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It’s not credible. I know people that work at this kind of company. None of the countermeasures have been successful and the germination rate is less than 1%.
by dymk 5y ago
It’s not credible. I know people that work at this kind of company. None of the countermeasures have been successful and the germination rate is less than 1%.
- relaunched 5y agoCan you site any sources supporting your claim?
- dymk 5y agoNo, this is hearsay, and I'm only passing on information I've heard from people that work at companies in this space and in silviculture (lots of companies are trying to crack the "plant trees with drones" nut).
- na85 5y agoEven 0.5% of 40000 seeds is 200 trees per day.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dymk 5y agoThat's nothing, and in addition to that, it's a huge waste of seeds (these companies are buying up all the available seed for certain species of trees, which means net fewer trees planted). Manually planting already germinated baby trees is more efficient both in terms of hours and labor spent and has a higher germination rate.
- otikik 5y agoDepending on the seed that might be enough. The same way just adding another machine to a cloud might be more economic than employing 2 engineers for a year in order to make a system more efficient. A coffee bean weights 132.5 milligrams. 40k of those is ~5.3 kgs of beans. Sure it would be inefficient to employ all of those beans if only 200 of them end up being viable. But if those "wasted" 5 kg beans saves labour, then it might make economical sense. And if the alternative is running some sort of heavier planter machine, it might end up producing less emissions. For the record I have not done real numbers here and my gut instinct is that the drone thing is a gimmick. I'm just trying to keep an open mind.
- twofornone 5y agoI don't think emissions should be a concern at all for a reforestation project, unless orders of magnitude more waste is emitted compared to that absorbed by a tree over, say, 10-20 years. Forests pay long term dividends beyond carbon capture.
- sandworm101 5y ago200 trees is about how many an experienced treeplanter will plant before thier first coffee break.
- fnordpiglet 5y agoYes but do they use AI and machine learning? Do they hover in place and look cool? They don’t even have a cool name like “drone.” I guess you probably also can’t mass produce and automate experienced tree planters too. While they’re swilling coffee they could be launching hundreds or even thousands of AI powered drones shooting fancy seed pods everywhere. You can’t stop progress John Henry.
- bostonsre 5y agoThey claim 80% germination rate at this company.
- hemreldop 5y ago
- brundozer 5y agoI don't know what the germination rate is when you plant the seeds by hand, but it seems that aerial seeding requires 1.5 to 2 times more seeds. https://efotg.sc.egov.usda.gov/references/public/IL/AgronomyTechNote21.pdf https://efotg.sc.egov.usda.gov/references/public/IL/Agronomy... This does not seem excessive in regards of the time it saves.
- dymk 5y agoCover crops aren't trees. To elaborate... Cover crop seeds (basically grasses) and tree seeds are apples and oranges. You can spray grass seed on the surface of the dirt and it will grow into a meadow. The same can not be said for trees. They will be eaten by birds and mice and digested, not dispersed. They also don't germinate well when left on the surface of the soil. It's also a matter of numbers - tree seeds are by comparison, incredibly expensive to harvest. There's an industry of people who will camp out in forests, stalk squirrels, and see where they're storing their nuts. Or they climb trees to manually harvest fresh pinecones. It's labor intensive and you need a permit to do it.
- pas 5y agowhat does this mean?
- dymk 5y agoI've added more context to the comment
- sebmellen 5y agoWhat if a drone were to shoot the seeds into the ground with such force that they would be buried 4-5 inches deep (which is, I would guess, the necessary depth for successful propagation)?
- cinntaile 5y agoThat's probably too deep for most plants. 1-2 inches is probably more realistic, with 2 being close to the max.
- fnordpiglet 5y ago400 trees a day planted by drones seems ok. That’s 146,000 per year. Per drone. Seems ok to me.
- dylan604 5y agoWhere did you see anything about a drone planting 400 trees a day? This would truly be remarkable if it existed.
- yakak 5y ago40k/day Ad * 1% success rate criticism = 400 trees/day. So the criticism is a claim it is remarkable?
- dylan604 5y agoExcept these drones are not planting trees is my hang up on the comment. These drones are randomly throwing out seeds. The 1% is a seed germination rate. A germinated seed does not equate to a tree being planted.
- yakak 5y agoI think a sapling planter plants more than their salary in saplings, so a comparison to the human sapling planter is false equivalence. I also don't see the difficulty in waiting until a seed has germinated in a nutrition disc before releasing it if you want to focus on getting 80% germination. Regardless of what choices are made it seems likely to me that someone's automation in this area is already capable of doing about as well as careful management in some places with high labor costs. From equality, an automated system can easily double it's yield every few years while a managed system is going to be lucky with 20% improvement? Really improving seed performance and dispersion by orders of magnitude from natural with automation never has to get anywhere near as good as a manual system of trying to raise every tree.