In the past 10 years, forest fires ravaged an average of 7M acres annually in the US. (This is up from 2.6M acres per year in the 10-year period from 1982 to 1992.) The current method of reforestation involves people with shovels, carrying 50-pound bags of one- to two-year-old trees up 60° slopes. But what if we didn’t have to wait for greenhouses to grow seedlings? What if we could plant the right biological mix of seeds as soon as the fire cools? And what if we could do it all with drones?
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jospe. We traveled for this podcast down the street. It was very convenient. I’m happy it’s our first neighborhood leaving our office yet still in Ballard. Are you right on the limit? They have that horrible new word between Fremont and Ballard, Freelard. Are we like right on the boundary there? Actually, we might be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Christophe Jospe: We tried to keep it so simple. So simple. And we get to have two very distinguished guests on the podcast. We have Matthew Agai, who is the director of R&D Biological Products. And we have Grant Canary, who’s the CEO. And we’ll save the juicy bait. I usually like to lay out a little bit of like, what’s this podcast all about? Or why does it matter? I mean, obviously, photosynthesis removes carbon dioxide and talking about Reversing Climate Change. So it’s kind of like, duh, only a matter of time till we come up with scalable ways to do massive photosynthesis on an exponential scale.
But Grant, how’d you get into all this?
Grant Canary: Very specifically wanted to make a dent in carbon emissions. Had a bunch of bad ideas. Went through a lean startup method. I know they’re bad ideas because like I put them in front of people and mocked them up. Minimum viable product created a thing to said like, hey, this is going to be awesome. What do you think? And then friends that I knew, loved and trusted were like, I would never buy that. Don’t do that. Don’t spend the five years of your life doing that. It’s not worth it. And so like I can give you a couple examples if that’s useful but basically like one example was getting a gas station and putting a one cent on a liter a gallon of gas to be able to fund reforestation in a carbon market.
And I put that in front of people and people looked at that and they were like, ugh. And that was like for a lot of people, that was like something that they were not focused on or wanting to do at that time. I think actually that like you’re starting to see a lot more of a tipping point now. Because now we see that Shell, they have the ability to execute at scale with that. So they just announced $300 million for reforestation and in Europe, the ability to do just that. But for me as an entrepreneur, I started looking into the gas pumps.
I started looking at how would I get a gas station. How would I do a minimum viable product on that? And I just couldn’t see how to fund that on a CapEx. And I also was like getting pushback from people at the time saying like, I’m not sure why I want this product. So it was something that for me, it was like, it was not a good thing to dive into.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a very good way to go. You should test things out and do it in a small way before you launch a career in it or try to. You’d be surprised that this doesn’t happen as often as it maybe should. I’ve definitely seen ideas where I’m like, you should workshop this a little bit or before publicly announcing that this is your new life path.
Christophe Jospe: It is validating to be like, hey, Shell, you stole my idea. And also that, yeah.
Grant Canary: Yeah. But you have to look very critically at it and then also like look at CapEx, look at other things. But to fast forward, then what happens in this process is it becomes very painful because a lot of ideas are scrapped and the process sucks. And so you whine about it to your friends. That’s not exactly what they said. They said it much more sardonically. To try and talk me out of trying to do something. And so then you start to look at it. And the reason that we’re in the business we are is because trees have eons of R&D that nature already did.
And they’re really efficient at sequestering carbon and they’re really cost effective. And I’ll respect your desire to bury the lead here. But yeah, we could talk more about that.
Ross Kenyon: I think we should kick it over to you, Matthew. Sometimes we’ve let this get away from us a little bit. And then 20 minutes in, we’re like, oh yeah, you need to talk too. You could tell your story. So let’s do it.
Matthew Agai: Yeah, so I started out in the Midwest. I was an urban kid. I grew up in inner city Chicago. And I decided after years of flipping through National Geographic magazines that I was going to work in the natural environment. So I went down to... Purdue University started in a wildlife degree program and that rolled into this line of thinking, well, you can’t really have wildlife without the habitat. So eventually, as I pursued this greater career, I started working in habitat restoration, I became a nurseryman, worked I worked in a variety of efforts around the world helping to, you know, find seed, grow trees, build the infrastructure to do that and be successful at reforestation.
If I’m being completely candid, I killed a lot of trees over the years trying to get trees to grow in a lot of Interesting places. And the lesson I learned is that we need to amp up the scale. And I would say about 80% through my PhD program here at the University of Washington, I met these guys and I saw there was an opportunity to really put some throttle on that scaling concept. And this was like my one shot to work at doing this with technology. And I couldn’t say no.
The rest is history.
Christophe Jospe: So there’s killing a tree and then there’s killing a tree. What does that actually mean?
Matthew Agai: Okay. So yeah, killing a tree in the name of science is one way to look at it. So, you know, you grow a seedling and then you see what thresholds it can handle in terms of drought, in terms of Cool.
Christophe Jospe: So Grant, you’re the CEO, so you probably get these questions from investors all the time. I’m not going to invest in your company. I think it’s cool. If I had money, I would. Talk to me in a few years. But all right. What do you do? What problems do you solve? How does it work?
Grant Canary: Yeah. So we went through Techstar Seattle. First thing they train you to do for those listening is tell people how you get paid. Tell investors how you get paid because you’d be shocked how much that doesn’t happen. We have a service model, so we get paid per acre as a service. It’s a Plant tree seeds, spray to protect them, and then monitor their growth. And we do all of that utilizing drone swarms. So that’s one of the things you work through. We’re a couple of years out of Techstars now, but you just like how to summarize that and make that really succinct.
The people that pay us are Tim. So these are like the warehouses of the world, Boise Cascade, others that are out there, and then nonprofits. So the Nature Conservancy, and then government agencies. So Bureau of Land Management, which manages arrangements and forests, and then also the U. S. Forests. So these organizations, we work with three out of the five largest timber companies in the United States. We work for the Nature Conservancy, which is the world’s largest land conservation group on the planet. They have a We have two precedent-setting waivers from the FAA.
So the most recent of which is we got approved. So, our crew is out there. It’s a crew of four to five folks. There’s one pilot. There’s a pilot that has five RC remotes that can take control of an aircraft at any time, but the aircraft, five aircraft are operating autonomously. They’re pre-programmed, if you will. They’re not relying on the future of autonomous vehicle sensors to detect automobiles. Obstacles, what we do is we go out there, we do a survey with LiDAR and multispectral data, create a 3D terrain map. That map is then what we’re utilizing to pre-program the drones to do 10 hours of flights in 10 to 20 minute chunks.
Ross Kenyon: How’s it done now? How is this in advance? I guess many people probably aren’t familiar with how forestry actually works.
Grant Canary: The best tools right now that we have for reforestation are people with shovels and bags on their hips. And I’m not saying that like there’s many founders who are like, oh, they’ll Existing solution is terrible. No, it’s an issue in the sense that the people who do the work are absolute superheroes because they’re basically mountaineering with about 40 to 50 pounds of one to two-year-old grown trees in bags on their hips. Yeah. So, most of that is left as trees. Well, that means you have these incredible like 40 to 60 degree slopes that you’re planting trees on.
And so, in order to replant after a cut or after a burn, you’ve got to get people out there. And if you put a tractor on a 60 degree grade on what may be like snow and mud and whatnot, like you’ve created a huge safety risk. So, that’s one of the problems that we’re focusing on.
Matthew Agai: Yeah, the other element is all the biological side of that, the front end. You know, in order to get somebody to get out there and plant a seedling, you obviously need a seedling. So working backwards, that means you need a greenhouse. That means you need fertilizers, heating, a variety of materials, styrofoam or whatever. Whatever other containers compose that seedling infrastructure. And then before that, you need somebody to go out and collect the seed. And you know, you need to have a good seed year, which we haven’t quite as biologists nailed down when we’re going to have good seed years for any given species.
So there’s a little bit of a gamble there. Stockpiling, there’s storage. So there’s this whole process, this whole supply chain that feeds into we need to control this and it takes time. So we’re trying to shortcut that whole nursery side of things because instead of having, let’s say a fire as an example, and I’m sure we’ll head there, and then ordering a seedling and hoping within two to three years, having that seedling ready for planting, we essentially are able to respond by saying we have the seed, let’s get right out to site and get that genetic material into that surface or onto that surface as soon as you have that disturbance.
Ross Kenyon: I want to talk about the fires. You are correct in assuming that we did want to talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. This is maybe a little bit outside of exactly what you do because I don’t think you work at this stage of it. But what’s wrong with how the forests are managed now? Is there anything that could be changed that would improve it? Why are there fires? I just moved up here from LA like a year ago and I was shocked by I thought Washington would escape this. And I saw I was also up in BC too.
Matthew Agai: There’s not a one size kind of fits all in terms of understanding what the limitations are of our current, you know, government’s practices or our current any landowners practices towards mitigating fire risk. Every region has its own issues. But one way to What I’d like to classify it is you look at the last century and we did something called fire suppression pretty uniformly along most of the West Coast forest resources, really in most parts of the country where you had a forest because fire isn’t good. Not only the smoke and the air quality, but also So burning up a resource that can be utilized in an age of timber primacy, that was really something that people were trying to avoid.
So we basically built up a lot of fuels. And now, in addition to some of the anthropogenic heating happening around us, we’re kind of at a flashback. So, you know, the nuances of policy and things that go into that have to do with perhaps funding, perhaps objectives. When you’re managing a forest for a single objective like timber, you’re very focused. And as a result, you do everything. You know, everything you can to make sure there’s always timber. That’s one of the issues with the last century of, you know, forest management that led to where we are.
You know, a way to look at that now is a lot of society starts to value other things. For instance, the spotted owl in the early 90s and their forest. And therefore, we are able to start drawing circles around spotted owl populations and therefore protecting old growth as it was, you know, waning. And now we’re starting to think, okay, well, there are other resources that we can put values on in the forest and they don’t require there to be these perfect large Stands of, you know, fire prone trees so we can start to thin them out and still get the watershed protection, still get, you know, the myriad ecosystem services from like various fruits to, let’s say, mushrooms to, let’s say, wildlife or other things.
Grant Canary: I’ll piggyback on that too and say that your question specifically is like, hey, what’s causing all the fires? And you’ve got management practices and you’ve got climate change. Climate change makes things hotter, things are dry. They’re more likely to burn, more likely to burn faster. The management practices, if you’re like, we want to make sure we don’t throw timber companies under the bus, they do a lot of pre-commercial thinning, which is where you thin out trees that is that small brush or undergrowth. That costs money. But that’s actually a really good forest management practice because that means those areas are less likely to burn because there’s not that undergrowth or that fuel load that’s at the bottom.
And the US Forest Service, we’d like them to have more money to do thinning of not like Yeah.
Unknown speaker: That’s the kindling.
Grant Canary: That’s the kindling, right. Exactly. It’s the bottom of the fire. You can’t light a fire from the top. You have to light a fire from the bottom, and that’s the bottom. And so we’d love the Forest Service to have more money to do thinning because what Matthew’s saying is like, Like the management practices, we like, you know, you have a fire in your kitchen. What do you do? Put it out. You don’t like, oh, we think this fire is a good fire to get rid of all the grease on the stove, right?
Like that’s not been like the, that’s not been the useful thought practice. You’re like, oh, no, put it out. And so that’s what the Forest Service has in the past. So what’s happening is you’re actually seeing them get up way up into the crown. They’re also torching the seed banks that are in the first couple layers of organic material. Matthew can talk much more deeply about this. As a PhD candidate with 12 years of doing reforestation. So like, and by the way, around the world, so make sure you grill them on that and some of those projects.
But if you’re torching that like that loads like stored pine cones that are in the soil, all of a sudden, you’re not seeing natural regeneration either. So your forests are not naturally coming back. And we’ve previously been relying on that natural region, which is biology class, like it burns and then like nature knows what to do with it. There’s an ecosystem, there’s a seed, it grows. So we’re not seeing that. So then what happens is nature hates a vacuum, invasives move in. Invasives are more likely to burn. And just for like comparison, that’s a 10-year average, not a cherry-picked number, just a 10-year average.
For comparison, Weyerhaeuser, which is the biggest forestry company in the United States, on average, they reforest about a million acres a year to replace what they’ve cut. And so that’s seven times what the largest timber company by a factor of five is reforesting every year. So when I say those people that are doing the reforestation are superheroes as individuals, recruiting that labor... We’re utilizing seeds as opposed to seedlings grown in a nursery, which have all the HVAC supply chain costs, refrigerated supply chain to take it out to site, recruit the labor.
We’re trying to make it so people can do more with less, not replace those people, but at Instead of manually tilling fields, give them a tractor. And drones are that tractor for reforestation that hasn’t existed in the terrain. And just some stats on that too, like I will continue to flog these stats until they are just beaten to a pulp. Yeah. They are incredibly fit and it’s something that people do for maybe one season and then they’re like, never again. And that includes also any other labor supply. It doesn’t matter if it’s in Thailand.
It doesn’t matter if it’s in the US. People make a mental calculation. They’re like, I can do this job. For maybe one to two years and get a little bit more money per hour, or I can do another job in agriculture or making electronics or something like that. And it’s lower paying, but I can do it for 20, 40 years to support my family. Except for like the young bucks and a few like way outside the bell curve, like old timers, like they invariably choose the latter, which is do it for 20 to 40 years.
Ross Kenyon: I could see a lot of people preferring the Jack Kerouac Firewatch or Edward Abbey just cruising around the national parks in a beat up pickup truck. Sounds a little bit easier. Yes. You did a very good CEO job there bringing it all back to what you’re doing. And so you guys slide right in there because you’re trying to reforest this burnt land, right? People will bring you on to do that.
Grant Canary: Yeah. And there’s a very acute need for it too. Like we do an annual customer survey. If you’re one of the largest timber companies in the United States and the fire is over 500 acres, you don’t have seedlings that are grown for one to two years ready to drop in. So if you And if you don’t have that, then what happens is, well, you’ve got to figure out some way to keep the invasives out. You’ve got three options. You’ve got spray, you’ve got manual, like labor with machetes and backhoes, or you’ve got matches.
Those are your three solutions.
Christophe Jospe: And it’s deferred maintenance and it’s So part of my ignorance here, I mean, we’re talking a little bit about management practices and I just wanted to make a note of why fires are also happening. I mean, there are issues with the pine beetle. Sort of make trees even more prone to burning really quickly. And a big part of the pine beetle is because there’s such a monoculture crop of a tree. And sometimes when you think about, oh, well, let’s just scale quickly. Oh, no, are they planting the same trees? Are we going to see something like?
Can you talk about the seed variety and how you manage some of these tensions?
Matthew Agai: Yeah, I mean, any good forestry student knows that it’s all about landowner objectives. So first and foremost, you know, we’re trying to meet the prescription that the landowner desires and whether that’s a very small mix of species or very wide mix of species can vary. Those love to burn. We encourage our customers to have dialogue with us and consider all the options. And a lot of that relies on what their seed banking strategy is. So if they have a variety of orchards, they will People often put out seed mixtures out onto a landscape that has burned.
You’d be surprised even some of the big Temos and Reeds, these big forestry organizations are...
Unknown speaker: Sorry, what’s a Timo?
Matthew Agai: Timber Investment Management Organization. He warned you this would happen.
Unknown speaker: I know.
Matthew Agai: And then... We also...
Christophe Jospe: I didn’t get off to Grant. He said FAA and I wanted to start singing like... What is it? The Guster song? The fa, fa, fa, fa, fa, fa. That’s the... What is that again?
Matthew Agai: The Federal Aviation Administration. There it is. Yeah. And so anyway, going back to seed mixes, we are all about getting a variety of species out there because you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket and put a monoculture out there and have that high risk. You want to reduce We always have that in mind, but we do have to be careful because, again, it’s all about the landowner objectives. We are a contractor.
Grant Canary: Yeah, and I’ll jump in there. Can we just digress and nerd out a little bit on supply chain? Because I think it’s super important. There’s a pragmatic element that I think is missing, especially in cities understanding, and I’m self from that, so I identify in Yeah. We always want to be doing native species, as Matthew mentioned. Polyculture is part of my background and everything I’ve ever done has been in sustainability. So Vestas Wind Energy, U. S. Green Building Council, etc. And one of those aspects. All of these things. And then you have to then have a nursery system that grows a number of seeds from seed zones in different nurseries, then goes out to site in a refrigerated supply chain.
And then there’s a worker population that then puts it into the ground. And then there’s a monitoring group. There’s a long supply chain. There’s so much costs in grown trees. And one of the things that we can do, and I said, but, so like, We are all about the polyculture and native species. And the best way to do that is utilizing seeds as opposed to seedlings because you cut out that part of the nursery that is, you know, if you have four species, you’re most likely dealing with multiple nurseries who specialize in cultivation of different plants.
And so if you’re doing that- Is that right?
Ross Kenyon: Nursery men?
Grant Canary: Yeah. Nursery men or women.
Ross Kenyon: Just from the check. You know, a more- Nursery folk.
Matthew Agai: Less nomenclature, you know, grower.
Ross Kenyon: That was a totally necessary objection.
Grant Canary: So to jump back on that train, like if you are doing that, we can cut out parts of that supply chain. So we cut out the refrigerated supply chain where like you’ve grown a tree, you can’t put it in a hot metal box to go out to the middle of nowhere. You have to have a refrigeration unit on that truck. That’s expensive. The HVAC in the nursery, nurseries like 25 to 50% of the nursery operation costs are in HVAC because you have to keep the climate controlled and doing that in the, like wherever you’re doing that is really expensive.
And then you’ve also got to have multiple ones. So those refrigerator trucks have to drive around to different nurseries to pick up different trees to do a polyculture. Now, subtract all that out. You just utilize seed. We’ve simplified that supply chain. You go a step further.
Unknown speaker: And you’ve saved carbon.
Grant Canary: And you’ve saved carbon. Yes. Less HVAC. So that’s great.
Christophe Jospe: Which is heating, ventilation, and air conditioning for those who didn’t know. Sometimes it goes overboard, but yeah.
Grant Canary: No, no, appreciate it. Thank you. So the other thing that I’ll point out on supply chain is like, so I quoted the stat, like 7 million acres is the 10 year average burn in the US now. That’s an average though. So that means some years it’s 10 million acres burn and some years it’s like five. And that is a 5 million acre swing. And that is a hell of a lot of trees if you were to just like have them on call.
Matthew Agai: They don’t often want to grow on spec and I should defend nurseries a little bit along this line. They are an extremely efficient way of growing genetic material and preparing it for difficult conditions and doing it at scale. I’ll use the federal nursery system as an example, though. There used to be 20. Now there are probably six. There hasn’t been a lot of investment in modernizing and streamlining this supply chain. So we are essentially presenting the case that it is deficient in meeting all of society’s needs. So we want to make sure we’re adding a tool to the toolbox and this highly efficient tool.
Grant Canary: So in this, because this is important because you’re going from 20 nurseries to six. So like the reason for that is like if you have in one year like, oh, we grew all these trees because we expected 10 million acres to burn, right? Which would be like one part of the political spectrum’s answer is like, well, just have the government take care of it. The whole public will just pay for it and we’ll plant all these trees and it’ll be great. Well, the problem with that is then like, oh, okay, well, only 7 million acres burn.
Well, now you’re throwing away 3 million acres worth of trees because you can’t just keep growing them because they get bigger. And then where are you going to like, then all of a sudden they start to choke each other out and kill each other. And like, that’s an issue. Now you want to see a mad public throw away 3 million trees. That’s taxpayer dollars and their trees. People will be super pissed. On the other side is like, okay, well, we’ll grow 5 million acres. Well, now you’re 2 million acres short.
That’s a lot of land to be short trees on. So what we see is seeds. Now, what we need to get into is setting the proper expectations because the public also kind of assumes like, oh, we’ll just go out there and plant trees and they all grow 100%. Just like in my backyard when I plant a 10-year-old tree, every single one of them grows. And if not, I get angry and go down the nursery and be like, why does this tree go? So there’s a numbers game we need to get into and I’ll flip it over here.
But you also had a question, sir.
Christophe Jospe: No, I love numbers. I did have a question around the success rate of seeds versus nursery trees. Do you have a quick back of the envelope for us?
Matthew Agai: Yeah, back of the envelope. I’d say that here in the Pacific Northwest, 80% for seedlings coming out of a nursery, 80%. So that’s the one to two year old tree, a seedling. Right. Yeah. Something with roots should survive in a forestry operation or some sort of restoration outfit. Seeds, it can vary, you know, we’ve felt comfortable with the metric that 16%. So we’re enabling seed. We’re taking it to the next level. So we should be operating somewhere above that 10% mark in terms of survival. And the higher we can get that, the better without that nursery input.
Grant Canary: Well, we need to explain, like, we don’t do just raw seeds. There’s more to it. Yeah, you got to see some of that.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, we did. Yeah, Matthew took us to the murder room. Not sure what that’s all about.
Grant Canary: Lots of plastic sheeting, very Dexter-like, but it’s, yeah, it’s where we do puck production. Yeah, you want to talk about that?
Matthew Agai: Yeah, sure. Basically, we look at it this way. We know that seedlings are very efficient. They have roots, but we’re not planting things with roots because there’s this whole supply chain that So instead of just being a raw seed outfit, which, you know, is not really a change in the state of the art, we want to enable seed and essentially give them any sort of strategic enhancement, whether it’s Our software that leads to placement in the forest or on the facilitative side from a material standpoint, giving it some sort of platform to facilitate that already wonderful evolutionary potential to germinate, maximize that likelihood of germination, growing a root down and surviving on a site.
So that’s what you saw. And to summarize it without getting into much of the details, it’s a fiber-based platform. And then in that fiber-based platform, we put in seed and a variety of amendments that do exactly that, that facilitate that evolutionary potential of whatever that species is to get out onto the site, break that dormancy, and grow into a plant.
Grant Canary: Two ways a seed can die. Dry out, gets eaten. Those are like the top two ways that it dies. We put in things that make sure that those two things have a lower probability. But again, I feel like the public has a problem with probability. We don’t see 100% success rate. We’re playing a numbers game. So what you do is you go out there, you put a large number. We’ll call it 1,000 to 2,000 pucks per acre. And then you rely on a survival rate that you’ve calculated out. Matthew gave the number 16%.
So then you see you get to, there’s a certain number of seeds per puck. So then one to two dry seasons later or a summer Right. Right. Right. Yeah. So if I were to do my CEO job, as I’ve been framed here, if you were to sum it up, there’s three things that the system that we’ve built with our team does. The first part is go out there, map it, utilize LiDAR, utilize multispectral data, and identify where we want to put a seed puck or the payload. And also avoid obstacles on the way.
Don’t crash into trees. That’s not helpful for executing. Second thing is we want the actual... We want it to not get eaten and we want it to not dry out. And then the third thing is we want to do all of this in a way that we make money and is efficient. And most drone companies, the reason we operate with swarms is because it’s the old adage of many hands. Yeah. Any aviation professional knows that your time on the ground is the time that you’re not servicing your customer, you’re not making money, you’re just wasting time.
And so we built this whole support system and charge structure behind that allows us to, we’re actually operating A lot like a NASCAR pit crew, that crew of four or five, not only are they observing the aircraft, there’s a person in the computer that can pause the aircraft, but they’re also running out there, swapping out the batteries, getting more pucks back in. And then there’s a planting module or payload that actually kicks the pucks out at the right spot because micrositing is super important. So we can get into what that is with the mapping and the LiDAR and the multispectral, but putting the puck in the place where it needs to go is the other.
That’s really, really keen. And that’s what those people with shovels are doing. They’re trained to put a tree not in gravel, not in a river. These are very basic things like put it in a nice little like sandy patch of ground that has some mineral content that it’ll grow.
Christophe Jospe: And so this is what you’d call precision forestry, right? That is the precision forestry element of it.
Grant Canary: And do you want to take it away there?
Matthew Agai: Yeah, sure.
Ross Kenyon: So like, you know, backseat podcasting right there.
Unknown speaker: Go ahead.
Matthew Agai: It’s in the follow leads. Basically, Graham mentioned microsetting. That’s another element to that question you asked about seed survival. So one of the things that we do in all sort of planting operations, in our case, seeding operations, is find the optimal location for I’m sure you’ve heard like, you know, the north side is where the moss grows on a tree. You know, there are features of different sites like slope, aspect, different terrain. Features like stumps, downed woody detritus, other things that are laying around that are actually lending themselves to a more nursery-like environment for that genetic material, meaning it’s sheltered from the extremes of a site like moisture deficit, too much We try to find these features using all that multispectral imagery, the LIDAR, and then we use, right now, We now supervise classification to annotate those on a site and ultimately when we get feedback on whether our seeds have germinated or not at a site, ones and zeros, grown or not, at what rate did they grow, how many pucks were there, we classify all these things and then they feed into a model that eventually will be our machine learning model for making these decisions without us.
Grant Canary: For the record, not a startup out there saying, oh, it’s machine learning, like computers solve it all for us. No, we’re in the very early stages where it’s supervised classification or manual annotation.
Christophe Jospe: I’m so glad you said that because we also have a machine learning angle to what Nori does, but we don’t go and tout it. It comes down to you need to ground truth what is going on with the model. And so don’t talk to me about some abstract algorithm unless you really have the practical knowledge that can inform this smarter algorithm. So... That’s just to say, like, everyone out there, like, make your models open so others can replicate it. Everything will move more quickly. Sorry.
Unknown speaker: You had something you wanted to add.
Matthew Agai: I mean, I’m just playing into that here. I mean, we want that to be the case. But the only way to do that from the biological side is more data. And the best time to have started our business on the biological side was, you know, years ago. What is the expression? 20 years ago is the best time to plant a tree, right?
Christophe Jospe: I knew you were going to do that.
Matthew Agai: So, best time for us to do it is right now, yesterday, the day before, and we’ve been going as fast as we can on the seed side to get our pups produced, get other things produced, get experiments out ahead of our business. So, we’re not only planting. We’re also planting our prototypes strategically in other locations ahead of where we’d like to expand. We’re in the southern hemisphere, so we can take advantage of multiple growing seasons. You know, we want to be in more places. So we implore people to reach out to us so we can send out our prototypes, you know.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve had friends who are either drone enthusiasts or entrepreneurs, and I know that FAA is strict sometimes. I’ve also seen things where maybe they’ve loosened up or been innovating on the frontiers of this regulation. What’s the state of it now? How does your business interact with it? How’s that all going?
Grant Canary: Yeah, the FAA portion of things, the FAA was a sleepy organization that managed, I’m not sure how many, but we’ll just pretend it’s a thousand plus so that I can have a number to toss out there, but a thousand plus like 737s and other large aircraft coming in and out of their airspace. And then all of a sudden it was like, oh... Wait, hold on. There’s going to be 500,000 DJI Phantoms in the airspace now. And they had to very quickly turn around and come up with something. And I would not say that anyone in the FAA would say that like, oh, yeah, we nailed it.
They worked really hard to figure out... I got pushed back from Congress. So from our perspective, to answer the question, we treated the Part 107, which is the federal statue where they basically took everything that was related to drones and called drones under 55 pounds. And they just made a statue for it called 107 and said, everything related to things under 55 pounds that don’t have pilots that are on the aircraft is in this statue. So when they created the ability for... You could get waivers to things like being able to fly multiple drones with one pilot.
We treated that like there was a day that was coming out.
Unknown speaker: And that’s a drone swarm, right?
Grant Canary: That’s a drone swarm. Yes. And so this was in 2016, 2017. We treated that like We knew the date that it would come out and the morning that they would announce what the waivers and exemptions you could get or we had pre-drafted a whole bunch of stuff. Nobody knew what the form was going to look like. And so we were all up the night before going like, are they going to release it at 12. 01am? Are they going to release it at like 8am East Coast? Like what’s happening? And as soon as it was live on the FAA site, there was like five text boxes and we just like nailed it, punched it in, sent it in.
So that was like step one for our first precedent setting waiver. And then the next step. Yeah. Who sort of have these regional offices in various places and they will go and certify planes, aircraft maintenance operations, etc. So we did a live demo of our multiple vehicle operations the first time and then we did another one for our second precedent setting waiver. To do a knowledge and skills test. They had never done a knowledge and skills test. So they pioneered it with us. And they brought not one, but six inspectors out.
Because the other five were there for observation training to kind of know what was happening because they were going to encounter a lot more. And so like, if you want to talk about a stressful environment, like you’ve got not one, but six FAA inspectors watching you. And you’re flying multiple aircraft simultaneously, doing it on a test that like, Is being pioneered between you and the FAA at the same time. So it’s not like, oh, it’s just go and take the SATs. We all know how then like, you know, whatever the formulas are to get through these questions is very much more open ended.
And at the end, we pass that. So yeah, so that’s kind of how we’ve interacted. We reacted with the FAA. Our first approval took 221 days. By the FAA standards, they’re like, we worked really hard to move that really quickly for you. And from our perspective, we’re like, oh, that hurts so much. But we really appreciate what the FAA did. And so, what the FAA has done and how fast they’ve moved that, they probably appreciate us because our theater of operations is in the middle of nowhere on private land or conservation easements or government access only type sites.
Literally, it’s very different than we’d like to deliver a burrito in the middle of downtown Chicago or Seattle or wherever, right? There’s not a lot of people that can be impacted by our operations or an aircraft having problems. I mean, literally, there are steel Gates that are foresters, they want to keep people out of specific areas to have them not start fires. And so when they lock gates, they’re steel gates, but they’re also filled with concrete. So you can’t even arc weld through them. You can see that sometimes they get hit by trucks and they still stay locked.
So it’s a fairly lockdown in that method. And so from the FAA’s perspective, they’re very much a data-driven organization. They’re like, Go hither and develop all the data on how many flights you’ve done and issues you encounter. And we want to see that data. So we’re a data source for them in a very safe area. And we’re very, very effective at communicating what we’re doing. Rockstar team members, not on this conversation, but come from Air Force Academy, come from Weapons School, which is the other top gun. Jennifer Flonica, our VP of Ops, is very, very highly qualified.
She’s organized 300 C-17s at a time. So for her organizing five drones with 115 pound payload, they’re big drones, but they’re nothing like C-17s, right? They’re eight feet in diameter, but they’re nothing like a C-17.
Christophe Jospe: That I think everything you’re saying is just really cool. I’m just kind of basking in it. I’m like, wow, these guys are one of the major forces advancing the drone industry seems to make a lot more sense than that Portlandia episode where they’re like watching a concert and flying drones around or just like these annoying pesky little Mm-hmm. Yeah, cool. We should probably get to wrapping this up soon, but I do have one clarifying question. How many acres are you on right now? Like each year, how many acres are you trying to plant seeds on?
Grant Canary: Yeah, well, I’ll give you the numbers as far as surveyed. We’ve got the planting, spraying, monitoring. So we’re at a thousand plus. Amazing.
Christophe Jospe: This is getting to the end of it. We want to give our listeners a chance to learn more, to stay in touch with you. If there are things that they can do, can they write a letter to their local congressman and say, hey, let these guys just have an easy pass at something? Or what can our listeners do to stay involved and stay connected to this work?
Grant Canary: Check us out at droneseed.co, droneseed.com. And we’ll see what we can’t do to put a subscribe link on there to get people some updates. I think those are the things for now. Can we take 90 seconds to talk about carbon emissions real quickly in the carbons market with the emissions trading system?
Matthew Agai: I just want to clarify that, you know, we do not segregate ecosystems. Like we are working in rangelands as well. So trees are one avenue, but we are across the board.
Unknown speaker: If there are seeds- Oh yeah, you plant grass.
Matthew Agai: We’ll plant anything.
Unknown speaker: Sagebrush?
Grant Canary: Anything native. Sagebrush? Sagebrush is a big one. Yeah, super important for sage grouse, which has become a topic of concern in the political conversations. But one of the things I’ll note is that the emissions trading system in California, $4 billion. And allowances, another $200 million in offsets. It’s something that we’re starting to see major forestry players make very specific changes to their business models. Sierra Pacific, California’s largest landowner, 1. 7, 1. 8 million acres. They’ve transitioned already about 29,000 acres to emissions trading systems and the California projects there and looking to do about 50% of their acreage into offset projects.
And so what we’re seeing there is like awesome projects. We have done a deep dive internally for ourselves, for our investors to be like, great, well, is this a scam? Is this like, okay, great, they’re just going to do business as usual, cut the trees and whatnot. No, they have to have different management practices, bigger spacing, more fire control, etc. that goes into that to be able to be valid. And then they also, anything that they’re cutting... If they’re cutting it, it has to go into a supply chain that’s also validated in its own way because you can lock up that carbon in homes.
And as long as you’re locking up that carbon for 100 years, that’s really the metric for the emissions trading system in California. So we’re seeing that and going, okay. Great. We really like that. That’s funding reforestation. We expect that to increase over time as other players like Nature Conservancy. We were just out visiting Colville Tribes and also have experience doing reforestation projects and getting in. So we’re seeing that. And I guess the thing that I would wrap on to respect everyone’s time that’s listening is very much that if you look at Billions.
Yeah. Billions, trillions, like quadrillions. Over one trillion. Yes, we will take all the carbon out, right? So like if you have a surface area issue in the sense that any other, if you have millions of tonnes of any other thing, what would that look like across the state of Texas if phosphorus of coal or something? Millions of tonnes would be a lot of surface area. So you have two options. You either have oceans or forests. And the idea of dumping a bunch of iron into oceans, man, law of unintended consequences.
Like really, I’m very much opposed to that. I think that will just completely cause All these problems that we just do not even understand yet. Whereas we know right now forests works. People will sit in trees to protect forests very publicly acceptable. The other option is you have scaled up air scrubbers, but you have a flow rate. Right. You look at where we’re at on a price per acre of sequestered carbon. If you are pulling out at some of our price points, you’re at $13 per acre of sequestered carbon. The math there is you take the dollars per acre that we charge to put trees out there, and then you take the 15 to 20 tonnes of carbon per managed acre of forest, and then you look at it And you’re like, great, where were we at?
And for the first year, you’re at like $13 to $20 per ton, which $14 is the price floor in the California trading system right now. So we’re already below the price floor. And that’s just for the first year. The projects continue to accrue credits over the lifetime of the project. So that can be very much like a source of cash flow for these industries. And yes, of course, if they do burn, there’s an insurance pool that everybody pays into. So like, we really love what you’re up to with making a system that has more verification, that can trade more emissions, because we really see like a ton of additional funding for reforestation projects, because on a surface area physics basis, they’re the most efficient.
And on a cash basis, cost basis, they’re the most efficient because nature already did the R&D for those systems.
Christophe Jospe: Mic drop. I totally agree. And we definitely should do a whole other podcast that gets into how this can work and also how we can use drone data more efficiently to just dramatically cut out verification costs because it’s all right there.
Ross Kenyon: You might not know this, but this guy worked in direct air capture for a long time, too. So you just laid so many things right in front of him.
Christophe Jospe: I won’t even respond to that. Yeah, we’re going to exist. Juicy steaks. Yeah. Ross is like saying, wrap it up, Kristoff, because I need to go do my next thing. So I will do that. But thank you for listening. If you like the show, please subscribe. This is the first time you’re listening. You can follow Nori on Twitter at Nori. You can check us out at Nori.com. Check out DroneSeed. That’s DroneSeed.co or com. And we’ll see you next time.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks, guys. Thank you for making time.
