Rodger Shankland surveys the rows of sea buckthorn trees lining the curve of a Bruce County farm field. This year was the best season yet at the pick-your-own orchard and rootstock nursery that the retired engineer’s life partner, Marlene Wynnyk, established 13 years ago on her small farm near Teeswater.

“They come in families to pick,” says Shankland, who helps maintain the orchard. “Droves of people.”

Most of the visitors are of Baltic heritage. Many remember the tree with its clusters of tart, bright orange, quarter-sized berries growing in the wild in their home countries. (Sea buckthorn is also commercially grown in Germany for its juice, seeds and oil).

The couple has lost count of how much rootstock they’ve sold to other farmers, gardeners and even chefs.

Wynnyk owns a company that sells holistic products, and championed the berry’s commercialization in Ontario largely because of its high vitamin C content (50 times more by volume than an orange, she claimed in a recent presentation).

In doing so, she and Shankland joined a small but growing number of Ontario farmers who recognize the business opportunity in bringing so-called superfoods to market. Like sea buckthorn, many of these crops — goji berries, quinoa and amaranth, for example — originated in other countries and continents.

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These crops may bring health benefits for humans, but what of their effect on our environment and their potential to be invasive?

Wynnyk and Shankland’s sea buckthorn venture has hinged on how they’ve addressed this question.

The couple regularly heard concerns about the tree’s potential for invasiveness during the orchard’s first years of operation. “Somebody in the audience knows what [European] buckthorn is, and then it usually starts from there,” Shankland says.

European buckthorn is an invasive species and on Ontario’s noxious weeds list. It is unrelated to sea buckthorn, but often that doesn’t matter. The question inevitably arises and derails the discussion about sea buckthorn.

Shankland smiles at the notion sea buckthorn could be invasive.

It took them a long time to figure out how to propagate the trees, he explains. Many don’t survive the climate. Efforts to grow the tree from seeds or branch cuttings were unsuccessful.

As well, provincial crop specialists monitored their work for years, checking for invasiveness and pests that might threaten other crops.

“They came up somewhere between empty-handed and nothing.”

Today, Wynnyk and Shankland direct anyone who raises the question to the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.

Evan Elford, a new crop development specialist with the ministry, says the plant shows some invasive potential because it sends out suckers (shoots from roots) and spreads by rhizomes (a horizontal stem that grows underground). “But as long as it’s managed, sea buckthorn seems to be contained as a crop.”

Craig Hunter, who manages research and crop protection portfolios at the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association, and Kevin Schooley, executive director of the Ontario Berry Growers Association, say the commercial cultivation of berry crops such as sea buckthorn, goji, haskap and aronia poses little risk of fence line jumps.

Worry instead, they say, about the species — plants, diseases and insects — transported inadvertently in food import packaging or on other plant products. The destructive emerald ash borer first arrived in North America in wood packaging for other products, for example.

Moreover, plants initially imported for their ornamental value have historically presented a greater risk than agricultural plants, says Hunter. Phragmites australis, considered one of Canada’s worst invasive species, was once available as a nursery plant.

Techniques such as the application of herbicides and crop rotations manage the risk of crops spreading beyond their designated fields. If something with invasive potential does get into other areas where such controls aren’t available, however, “things can become a big problem in a big hurry,” Hunter says.

In this, as in so many things, there are no one-size-fits-all answers: one imported crop may pose genuine risks while another may be eminently manageable.

Colin Cassin, project liaison with the Ontario Invasive Plant Council, cautions against completely dismissing the farm field as a jumping-off point for invasive species. Wild parsnip, a noxious weed found throughout eastern Ontario and now spreading into the western portion of the province, was once a farm crop, he points out. (Europeans grew it as a staple during the early days of their settlement of North America.)

In Alberta, the provincial weed regulatory advisory committee recognizes sea buckthorn’s invasive tendencies. But “it is not currently a high priority discussion for the committee,” wrote Jeanna Friedley, Alberta Agriculture and Forestry spokesperson, in an email.

“The province and [the Alberta Weed Regulatory Advisory Committee] AWRAC must consider the potential for the spread of sea buckthorn and strike a balance with the needs and the potential of the industries (tree nurseries and medicinal markets) associated with this plant,” she added.

Other superfood crops, such as quinoa and amaranth, do not appear on environmental priority lists. Elford, who has researched the adaptation of both crops to Ontario growing conditions, doubts they pose a risk.

Quinoa, from South America’s Andean region, is difficult to establish. Its North American relative, lamb’s quarters, “is much more vigorous,” Elford says. Vegetable and grain amaranth varieties, on the other hand, are as easy to grow as their weedy relative, pigweed, and Elford has spied some growth of volunteer grain amaranth. (Volunteers are crop plants emerging in the same place where they were planted a year before).

Nevertheless, the volunteers are not a concern, he says, because they’re easily controlled with herbicides. Other much more familiar commodity crops such as corn, wheat and canola often produce volunteers and are controlled in the same way.

Elford predicts food trends could eventually make amaranth a solid business opportunity for Ontario farmers.

But Owen Williams, an Ontario Invasive Plant Council director, warns that if something spreads by seed, and the seed can be consumed (and thus expelled) by an animal, the potential for migrating to other locations exists. Farmers do also worry about amaranth's impact on crop yields and its growing herbicide resistance.

But if amaranth were ever poised to become a super weed, Williams says Ontario’s Invasive Species Act, passed late last year, will provide the tools needed for control — provided the danger is recognized in time.

Identifying when a problem exists is “the slow part of the process right now,” he says. Not only does it take a long time — possibly decades — for a problem to become apparent, once it is recognized it can be tough to build the momentum to motivate action.

Back in Bruce County, Shankland peers into the sea buckthorn orchard and shakes his head at how anyone could consider the crop a threat.

Goji berries (which come from China) is the crop he worries about. The couple tried growing them, but he was uncomfortable with what he saw. “It’s just a thorny mess that comes flying out of the ground in every direction.”