Here’s the problem: The planet is burning, and there’s not much we can do about it.
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 is building a tech-forward forest-as-a-service company that vastly simplifies and accelerates the process of restoring lands lost to wildfires.
The company sprouted, as it were, from DroneSeed, which was pioneering new methods of analyzing forests and planting seeds as a sort of remedial precision agriculture. What they found was that although their methods were effective, the bottleneck to restoring forests wasn’t just the planting process. It was…pretty much everything else.
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’t changed how they work in decades, for lack of either capital or interest.
As wildfires became a regular (and devastating) part of many regions’ dry seasons, suppliers of seedlings were caught flat-footed. Though it’s clearly an increasingly important part of supporting our planet’s health, reforestation has largely been standing still as other industries.
