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How to Grow a Forest Really Really Fast
- hoopism 12y agoI read a book about Fordlandia a while back. Absolutely fascinating look at applying manufacturing principals to agriculture/horticulture without domain knowledge. Was hard not to think of Fordlandia when reading this... odd they don't mention it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia Here's the book. http://www.amazon.com/Fordlandia-Henry-Fords-Forgotten-Jungle/dp/0312429622 http://www.amazon.com/Fordlandia-Henry-Fords-Forgotten-Jungl...
- nashashmi 12y agoThere is another organization that advocates the use of cattle for grazing and converting deserts to green lands. The green lands have been found to restore streams. This movement uses the same principles for sustenance. I think it is called the savant institute. the founder also has a ted talk.
- Beached 12y agoAllan Savory: His ted talk is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI
- thrownaway2424 12y agoGrazing for conservation is an interesting topic. Clearly, cattle and sheep do trample stream banks. In over-grazed lands (any place in the western USA) practically all riparian habitat has been destroyed by grazing. But, limited grazing does have benefits. At the Vina Plains ecological preserve (near Chico, California) they found that without grazing invasive weeds took over the entire site. When they allowed limited grazing the cattle trampled the non-native weeds, giving the native grasses and flowers a chance to grow. Just letting a herd through briefly in the spring season was enough to have this effect and not enough to ruin the streams. This is an interesting article about grazing at Vina Plains. https://www.cnps.org/cnps/publications/fremontia/january_2000/7griggs.pdf https://www.cnps.org/cnps/publications/fremontia/january_200...
- jessaustin 12y ago...over-grazed lands (any place in the western USA)... Anyone who has spent any time in public lands in the West naturally will be skeptical of this "cattle preserve grass" theory. We need more detail about why this hasn't been the case in USA public lands, and how policies could be changed to make it so. (The most obvious change would be "keep cattle off public land so the taxpayer isn't subsidizing certain beef producers".) That said, I'm confident that cattle aren't as bad for plants as horses are. Cattle lack upper incisors, as do deer and antelope. This means they tear off the upper portion of the plant, rather than extracting the plant along with most of the root as horses tend to do.
- ghshephard 12y agoI have friends in the Okanagan who managed to get some of the advanced species of Rapid Growing Hybrid Poplar from the research plantation they have in Vernon, BC. They have a small lot, about 5 acres, with a good agricultural water supply, which they planted mostly with this hybrid. In the first year these seedlings grew from around 6" to almost 5' in height. In the second year, the trees were 10' high. By the end of year three they had a mini forest of 15' high trees. It was actually terrifying how quickly these hybrids were capable of growing - reminded me of something out of "Day of the Triffids" - one only wonders what would happen if these fast-growing hybrid-poplars somehow managed to start spreading...
- NickNameNick 12y agoMy family owns a small pine plantation as an investment, and we were very lucky to buy our saplings right before the fery vast growth varieties came on the market. The fast growth versions have extremely soft timber, its functionally useless, even the paper pulp mills only buy it at a discount. They are probably vulnerable to storm damage too, but we haven't had to deal with that. Might still be useful to build a wind break and out-compete introduced varieties in phases
- abakker 12y agoI guess they're moderately OK at carbon sequestration? Assuming that we just choose to do nothing with them once they die.
- bsder 12y agoThey're more water, less carbon. So, they are less efficient at carbon sequestration in terms of density. And, they are probably easier for microbes to break back down so they hold the carbon for less time.
- vanderZwan 12y agoWait, so they literally took the meat industry's trick of "add water to add weight" and used that with trees?
- conjecTech 12y agoFor those of you who found this interesting and wish to know more, I would very heavily recommend you research permaculture and particularly check out some of the videos made by Geoff Lawton, which are extremely informative and entertaining. There is also a fantastic documentary case study of similar techniques being used by a farmer named Sepp Holzer on his farm the Krameterhof in Austria, though I don't remember the name. It was compelling enough to persuade a 16 year-old me to dig up about an acre of the hard red clay in my back yard and try to create a self sustaining food forest. Slightly more on topic, I'm very glad to see people trying to make a business out of these techniques and I wish the people at Aforestt all the best.
- contingencies 12y agoAgreed. Fukuoka's classic The One Straw Revolution is also excellent reading. He was a trained biologist who then moved toward a more holistic and philosophically based approach to land management, reaping huge benefits. You can view his work as agricultural process hacking. His five principles: (1) human cultivation of soil, plowing or tilling are unnecessary, as is the use of powered machines (2) prepared fertilizers are unnecessary, as is the process of preparing compost (3) weeding, either by cultivation or by herbicides, is unnecessary. Instead only minimal weed suppression with minimal disturbance (4) applications of pesticides or herbicides are unnecessary (5) pruning of fruit trees is unnecessary
- jessaustin 12y agoOccasionally, when we're really busy with non-gardening tasks during the summer, we follow these "principles" by default. No vegetables other than the tomatoes end up producing. And actually most years even the tomatoes require something for the hornworms, although we've had some success with the Bacillus thuringiensis spray. There must be more to this method than just not doing anything in the garden. EDIT: OK, I'll read this book. I have to ask: have you, or anyone you know personally, managed to grow useful plants from seed without cultivating, fertilizing, weeding, or pruning?
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- hyperbovine 12y agoThis is so neat. I have often dreamed of undertaking afforestation on a truly massive scale. In northern CA, every time I hike through redwoods (2% of their historical range) I wonder what prevents us from growing them faster. Not enough water? Not enough nutrients in the soil? Transporting either all the way up the tree? Can we engineer our way around these problems, or is it truly the case that the planet is incapable of recovering from the havoc we have wrought until long after we are all gone.
- Retric 12y agoRedwoods are massive and they need a lot of energy just to stay alive. But, in classic 2d v 3d scaling they don't gain enough sunlight for rapid growth. EX: A 250 foot tall tree with a 25ft diamiter base ~= 1,000 25 foot trees with 1 foot diamiter bases, but 1,000 25 foot trees would collect a lot more sunlight. PS: Redwoods do grow fairly quickly when there 'small'.
- thrownaway2424 12y agoOr if you just plant one or a few out in the open, they shoot right up.
- abakker 12y agoThey do often occur in mixed stands though. So while they do reach a maximum that doesn't allow the collection of more sunlight, they are still quite a bit taller than their neighbor trees that cannot reach the same height.
- sprokolopolis 12y agoI think that redwoods need a very specific environment. As I understand, they tend to need forest fires to grow well. This is one reason why you see controlled burns year round in places like Sequoia National Forest. Maybe that is just when they are young, because they don't really seem to die very easily once they are established. I once read that their most common cause of death is erosion, causing them to fall over (due to a shallow root system). I would love to see more redwood forests grown, but it seems like it might be hard to do.
- sitkack 12y agoThe Man Who Planted Trees https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTvYh8ar3tc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTvYh8ar3tc is a beautiful animated allegorical tale of reforestation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Planted_Trees http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Planted_Trees
- SuperChihuahua 12y agoI also liked this documentary "Forest Man" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkZDSqyE1do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkZDSqyE1do "Since the 1970's Majuli islander Jadav Payeng has been planting trees in order to save his island. To date he has single handedly planted a forest larger than Central Park NYC. His forest has transformed what was once a barren wasteland, into a lush oasis. "
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- JoeAltmaier 12y agoA mature forest has 100 trees per acre. They're doing 40 per square meter! This is certainly kickstarting tree growth, but you end up with a thicket instead of a mature forest.
- dickfickling 12y agoWhile still much more than 100 per acre, they're actually only planting "three to five saplings per square meter."
- arjie 12y ago> They're doing 40 per square meter! Where did you see this? I see > three to five saplings per square meter and > 300 trees of 42 species in a 93-square-meter plot I wouldn't nitpick but it's an order of magnitude.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoThanks! Mistyped, should have been '4'. Still, there are 4000+ square meters to an acre. That remains two orders of magnitude larger than a mature forest should have.
- whorleater 12y agoIt's also mentioned in the article that not all trees survive, meaning that the density would actually be slightly less than how it's planted.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoSo slightly less than 16,000 trees per acre?
- aetherson 12y agoI believe that the implicit claim of this method is that planting a thicket is part of a process, the end point of which is a mature forest, and that the trees which die in the process of thinning from the original density to the final density die with a purpose and their growth and eventual death helps restore the area to a forest much faster than would just leaving it alone. I do not have the expertise to validate this claim. But I don't think that they're suggesting that in 10 years there will still be 4 trees per square meter, or even one per square meter.
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- heydenberk 12y agoI don't much about other cities, but here in Philadelphia lots of Tulip Poplars were planted during the very first wave of proto-environmentalism in the late 19th century. They weren't an incredible environment boon unto themselves, but they are leading to secondary succession[1], which is to say, a more stable ecosystem closer to what we think of as "wild". If these new, rapidly-growing hybrids can lead to secondary succession more rapidly, they may provide a lot of indirect ecological value. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_succession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_succession
- bsder 12y agoIn Western Pennsylvania we've been doing something like this for a while on old strip mining sites. It used to be one of the projects for the local high school service clubs. After the mining companies strip mine a place, they take the good topsoil, sell it, and just dump back the fractured rock leaving a very acidic (sulfuric acid) soil once the rocks begin breaking down a little. About the only thing that would grow in this stuff would be pine trees, so we would plant pine saplings to kickstart the forest growth. It would neutralize the acidity over time, and drop needles to create a topsoil that wasn't so toxic. Pine trees are generally the starting point when a forest gets damaged, and then it switches over to deciduous over time.
- zkhalique 12y agoI rarely upvote, but this is amazing!
- d0m 12y agoLove it when technology helps the nature, instead of trying to squeeze out every little bit of fruits/money out of it and then let it die. I also really liked how every site was custom-thought to fit with the area (I.e. finding nutriments within 50km to help the local ecosystem). That's great.
- jeffdavis 12y agoHow does a Forrest preserve the aquifer/groundwater? If water falls on the ground, is that "wasted" or does it go into the aquifer? If it's wasted, where does it go?
- jonnathanson 12y agoMy best guess is that the development of forest root structures, combined with microbial, animal, and insect action, makes the soil more porous and absorbent. This allows rainfall to be captured and "reclaimed" by the soil, with excess trickling down into the aquifer. Simultaneously, the dense canopy provides shade to slow the effects of evaporation. By contrast, a barren soil would become hard and compacted, and much of the rainfall would simply wash away or be lost to evaporation. Again, this is one man's educated guess. I'm no expert, and it's quite possible I'm way off the mark.
- Ygg2 12y agoI think the trees try to keep a reserve of water around them, instead of letting it go back into the ground. Some anecdata - my family due to risk of falling decided to cut down some trees. Mere days after that the sewage flooded the basement. The trees were apparently keeping a reserve of sewage water around their roots that got released once they were cut down, flooding the basement. Multiple trees could keep that water around releasing it once there is too much water, thus forming or preserving aquifer. Not to mention they reduce evaporation.
- pdh 12y agoA cursory search for "forest aquifer" returns a number of relevant results. A couple of accessible and interesting ones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Barrens_%28New_Jersey%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Barrens_%28New_Jersey%29 http://files.hawaii.gov/dlnr/cwrm/publishedreports/eco1469_auahi.pdf http://files.hawaii.gov/dlnr/cwrm/publishedreports/eco1469_a...
- mpatobin 12y agoBare ground results in erosion whereas a forest slows the movement of water, shades it and allows it to sink into the ground.
- mathattack 12y agoWe then identify locally abundant biomass available in that region to give the soil whatever nourishment it needs. This seems like it would ultimately be the critical path item. You need a lot of fertilizer for them to grow. I applaud what these folks are doing!
- zobzu 12y agoYeah i wish he elaborated a bit on this since it seems the critical and difficult part (well once people let you grow the forest in peace that is..)
- wodenokoto 12y agoTo me it just sounded like they wanted waste from nearby farms / food production.
- mathattack 12y agoYes. To scale you would need an awful lot of this though. (I believe that biomass is relatively fixed, but would like someone else to delve into this more, as I don't know if the full dinosaurs -> oil -> gas and fertilizer cycle is a closed loop or not)
- Animats 12y agoHe's doing what's called "precision farming" in commercial agriculture. You measure soil properties, then plant and apply accordingly. That's in line with his background in Toyota production. Toyota's quality control is about measuring process variation, understanding its causes, and reducing it. Note his emphasis on measuring how many plants fail to grow.
- rwhitman 12y agoDammit. I found this so inspirational, so I sat down and watched his TED talk. Interesting stuff, but it seemed to be mostly a plug for his business. Then he mentions an "open source" platform for sharing his methods in detail. Cool! I google around. No such platform exists. This video is from a year ago. In the year since, the promise of shared knowledge hasn't been followed up on. So whatever tech is being used here, looks like is proprietary to this guy's business at the moment
- hcarvalhoalves 12y agoThis is what Christopher Alexander calls "to build nature". He, and a generation of architects and urbanists, realized some decades ago that preservation wouldn't be enough - we need to learn how to engineer nature to live in a symbiotic rather than predatory relationship.