\nFrom root to crown, Mast Reforestation is regrowing the tree economy for the 21st century<\/br>
\n2023-05-17 21:49:31<\/br><\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the problem:<\/span> The planet is burning, and there\u2019s not much we can do about it.<\/p>\n Forests are in peril not just because of the ravages of climate change, but because the industries that support them remain traditional and under-resourced. Mast Reforestation<\/a> is building a tech-forward forest-as-a-service company that vastly simplifies and accelerates the process of restoring lands lost to wildfires.<\/p>\n The company sprouted, as it were, from DroneSeed, which was pioneering new methods of analyzing forests and planting seeds<\/a> as a sort of remedial precision agriculture. What they found was that although their methods were effective, the bottleneck to restoring forests wasn\u2019t just the planting process. It was\u2026pretty much everything else.<\/p>\n To plant a tree, you need a seedling (preferably thousands of them); that seedling needs to be grown by someone; that someone needs a seed supply and growing infrastructure, not to mention the logistics to tie it all together. And the companies serving these needs were often a century old or more, relics of the old logging industry that haven\u2019t changed how they work in decades, for lack of either capital or interest.<\/p>\n As wildfires became a regular (and devastating) part of many regions\u2019 dry seasons, suppliers of seedlings were caught flat-footed. Though it\u2019s clearly an increasingly important part of supporting our planet\u2019s health, reforestation has largely been standing still as other industries have raced to embrace technology.<\/p>\n The result is satellite imagery that can tell us the exact shape of a fire and machine learning models that can predict its extent, but the seed banks and seedling growers, distribution networks and everything in between operate as if it\u2019s still the 20th century\u2026if not the 19th.<\/p>\n Though that legacy does prove to be important as well as limiting, it was obvious that demand had already exceeded supply by a massive margin. DroneSeed, having innovated on the (equally outdated) processes on the demand side, decided to go all in and build a new company combining the resources and networks of century-old forestry companies with a new generation of tech.<\/p>\n The result is Mast Reforestation \u2014 a reference to \u201cmast events\u201d when trees produce a bumper crop of cones and seeds. It acts as the umbrella company for DroneSeed, as well as for the recently acquired seed processor Silvaseed<\/a>, and other companies and platforms to come. Together they are building a complete solution for reforestation, from sourcing seeds to growing improved seedlings to planting them on site, tracking it all using powerful, accessible tech. Perhaps most importantly, they make the whole thing make sense financially by wrangling the carbon credits and government funding needed to subsidize this crucial industry.<\/p>\n It turns out that between these disparate pieces is a huge amount of synergy that\u2019s been left on the table for decades. The seed people aren\u2019t seedling people, and the seedling people aren\u2019t foresters, and the foresters aren\u2019t financial experts \u2014 each piece could inform the others, but that just hasn\u2019t happened.<\/p>\n Image Credits:<\/strong> Mast Reforestation<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This lack of innovation and investment is what DroneSeed discovered when it raised its Series A and bought Silvaseed, one of a handful of large seed providers that together serve the whole country. Dozens of companies and agencies relied on Silvaseed, a 125-year-old company, but few recognized its importance as a bottleneck in the reforestation pipeline until it was too late. DroneSeed (which soon reorganized as Mast) bought it because it saw the potential in its facilities and expertise.<\/p>\n For instance, Silvaseed helped establish the now-industry-standard seed zone chart \u2014 turns out seeds from a pine that grows in Washington are not ideal if you\u2019re planting in southern Oregon, even if they\u2019re the same species. For that matter, a pine on the east side of a ridge might grow poorly on the west side of a ridge. These innumerable variations were recognized and formalized by Silvaseed and others early on, but now they can be tracked with astonishing granularity.<\/p>\n As part of its successful effort to triple seed production and availability, Mast has built a system that literally tracks every tree from seed source to planting location and beyond. Collected west of a ridge in southern Oregon, on October 19, planted at this exact GPS coordinate on July 2, and measured at this height and circumference 2 years later. Making a rich data play like this not only provides a powerful dashboard for logistics that can be read by anyone at a glance, but it also enables detailed studies of outcomes and easy identification of opportunities and needs.<\/p>\n As with any other big data system, you improve by half a point here and there, pretty soon you\u2019re saving millions of dollars, or in this case seedlings. Right now the data platform is strictly for \u201ccustomers, partners, and consulting foresters,\u201d the last of which is a career track I would have pursued had I known it existed.<\/p>\n After the seeds come seedlings, of course, which were another challenge entirely. Until recent years, wildfires were relatively predictable and tended to be adequately repaired through natural processes \u2014 a little help here and there at the worst spots was all they needed, and that meant seedling providers generally just grew one big crop per year. Anyone on the supply side will tell you that locking in not just product quantity but also timing is a disaster waiting to happen whenever the market shifts. And boy did it shift!<\/p>\n Seedling providers have been overwhelmed year after year, as wildfires happen more frequently and less predictably. If all your seedlings are best planted within a month of maturity in, say, July, what happens when wildfires start in May? And what if you run out of them before August \u2014 just as things get really<\/em> bad?<\/p>\n This was the situation Mast confronted when it found that, even if it produced ten times the number of seeds, they couldn\u2019t be grown and planted fast enough. It simply wasn\u2019t done.<\/p>\n So in March, they bought Cal Forest, one of the country\u2019s biggest seedling providers: again, a business and category that has failed to attract meaningful innovation or investment over the decades, even as foresters and ecologists raised the alarm.<\/p>\n Now Cal Forest\u2019s operations are being tranformed into a year-round growing operation that brings modern advances to the greenhouses. Not only are today\u2019s precision agriculture techniques like environmental controls being implemented \u2014 and a huge new facility they call the Terrafactory is coming to the Seattle area \u2014 but forestry experts at Mast are also changing the trees themselves.<\/p>\n No, not through genetic modification \u2014 just plain old cultivation of desirable traits. Mast calls its improved seedlings \u201cfireplugs,\u201d after both their shorter, thicker character and the fact that they are more resistant to wildfire and post-fire conditions.<\/p>\n A \u201cblasted hellscape\u201d and \u201cfireplug\u201d seedling. Image Credits:<\/strong> Mast Reforestation<\/p>\n<\/div>\n By cultivating a thicker stem and deeper root system, the chances of any seedling\u2019s survival in these harsh conditions are raised considerably. Although you might think that wide-open skies and freshly cleared land make for a paradise for saplings, in fact \u201cthese are blasted hellscapes,\u201d said Mast\u2019s VP of R&D, Matthew Aghai. Any advantage you can give a sapling against invasive plants, heat and exposure, water scarcity and other issues translates directly to improved survivability.<\/p>\n Combined with the seed zone tracking and improved cadence, this means more seedlings are available at any given time and more that are planted will survive, and importantly this can all be verified and recorded. That last bit is important because it helps the work and because the financing of this work is yet another obstacle to quick and effective reforestation.<\/p>\n The basic economic equation is this: The value of forests is often achieved when they are harvested, but its value can also be measured in how much carbon they sequester, how they prevent erosion, and benefits of varying tangibility. Unfortunately, most of these factors take place over a period of decades \u2014 making investments inherently a long-term proposition.<\/p>\n Now, if you\u2019re a land owner or manager and your forest burns, you may no longer have the value of that forest, and possibly you won\u2019t even have anything of value to borrow against in order to replant it. This situation has become increasingly common, and although grants and other financial instruments can be brought in, it\u2019s far from simple. If I asked you for a few million bucks to plant some trees worth nothing until 2040, and that may well burn again in the next ten years\u2026well, I wouldn\u2019t blame you if you held on to your money.<\/p>\n The solution being embraced by Mast is carbon credits \u2014 but here we must make sure to discriminate between two frequently confused concepts. Carbon offsets<\/em> are often used to greenwash a business, paying some cash to a middleman who says they\u2019ll eventually put that money into another company, that may in the future do some project that may eventually sequester some carbon. The term and practice have justifiably attracted considerable skepticism, but the idea is sound \u2014 you just have to do a little more than make green-tinged promises.<\/p>\n And we need<\/em> to make it work, because right now it\u2019s the only way to finance a project like a major reforestation effort on short notice.<\/p>\n Because it isn\u2019t cheap or easy. If you\u2019re a land owner and your timber goes up in flames, you\u2019re looking at weeks of calls and paperwork to line up the seeds, seedlings, grants, loans, loggers, planters, insurance, and everything else; you\u2019d be lucky if the chainsaws are roaring within a couple months. Mast\u2019s ambition is that you will make one<\/em> call and there will be seedlings in the ground before invasive or undesirable species (and there are plenty) have time to put down their own roots.<\/p>\n Fly, my pretties! Image Credits:<\/strong> Mast Reforestation<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The carbon credit system Mast works with is overseen by various industry authorities and is a per-project first-party deal: You buy $5 million worth of carbon credits, and that money goes to directly plant, as well as inspect and insure an equivalent carbon value of trees in a long-term management process.<\/p>\nFunding seeds<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\n\u201cBlasted hellscapes\u201d<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nCarbon credits as working capital<\/h2>\n
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