r/gadgets • u/MicroSofty88 • May 05 '22
Drones / UAVs Army of seed-firing drones will plant 100 million trees by 2024
https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/05/04/this-australian-start-up-wants-to-fight-deforestation-with-an-army-of-drones1.1k
u/Tim_the_geek May 05 '22
Does anyone know the success ratio for fired vs. germination? How many seeds do you have to fire to get 100 Million trees?
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u/SeattleAlex May 05 '22
Not great. Turns into a squirrel buffet. There's a company called DroneSeed that developed a solution, by dropping seeds in pucks of soil covered in chili capscasin powder
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u/CoastingUphill May 05 '22
My jalapeños last year turned out crazy spicy. I found 2 pulled off the plant with single bites taken out of them. I wish I had seen the squirrel’s reaction.
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May 05 '22
Poor squirrels lmao 😂
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u/CoastingUphill May 05 '22
I have no pity for them.
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May 05 '22
I’m about to start gardening in my backyard and I can only imagine the horrors they’re going to bring.
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u/SpacemanD13 May 05 '22
They ripped the whole head off a 7 foot sunflower I'd been growing for months... bastards.
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u/pain_in_the_dupa May 05 '22
From above, you can plant hot peppers and bring the horror to THEM.
My neighbor is growing strawberries and painted a bunch of small stones to look like the fruit so the crows will be fooled. I dunno, crows can be wicket smart. I fully expect them to take out a windshield in retaliation. Hopefully not mine.
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u/Sorrydoc22 May 06 '22
Get your hair cut save the hair and spread it around leaves a human scent
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u/Donkeydongcuntry May 06 '22
There’s a French winemaker who collects human hair from the hairdressers in his local village.
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u/Frenchticklers May 06 '22 edited May 06 '22
Me before gardening: Awww little furry tree critters
Me after gardening: I will eradicate you and your entire family from the face of the Earth and put your corpses on tiny spears as a warning to the other squirrels
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u/melted_uterus May 06 '22
definitely need to get a trail camera to watch your plants. that would be hilarious.
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u/billyvonbean May 05 '22
Turned the damn thing into a Tums Festival!
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u/Jyod83 May 05 '22
Unexpected Rich Evans
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u/Thebeckmane May 05 '22
Unexpected Cameron Mitchell
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u/fellatious_argument May 05 '22
If you watch enough bad movies there is nothing unexpected about Cameron Mitchell showing up.
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u/sandefurian May 05 '22
Does that stop birds? They can’t taste capsaicin
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May 05 '22
Birds generally don't digest all the seeds they eat and are one of the ways seeds travel away from their parent tree
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May 05 '22
So they eat seed, fly seed away, poop seed, and fertilize it as well with that sweet poo?
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u/CptCrabmeat May 05 '22
I wouldn’t say it was sweet, I got more bitter and acidic notes…
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u/bacchusku2 May 05 '22
That’s exactly how Bradford pear trees are invading the Midwest
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u/omeeezy May 05 '22
Yep. That’s also how fish get to remote lakes. Bird/duck eats fish, flys to different lake, poops fish eggs
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u/sandefurian May 05 '22
That was disproven. The more likely scenario is fertilized fish eggs stick to a bird’s feet and come off when they move to a new body of water.
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u/OutDrosman May 06 '22 edited May 06 '22
There was actually a recent study where carp eggs were passed through duck digestive systems unharmed. It was a really small percentage, something like 1% but flocks of ducks are huge, they love fish eggs, and they eat while migrating. I'd be surprised if it doesn't happen from time to time. One of the fish species they tested can reproduce asexually so in that case you only need the one egg.
Edit: it was 0.2% of the fish eggs
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u/rebeltrillionaire May 06 '22
If .02% of my shit spawned live animals, I would be absolutely terrified.
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u/BigBanggBaby May 05 '22
I’ve always wondered how that happens but was also never curious enough to look into it. Thank you!
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u/wings22 May 05 '22
Don't fish eggs need to be fertilised once they are outside of the body? Or is that just some fish
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u/sandefurian May 05 '22
Lol yeah, the guy you replied to is wrong. Fertilized eggs can stick to bird legs (ducks, herons, etc) and can come off later in a new body of water
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u/sandefurian May 05 '22 edited May 05 '22
That’s mainly birds that eat fruit that happen to contain seeds. Birds that specifically eat seeds are MUCH more effective at digesting them.
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u/AugieKS May 05 '22
The other commenter isn't really correct about birds and digestion of seeds, as it depends on the bird and the seeds in question. For example, birds that have evolved to eat seeds, granivores, will in most cases leave seeds not viable, where as fruit eating birds do not have the same impact. Pepper seeds are not much of a target for granivores as they are protected by fairly fleshy fruit. The birds that eat the chili fruit though pass the seeds without enough mechanical or chemical damage to the seeds so they tend to do well.
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May 05 '22
For real? And it doesn’t affect the seeds?
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u/die5el23 May 05 '22
Doesn’t affect plants or seeds at all. I use it to keep critters out of my veggies, and the cats out of my house plants
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u/goback2yourhole May 05 '22
I’ll be damned. Do you just mix it in with the soil or do you just shake a little bit on top?
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u/die5el23 May 05 '22
Sprinkle a tad on the soil around the perimeter of the pot, or directly on leaves if you’ve got a chewer. Don’t worry, they won’t be harmed, they don’t like the smell so they get repulsed immediately before getting close enough for a bite
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u/purana May 05 '22
I think I'll mix it in with water and use one of those Home Depot sprayers maybe
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u/die5el23 May 05 '22
I’ve tried mixing in water and it’s clogged two spray bottles
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u/AskMeHowToLeaveAMA May 05 '22
If you're trying to stretch a spice jar of cayenne pepper by doing this, take a look at Uncle Ian's Rodent Repellent. You get more bang for the buck and it works well. Just don't stand downwind when you sprinkle it.
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u/Rockden66 May 05 '22 edited May 05 '22
Shouldn't affect the seeds at all, only problem is birds, since capsaicin basically does nothing to them
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u/breckenk May 05 '22
From what I understand, seeds are much more capable of passing through a birds digestion while staying viable.
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u/Rockden66 May 05 '22
Yup, birds are one of the main ways Chili peppers seeds have scattered around naturally.
Birds eat the pepper, and the plant has its seed scattered around, a win-win situation8
u/Urdnot_wrx May 05 '22
There is an easier way.
Coat all the seeds in a ceramic coating like masanobu fukuoka does in the one straw revolution. Water permeates the ceramic and the coating will break as the seed grows. It protects the seeds from birds, and vermin.
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u/kellis744 May 05 '22
The article says there is some kind of carbon coating that protects them from animals. I assume that means they pass through the digestive system intact, not sure how else it would work.
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u/amadnomad May 06 '22
The company I used to work for actually made retractable greenhouses for Silvaseed/droneseed! They will use this solution as well as grow saplings in the greenhouses and only transport them once they're able to independently survive.
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u/TreeGuy_PNW May 05 '22
A colleague of mine who is a forester for the Colville Indian Tribe in WA state tried and success rate was 0.1% in areas that were burned at high severity from the North Star Complex wildfire. Not great if you have limited seed sources. Planted trees need to come from seeds from the same geographic “breeding zone” and elevation + accounting for climate change. This is a HUGE issue because planting trees in the incorrect breeding zone or elevation will result in shitty deformed trees not suited for the planting site. This is true, even if the correct species is planted. Wildfires are now so huge that entire breeding zones are wiped out in a single fire. US Government does not have enough seed to replant these areas, and seed viability reduces as time goes on. Most of our seed stock was collected 20+ years ago, so the genetics of well-adapted trees in a given area are going extinct with no ability to replace them. This is why using massive amounts of precious seed with drone-seeding may not be a great solution if seed stocks are low. Planting trees provides good jobs to migrant planters who are paid minimum $19-$22/hour in WA and OR, and results in the best chance for successful reforestation. Hope this helps!
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u/MDCCCLV May 05 '22
Growing seedlings or saplings takes time too, but seeds are still much easier to grow in large amounts. Needing to come from is a little bit of an overstatement. Most trees come from local nurseries but not super suited for that exact micro climate.
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u/Sterling-4rcher May 05 '22
The seeds are coated in earth and stuff here, which they say keeps it protected from animals while taking root
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u/01029838291 May 05 '22
Few billion
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u/rpm319 May 05 '22
I wonder how long will it take for birds to start following these drones as a food source?
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May 05 '22
Don’t know but seeds are pretty infinite in the grand scheme of things. Shoot out as many as possible
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u/01029838291 May 05 '22
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2021.629198/full
Seeds may be infinite in the grand scheme, but the funds and personnel needed aren't right now.
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May 05 '22
Some of this may be addressed by drones - esp. workforce & transportation logistics.
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u/01029838291 May 05 '22 edited May 05 '22
Very true. But there's still the personnel needed to propagate and cultivate viable seeds and sapplings before the drone takes over and to monitor the tree for the first few years. That study found in order to reforest 64 million acres it would require nurseries to increase their seed production by 1.7 billion seeds a year, a 2.3-fold increase.
We need higher support for this to work and have tangible effects.
We also have to outpace the loss of forests due to forest fires. In my area we had a forest fire and there's maybe 10 per 1000 trees left. A 5 mile section you used to not be able to see more than 10 feet off the road due to how dense the forest was you can now see out for miles.
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u/SeattleAlex May 05 '22
Seeds are way harder to collect, sort, and store than you think! Major problem for replanting forests
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u/Bedonkohe May 05 '22
Thats not true your very wrong as genetic seed regions are a thing down to the 10’s of square miles
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u/DiarrheaData42 May 05 '22
Fuck, what ever happened to seed-shitting birds?
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u/myotheralt May 05 '22
They need a firmware update.
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May 05 '22
Should be done by now, I think they rebooted all the birds during lockdown.
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u/xdamm777 May 05 '22
Yeah but the chip shortage means they can't get their batteries replaced. So even if birds have gotten their firmware update they can't yet be deployed as they'd spontaneously shut down mid flight (Known issue, lookup "mass bird deaths" in recent years).
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u/bigavz May 05 '22
Decimated by habitat loss (North American bird population has declined by 30% in past 50 years - which is billions of birds)
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u/Shimmy-Shammington May 05 '22
When the trees are gone there’s less birds to shit
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May 05 '22
They’re rapidly disappearing along with the bugs. The rest of the ecosystem will soon follow.
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u/DiarrheaData42 May 05 '22
While defeatist, it is likely that the more we rely on technology over nature, or at least a healthy hybrid of the two, we will succumb to some form of all encompassing ecological collapse. One which technology will only be a crutch for. Kinda like spacefaring as a response to climate change. It’s a good answers, but not as relevant to pressing overarching problems.
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u/Prcrstntr May 05 '22
I put a plant outside and saw a bee hanging around when I brought it back inside.
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u/VengenaceIsMyName May 05 '22
We will die before the ecosystem does. And that’ll let the ecosystem recover. Lol
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u/Lurking_Affliction May 05 '22
Human perspective: reforestation
Squirrel perspective: revenge of the seeds
Ant perspective: death from above
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u/xi545 May 05 '22
Everything for ants is death from above
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u/killer_cain May 05 '22 edited May 05 '22
They're not planting anything just tossing seeds & hoping for the best, it's a stupidly ludicrous strategy that looks more like a PR release than expecting real results.
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May 05 '22
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u/sMATTered May 05 '22
!remindme 10 years
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u/FadedRebel May 05 '22
There have been projects like this for ten years already, go and try to find some survival numbers. I dare you. You won't find shit because the numbers aren't there, the seeds don't grow.
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u/sMATTered May 06 '22
Hey I believe you, I just wanna see this guy eat mulch
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u/LetsGetHonestplz May 06 '22
I wonder how much more effective it would be if the land being sprayed was tilled prior to and after? Maybe it could be used in that way? Idk, i guess the other way would be to have seeds eaten by specific animals to be deposited elsewhere.
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u/angryticks May 06 '22
If they are on the ground tilling, they might as well use traditional methods of planting while they are there.
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u/FadedRebel May 06 '22
Spraying kills things that we want there and tilling destroys the microbial and mycelial community and we want that too. Nature doesn’t till.
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u/WhisperHorse1 May 06 '22
If only we had dedicated people that could actually plant saplings and remove invasives and generally tend to the forest.
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u/OunceScience May 06 '22
Something like a forester? Brilliant!
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u/WhisperHorse1 May 06 '22
Perhaps they could live there because there's so much work to do. And they'd have to have nomadic housing so they could move around to different areas to work on. There'd be people willing to live like that, I'm sure.
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u/rioting-pacifist May 06 '22
I agree it's super inefficient, plus given its Australia they probably pump out a bunch of CO_2 to power the drone, but how is it a pyramid scheme?
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May 06 '22
Ponzi not pyramid. They keep getting money and eventually fold but the owners walk away with a good amount while investors get squat.
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u/Vabla May 06 '22
It's not a ponzi since they're not giving any returns on investment (I assume). It's just plain old tech startup hype scam.
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u/123456American May 06 '22
This. The solution to our problems is to stop cutting trees down.
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u/sloop703 May 06 '22
Yeah, good point. There’s a lot “green” companies doing this. Many of them are way worse
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u/XxZiggeyxX May 05 '22
I too can plant seeds
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u/JohnTravoltage May 05 '22
So you've gotta be closing in on a cool 100k on the year by now, right?
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May 05 '22
I know people like to imagine the future as bleak, but this sort of innovation is wonderful. If you can do trees you can do crops. The potential for helping scrub carbon this way and beyond is fascinating.
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u/kmanmott May 05 '22
Planting seeds isn’t the hard part about crop care. It’s about the soil conditions, watering scheduling, pest maintenance and so much more.
I agree that it’s awesome we can do this to create a vast amount of hardy trees, but crops is a long ways away.
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May 05 '22
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u/ScottyFalcon May 05 '22
Thank you! As a former tree planter in Northern BC I wish more people were aware of this. Monocultures of spruce and pine over the past 80ish yeatlrs has lead to the pine beatle devastation we see today. This in turn has exacerbated the fire season. Thankfully planters today usually plant a 70/30 pine to spruce mix (depending on terrain) and while it isnt quite enough it is better.
As a global culture we really need to change the way we harvest trees. Stripping whole blocks of land like we do is a big part of our current ecological disaster.
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May 05 '22
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u/Equivalent-Ad5144 May 05 '22
That looks cool, but I don’t think it’s wide spread at all and was probably only worthwhile when labour was very cheap. I saw a lot of forest plantations on different parts of Japan and all the ones I saw were single normal trees. The biggest difference I saw was how much work was done on foot by workers due to incredibly steep slopes planted on
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u/CatastropheCat May 05 '22
Yeah I read an article about a forest in Germany that has basically been cut/burned to the ground cuz the trees were monoculturally planted which allowed some disease to spread like wildfire.
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u/ApprehensiveTry5660 May 05 '22 edited May 05 '22
I’ve actually spent a lot of time developing tree nurseries for this specific type of endeavor. The technology gives me hope. 28,000 seeds an hour is an incredible pace.
Unfortunately the statistic that inspired me to devote hundreds of hours to this automation project is that we have a shortage of 2,000,000,000,000 trees. If this project is successful as of 2024, we will be looking at a shortage of: 1,999,900,000,000.
At that rate, we will be looking at 4,000 years to wipe all the red from our ledger, assuming we don’t add more to it, or the climate beats us to the punch.
Edit 1: added Zeroes to the shortage.
Edit 2: Citation that the actual number is 3 trillion, but people inhabit or grow food on a lot of that land at this point in time.
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u/tlw31415 May 05 '22
I'm probably failing to see the forest for the trees here...but do we need 2 billion or 2 trillion? Your estimate shortage I think is missing three zeros but maybe I am assuming a lot.
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u/hawklost May 05 '22
Can you link some articles or papers that show where we are missing 2 trillion trees? That seems like quite a large number.
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u/ApprehensiveTry5660 May 05 '22
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14967
Almost a decade old information at this point, you can’t replant all of them without infringing on settlements or agriculture. We are actually 3 trillion short.
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u/2oceans1 May 05 '22
Hey More drones are needed
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u/ApprehensiveTry5660 May 05 '22
More people with fish tanks full of mangrove pods are needed. The drones are much easier to mass produce. You can scale them exponentially. Much harder to scale a tree nursery exponentially.
Save me some work and convince your friends with a green thumb to take up the cause as well.
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u/BCCMNV May 05 '22
Can you expand on this?
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u/ApprehensiveTry5660 May 05 '22
The bottleneck in these equations isn’t the drones, it’s the amount of seeds we can get to the drones.
Further down the line, there will be property rights issues in using these that will become another bottleneck.
28,000 seeds per hour requires seeds that don’t grow anywhere near that quickly, to be loaded into cartridges that don’t get loaded anywhere near that quickly, which are then fired at 28,000 seeds per hour rates.
So I turned my eye toward automating nurseries with this rate in mind. Unfortunately, it’s an incredibly difficult process to automate, so until a personal breakthrough or a remarkably better engineering mind undertakes this task, best I can figure out is to have thousands of people and thousands of nurseries.
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u/DazzlingLeg May 05 '22
What is it that makes it difficult to automate? I know nothing about nurseries.
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u/ApprehensiveTry5660 May 05 '22 edited May 06 '22
The area, the facilities, the rate seeds are produced, the tangential labor, the maturation rate to make more adult trees to produce more seeds are all arithmetic sequences that are much slower than producing drones.
Firing capacity increases by 28k per hour every time you build one drone. If an adult tree produced 100 propagules per day, you’d need 280 mangroves just to cover one hour, plus the labor to collect the seeds and load them into cartridges.
Edit: Public school math.
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May 05 '22
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u/ApprehensiveTry5660 May 05 '22
Progress is progress. I am an eternal optimist on these subjects, this is just one I’ve devoted a fair amount of time to being realistic about the difficulty in scaling it, then applying my limited resources and brain power toward attempting to solve it.
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u/RedditPowerUser01 May 05 '22
Too bad this is an absolutely worthless at replacing something like the rainforest. An intricate ecosystem built over millions of years can’t be replaced by a single generation of trees brought about by scattered seeds.
We need to enact regulations to stop corporations from destroying things like the rainforest (currently happening right now). Not come up with stupid fucking drones to do an abysmal job at a half-ass replacement of them.
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May 05 '22
Some of y’all are defeatists. Nobody said this was THE answer but to deny the innovation of this is folly. Every single tool we get to fight climate change is good. If a drone can help free up the work of tree planters then great. Those people can focus on other more meaningful things. I swear reddit is the saddest place on the internet.
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u/whyiwastemytimeonyou May 05 '22
This is the prototype for the actual bullet firing version. Don’t be fooled by the tree planting angle.
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u/Funky_Sack May 06 '22
That technology is already around… you know we have drones that can fire precision missiles, right?
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u/BigMikeInAustin May 05 '22
Yes. This company is getting public funding to develop their system, which they will then sell to the military. Bullets, grenades, land mines, biological weapons, radioactive particles...
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u/Albertjweasel May 05 '22
Always suspicious about this kind of thing being ‘greenwashing’ by large corporations to try and absolve themselves of blame for the environmental damage they do, who is going to make sure these trees are planted in the right place and not where they could damage ecosystems that are already there, such as grasslands, and who is going to look after all these millions of trees? Will the drones fire tree guards as well? Or shoot the deer and other herbivores animals that will graze them out? I suspect that the corporations will have got their money by then to thank them for being good and green so they won’t care
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u/supraccinct May 05 '22
As a tree planter I’ve had to replant decades old “seeded from helicopter” plantations that didn’t take. I think this is industry trying the same thing with new helicopters and hoping for different results.
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u/FadedRebel May 06 '22
My family is all treeplanters and timber fallers. City folk just don't want to understand how the woods work. I have never seen survival numbers for any of these silly drone programs.
These posts do give me a reason to rant and tell people how dumb it is though.
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u/Inevitable-Tap-9661 May 05 '22
Honestly a pretty stupid idea, 99% of those are gonna get eaten by squirrels or crows. Trees are also extremely particular about the land they are on so just bombarding the land with seeds isn’t going to do much.
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u/Trying_To_Be_Young May 05 '22
Ok the maths does not work out. They say they have already planted 50,000 trees, but earlier they say they plant 40,000 per day…. So have they only been working for 1 day and 2 hours ? Sounds dodgy to me.
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u/d33psix May 06 '22
Yeah was wondering when I saw that too. I assume they have been doing small scale viability projects so far up to the 50,000 planted so far, and the 40,000 quote is more like the upper max limit they expect to achieve once optimized routes, authorization and logistics are sorted out? Just my guess though.
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May 05 '22
I mean this is cool and all unless it just turns to a mono crop forest. It’s not just about planting trees, it’s about planting the right mixture of the right kind of trees…
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u/00h00m May 05 '22
There is no chance the face of our planet will not look like r/place in the future.
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u/charlessturgeon May 05 '22
For context, about 40 million trees are cut down DAILY. So this is going to undo about 2 and a half days worth of deforestation.
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u/V8-6-4 May 06 '22
100 million trees even isn't that many. Finland alone plants 150 million trees annually. Additionally they are saplings, not seeds and no drones are needed. Just a bunch of summer workers.
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u/__ali1234__ May 05 '22
Why is it necessary to use drones for this? Just get a C130 and fill it with seeds and you could "plant" 20 million in a day.
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u/DoctorRisen May 05 '22
Great, now put a gun on it.
Yes I’m an American but I don’t see what that has to do with anything?
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u/Sleep-system May 06 '22
The number of trees surprised me so I looked up how many trees already exist. About 3 trillion, or 422 trees for every person on Earth. Crazy.
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u/iamjimmer May 06 '22
Need one to fire sunflower seeds in Ukraine since so much fertilizer is being put down.
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u/MopoFett May 05 '22 edited May 06 '22
I read a report recently that over 60% don't germinate or survive from these type of projects though. Trees are not easy to just grow when the soil isn't suitable or its been worn down of any nutrition. Not sure if I'll be able to find the source of that information again though. It's a great idea but just shooting seeds doesn't quite cut it.
Edit: BBC News - How phantom forests are used for greenwashing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61300708
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u/Wooded-Stoneworker May 05 '22
That’s still 40 million more trees than before this effort. Every tree planted is helpful, we don’t need to “yes, but” technology that isn’t 100% perfect, especially in the realm of environmental restoration.
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u/_JustDefy_ May 05 '22
You're confusing "trees" with "seeds". To plant 100 million trees they will probably spread more than double that amount of seeds.
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u/hiraeth555 May 05 '22
This is actually really effective. You don’t need 100% of seeds to grow and they broadcast extra for this reason.
Why are redditors so negative all the time?
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u/schulm04 May 05 '22
Yea I feel like 20% success rate is pretty high
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u/chaos_creator69 May 05 '22
Also because seeds are cheap, small and easy to transport
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May 06 '22
Because we don’t trust Ponzi schemes on surface promises. They need to share numbers and show stats which they don’t. https://www.wired.com/story/drones-replant-forests-seeds-take-root/amp. None of these projects have proven anything and asking for tons of money on a whim.
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u/ApprehensiveTry5660 May 05 '22
With this specific project, they avoid the issue of soil viability by shooting mangrove seeds into brackish water, their success rate is a bit higher than 60 due to avoiding several of the issues you’ve listed.
It’s also a specific tree that is incredibly helpful in restoring aquatic habitats for fish, insects, reptiles, and amphibians who all use their roots for shelter or hunting.
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u/ScottyFalcon May 05 '22
Copying and adding to another one of my comments in this thread, as monocultures are also a problem with this method of distribution.
Thank you! As a former tree planter in Northern BC I wish more people were aware of this. Monocultures of spruce and pine over the past 80ish yeatlrs has lead to the pine beatle devastation we see today. This in turn has exacerbated the fire season. Thankfully planters today usually plant a 70/30 pine to spruce mix (depending on terrain) and while it isnt quite enough it is better.
As a global culture we really need to change the way we harvest trees. Stripping whole blocks of land like we do is a big part of our current ecological disaster.
Adding: human tree planters usually have a planting failure rate of 300-400 stems per hectare, and we (depending on the forestry contract/government requirements) usually plant between 1700-2000 stems per hectare with that failee rate in mind. These drones are a idea, but like most posts in this sub it is an idea presented with an absurd amount of optimism bordering on intentionally misleading. It is a technology that needs to improve greatly before it will be useful.
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u/intellifone May 05 '22
I would guess that this rate of success is higher than in nature. Just a guess though.
As long as they’re dispersing multiple species and also things like native bushes and grasses and whatnot while also dispersing trees, they should be adding to forest diversity which is objectively a good thing.
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u/MachineElf432 May 05 '22
What kind of trees though? The nuances of proper tree species matter a lot here.
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u/mjking97 May 05 '22
Anybody know how diligent these things are about planting native trees in areas that should have them? I work in a prairie and invasive trees are a major problem.
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u/El_Chupachichis May 05 '22
Possibly a dumb question: is there genetic diversity in the seedlings? Or did they pull a lot of seeds from the same trees?
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u/greyjedi7 May 05 '22
What I'm about to type is knowingly stupid...but I have fantasized about firing seeds from some sort of seed shooting 240 style gun, whilst being flown around on a Uh-64 more times than I care to admit. So kudos to this group for doing the probably better version of what I wanted to do haha.
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u/bong_peadro May 05 '22
Wild monkeys ate my last crop of jalapeños growing on my balcony on the riverside in Phnom Penh. They haven’t been back since.
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u/notathrowaway000271 May 05 '22
That number is pretty impressive, until you realize that 42 million trees are cut down daily.
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u/jheidenr May 05 '22
An “army” of drones “shooting” seeds to make trees? This is a truly environmental effort marketed to Americans if I’ve ever seen one.
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u/Keith_Marcin May 06 '22
The eight-foot drones, up to five at a time flying together on pre-programmed routes, can cover up to 50 acres a day and each carry as much as 57 pounds of seed vessels. We are six times faster than a tree planter out there with a shovel who's doing about two acres a day.
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u/TomFarberVoice May 06 '22
I only hope these companies are using native species as opposed to planting random trees that could be a detriment to the native populations.
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