanitized between every lot.

“We’ll mill 5,000 to 10,000 pounds of seed in a day, and it will include two to four hours minimum to take the line apart and clean all the seeds out of there; clean the floor, the elevators — everything — before we process the next lot,” Parker said. “We joke that we spend more time with the blowgun than we do running the equipment, but that’s not too far from the truth.

“Our customers require zero contamination of any sort in their seed.”

The Parkers test and produce seed on about 40-50 fields each year, ranging in size from 2 to 5 acres each. They have eight full-time employees, some who have been with the company for more than 35 years. The crew and family are valued highly by the Parkers, as the work requires a very high standard.

“We try to treat them well; without them, we would not be able to supply the reliable seed our customers count on from year to year,” Parker said. “We’ve been doing this a long time and it’s an ongoing challenge to do the best job we can, making things as efficient as we can while ensuring our customers the highest quality possible.”