Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. met Monday with his Cabinet officers and federal forest and public lands officials to coordinate the rehabilitation and restoration of more than 460,000 acres of Utah land that has burned this year.

Most of it went up in the Milford Flat fire, which burned more than 360,000 acres, making it the largest fire on record in the state.

But the extraordinary fire season has the state's budgets and seed warehouses both stretched to the limit.

"We told the governor that we don't think we have enough seed and we're going to need more money," said Mike Styler, executive director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources. "We told him that we thought if we could get 2 to 3 million dollars that would be a big help."

Orders for additional seed will be put in within the next two weeks, he said.

"To some extent we don't know how much we'll need," Styler said. "Our plan is still evolving because we haven't been able to get out on the land yet to triage the land."

Selma Sierra, state director for the Bureau of Land Management, said the window for buying seed is small, and rapidly closing, as other fire-stricken areas put in orders and dwindling availability drives up prices.

"What we have right now is certainly nowhere near what we anticipate the need to be," Sierra said.

The focus of the rehabilitation effort will be to preserve watershed areas and to replant the rangeland to stave off cheat grass, a non-native type of grass that has invaded huge swaths of the West, pushing out other native species of grass, and poses a severe fire risk.

The hope is that a blend of heartier native grasses and perhaps some other non-native species will be able to prevent encroachment by the cheat grass and lessen future fire hazards, Styler said.

State and federal agencies plan to coordinate their rehabilitation and restoration efforts under the umbrella of the Utah Partners for Conservation and Development, an entity created to pool state, federal and local interests to develop watershed and habitat conservation projects.

"We're looking not only at immediate mitigation issues, we're also looking at, long-term, how to rehabilitate the land," said Sierra.

"The interest the governor has, which is the interest we have, is 'How do we look at the rehabilitation and restoration effort that will break the cycle of fires from one year to the next?' "