Episode 89: Projectile tree-planting with Flash Forest

Molly Wood Voice-Over: 

Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood. 

So last week on the show we talked to Nathan Nalevanko from Kickstarter about funding climate startups on the popular crowdfunding site this week, let’s talk to one of its success stories a company that’s figured out some pretty action-movie drone technology for planting trees 

And along the way we’ll learn about how climate change is making wildfires and urban fires like the ones that swept through Los Angeles burn hotter and faster than they ever have before so much so that we can no longer rely on nature to regenerate the trees that we and our climate desperately need. 

Let’s get to it. 

Cameron Jones

My name is Cameron Jones. I'm one of the co-founders and I'm the chief operating officer of Flash Forest. Flash Forest is a company that is designed to help mechanize and automate the tree planting process. We set this up in response to the wildfire and climate change issues that we're experiencing in Canada and that I've experienced personally growing up in British Columbia where the forest behind our house burnt over 20 years ago and hasn't come back. And so...

A lot of the people in the company used to work as tree planters and we know that we have excellent tools for harvesting trees, but we don't have those same tools for putting them back in the earth. And so we set up a business to help automate the tree planting business using drones, using artificial intelligence, and then using automation and robotics and machinery so that we can actually produce millions of pods a day, which enable us to go out and address these issues rapidly.

Molly Wood

Amazing. If we're going to dig into those details in a minute, first I'm to note that you are saying we, and this we in this case is you and your brother, right? That's awesome. So when you say our house, or the forest behind our house, do you mean you and your brother and you worked on this together? How's that been?

Cameron Jones

Correct. I mean, if anyone who has been in business with family knows that it has its pros and cons, especially being in a startup because it's high stakes, it's high adrenaline. In fact, I usually say I subsist off of a diet of cortisol and adrenaline. That is what I am consuming all day. Yeah, yeah.

Molly Wood 

Ha.

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood 

Literally the mom and me right now is like, we're going to need to stop. We have to have a talk. Like you can't be, you can't do that.

Cameron Jones

But that's the beauty of it, right? That when it's family, you always know you're have to work through your issues, so we just deal with it. And then there's nothing festering, and when you know, we're not gonna stop being brothers at any point. Same thing with my sister-in-law, she's also in the business. We're not gonna stop being family, so we gotta work through our issues, and that's actually, I think, helped us get through a lot of the peaks and valleys that maybe... would have been a little too tumultuous for some other founders. It helped us kind of get through it.

Molly Wood 

And it's been what? Like five and a half years-ish, six years? Okay, yep.

Cameron Jones

That's right. right. Yeah, we incorporated it in September of 2019.

Molly Wood

So on that note, actually, this interview is part of a little series on kind of funding climate startups in a different way, specifically Kickstarter. So tell me about where kind of the funding journey and how Kickstarter played into that.

Cameron Jones 

Yeah, I honestly talk about our Kickstarter journey frequently because Kickstarter was kind of indispensable for us. We started this as just an idea out of our apartment in Toronto. And we thought about, know, why not using, why don't we use drones to plant trees? We had a friend that was a valedictorian of the engineering school at University of Toronto, and he helped us come up with a device that we mounted to a drone.

that actually allowed us to start firing these seed pods into the ground. And when we thought about launching the business, we went to a talk and there were these girls there that were founders of another company that launched on Kickstarter and they had actually had a really successful launch. So we met with them. They'd kind of coached us through their Kickstarter journey and we said, okay, we got a boilerplate. Let's follow this. And you know, one of the things she told us is if you can get

you know, over 10,000 commitments in the first day. It helps rank you very high for Kickstarter. And basically the night before, put out an email campaign to friends and family, hey, we're starting this business. We're going out. want to plant trees and we want to use drones to do it. We're launching a Kickstarter tomorrow. If you want to support the mission, we'd love it. And then we sent a quick message out to the Good News Network the night before.

Next day we launched the campaign and we raised I think $11,000 in the first day. Good news, put out a article on us. And then the next day we had almost the same amount. By the end of the month we had raised over $110,000. We had 35 million media impressions. It went completely viral. We had CNN, CBC, I think Forbes, Fast Company all did articles on us.

Kickstarter put us on their landing page just before Christmas. Boxing day is usually a really bad day for Kickstarter. It was the best day we had ever had. And so yeah, after this wild month, we had a real business. And we had all these commitments to go out, plant trees. It was a little atypical from standard Kickstarter as well, because we don't have widgets, right? We're not selling products to consumers. saying, well,

Cameron Jones

if you want to pay, we will plant trees on your behalf and then we are also giving out swag and we have different tiered items. But it worked. There was a huge appeal, huge uptake and you know with that $110,000 that was kind of the seed that helped really grow the business.

Molly Wood

Yeah.

Molly Wood

No pun intended. I'm so sorry. didn't want to, but I had to. So did you have any type of a prototype at that point? was there, yeah. yeah, like how, it sounds like you had been doing some development and trying to figure out what should we do next? How should we fund this? And then the universe just delivered this conversation about Kickstarter. Or had you already tried different funding sources? Wow.

Cameron Jones

Nah, that's one place.

Cameron Jones

Yeah. Yeah, we...

Cameron Jones

Nope, universe, universe. We went to a talk at U of T, a startup talk, and then we happened to hear this speech from these other girls that launched a clothing company on Kickstarter. it was, just, it fell on our lap and we are so grateful we went that direction and that we got that coaching before, because it really helped it become the successful campaign that it was.

Molly Wood

Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood

Right, totally. Well, and as somebody who is venture capital adjacent and has done investing, it's a... I mean, part of the reason this is so interesting to me is the different kinds of funding mechanisms, right? Because when you ask the question, like, why is nobody planting trees with drones? It's because, like, venture capitalists hate hardware. Yeah.

Cameron Jones

True. It's true. Because it's a lot easier to make recurring revenue with SAS, right? Your margins don't change.

That's the challenge of our business. That's why we needed a lot of capital at the beginning because it is so capital intensive. I mean, if you come to our facility in Ontario, you won't believe it, but we have robotics that are producing two, three million pods every day, but it's heavy machinery. But like, that's what we require. Our drones are 14 feet. There's no way we can get around the machinery that we need for this business. So yeah. Yeah.

Molly Wood 

Whoa. Okay, so then let's go back to the planting and the drone-based tree planting. What was the, I mean, not everybody's sitting around saying, don't we plant trees with drones? Like, what was the spark that led to that idea?

Cameron Jones

So my brother used to be a tree planter and...

So he was planting hand in shovel. This is how it's been done for the last 100 years, hand in shovel planting. And it's basically the caloric equivalent of a marathon a day. It's extremely taxing. And so he'd always been trying to think, what's a way that we could mechanize this? I think anyone who's been out in the bush tree planting all day getting eaten by black flies is thinking, how can I mechanize this? So he had this idea that like, okay, no.

Molly Wood

I mean, we don't even plant corn that way. Like I think in most people's minds, it's like, no, we have a machine for this. And you're saying we flat out don't. Huh. How come? Like what's so hard about planting trees? That it can't be, that it couldn't be mechanized before, you know?

Cameron Jones

No, no, we don't. We do not. Because...

Well, I guess if you ever get into a tree planting site, there's no consistency. It's not like you're plowing a farm field. Once you're in a cut block, once you're in the woods, nature is wild. Nature takes over. So you will have stumps. You have slash.

Trees that are fallen over, right? Branches that are fallen over, uneven terrain, exposed rocks, that anytime you want to bring machinery over to plant trees automatically, it won't work because the ground conditions are so random. And then by planting by drone is also incredibly difficult. We were very naive when we launched the original campaign. like, man, we figured it out. We had this idea that no one else did. And we had a very rapid

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Cameron Jones

humbling I would say. In fact yeah that like right after that Kickstarter campaign we went into the field we had produced 30,000 pods and we had we had planted and that project was a complete failure and we said well we've got these backers we've got this all of this attention on us and we have people that put money into this they want to see it be successful that we basically took the money from Kickstarter

Molly Wood

interesting.

Cameron Jones

We were very strategic. We got some grants that would match funding. We were able to bring on four engineers and then we figured out a solution that evolved at almost like four fold within that year and then we were able to get the trees. But every single year, we are learning how little we knew the year before. Every single year. It's a very difficult business. I can't overstate it.

Molly Wood

What failed? Walk us through a little bit of that process and the learning. What went wrong the first time around?

Cameron Jones

Yeah, for sure. So very first thing that we did is we were putting seeds into pucks. So we were forming these pucks, almost like hockey pucks, with peat or with biochar, and then we put seeds in them. But what happens is when you drop those from a drone, if those pucks don't land in the perfect microsite, if they don't land in topsoil, if they get caught in a branch one inch off the soil,

They'll germinate, but those roots aren't going to penetrate the ground. And when you're flying over these sites that have trees that are standing, a lot of those will land in the tops of trees, a lot will land on the surface, they'll get eaten, or they'll dry out. Desiccation is huge, right? They'll dry out. So what we realized is if we can actually figure out a way to embed these in the soil, like a tree planter would do, get them in the soil, we were able to double our germination rates.

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Cameron Jones

But now we needed a completely different tool. We couldn't just fly and drop pods. We needed to figure out a way that we could shoot them in the ground. Now we need velocity. We needed velocity that was, I don't want to nerd out too much. But then we also needed.

Molly Wood 

Right.

Now you need velocity. This is getting so action movie by the way, like I love everything about this.

Molly Wood 

please nerd out. Like you need a propulsion. I'm assuming you need some sort of like feeling mechanism. Like please go, go crazy. I do. I really do. I got it. I have a good handle on the level of nerd we need here.

Cameron Jones

Okay, if you want me to tell you, I'll go through it. Cut me off if I get too much into it. So the first...

Cameron Jones

So the first thing we were doing is we were making packs. Because it was easy to make and we thought, you know, P packs, this is what you use in a greenhouse, but that doesn't actually work in the field if you're dropping it from a drone. So we needed to form something that was either conical, so it could get embed in the ground, or spherical, so it could shoot in the ground and it would still embed a dart or a pellet. But the issue was the materials we were using, if you try to compress them, they just fall apart. And we actually ended up

Molly Wood

Right. Either like a dart or a pellet.

Cameron Jones

coming up with a machine that was able to press these pods 200 tons of pressure, 20 tons of pressure, 200 Newtons of force they can withstand, 20 tons of pressure, and we were able to make these pods. So we're like, okay, we figured that out. But then when we were trying to fire them into the ground, we were using, at the beginning, we basically modified paintball guns, and we were using compressed air. But the challenge we had with that is, you have to carry so much weight on the drone. They only can fire a thousand shots before the compression is just completely reduced and the velocity goes down. And we needed air compressors out in the field. So then we brought on some engineers that helped us innovate a new solution. We just got a patent in the U.S. for it that now fires 20 pods a second, no gas whatsoever required. It's all electromechanical and actually

Last year it was 20 pods a second, this year it's going to be almost 40 pods every second that we're firing and they fire at 200 feet per second too.

Molly Wood 

My goodness. Okay, this is awesome. I am required to ask at this point, like, is it dangerous? Like if a critter gets in the way, I mean, that's, there must be a little bit of collateral damage.

Cameron Jones

Sorry.

Cameron Jones

It's a fair question. The pods aren't too much in terms of weight. So they're about 2.5 grams. It won't do any damage to anything that was hit. I've been hit by it. It's annoying. But the other thing that we do as well, yeah, it would be kind of like a BB gun, but there's a few things we do to also make sure we minimize any kind of environmental impact. We've planted...

Molly Wood

Okay.

It's like a meat weekend.

Cameron Jones

Very sensitive ecosystems. So we send our drones out before we plant, make sure, right, there's no migrating caribou. We check for wildlife before we plant. Also these drones, when they're flying, they're very loud too, so that also clears out wildlife. But even if, you know, even if there was an impact, anything was hit by a pod, it would not kill anything because we're just trying to fire the pods hard enough that it can bury about a half inch into the soil. That's all we need.

Molly Wood

Okay, yep.

Cameron Jones

So we ratchet it based on what we need to get into the ground, it wouldn't be a mortal wound for removing. No, no, no, no, no.

Molly Wood 

It's not like a full on asteroid impact, which is what I'm picturing. Yeah. I watch a lot of action movies. Maybe you could tell from my line of questioning here. 

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll talk about the success rate of Flash Forest’s drones and why it’s actually more necessary than ever to re-forest areas after wildfires instead of waiting for nature to do its thing. 

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Cameron Jones  co-founder and COO of FlashForest as part of our series on funding climate solutions through Kickstarter. 

Molly Wood

what then, how does the survival rate compare to like hand and shovel?

Cameron Jones

Survival rate with any kind of seed operations when you're operating with seed will be less than a seedling that's grown for two years. Aerial seeding is an industry that's existed for a while. That's basically where you just drop seeds out of a plane. That requires often 100 to 200,000 seeds per hectare. We're trying to use like less than a tenth of that.

Molly Wood

Okay.

Cameron Jones

And the way that we do it is we basically built this machine learning model after doing this for five years. We've planted all of these sites across Canada. We've tested the boundaries because we're testing in dry regions like Southern California, but we've also tested in very wet regions, arboreal forests, or Pacific Northwest forests in British Columbia, Washington to understand,

Why are these seedlings doing well in this site? Why are they not doing well in this site? And then within a site, what is driving the differences? Because you can plant a hectare and you're gonna have variation within it. We brought a machine learning specialist onto our team that now combed through all of our data. We've literally collected millions now of data points in the field, painstakingly by hand over the last five years to understand what germinated, what survived. He's taken that data, he's matched it now with satellite data that can go back 10 years, environmental sensors, and we've now been able to create predictability when we plant. So we can look at everything from what is the ground water table, what is the degree of slope, how much sunlight is reaching that patch of ground, that square meter, how much is reaching this other slope, and then we adjust what we plant and the density we plant to take into account all of this so we have reliability. And we just finished our data collection. Now this is five years of data, millions of trees that we've planted.

86 % of the land mass that we've planted, we've either hit or exceeded our target. So we're pretty stoked about that. We're like, okay, we're getting good at knowing where it works. We're also getting pretty good at knowing where it doesn't work, and so we're getting quite selective, but we have a really good degree of confidence now that we'll be able to hit the target. And so that's, you know, some sites are 10 pods a tree. Some sites are, could be less than five pods a tree.

Molly Wood

Wow. Yeah.

Cameron Jones

We've had one that was only two pods of tree and we've had others that are more than 10 a tree. But we adjust based on everything that constitutes the site.

Molly Wood 

So then how does that translate into like an automated drone experience? It's all sort of pre-programmed. The drones just go, they know this is the terrain that I'm in. This is the region I'm in. Behave accordingly or, know, like what is the, how does that translate into drones flying around shooting little pellets? Which is, let me just say one more time, awesome.

Cameron Jones

Yeah, so.

Cameron Jones

Thank you, thank you. You wanna come out, I'll bring you to a site. I'll bring you, you'll love it. Everyone who comes to a site is kind of blown away. So the first thing we do, and I'll talk, we do carbon offset projects, we do government projects, forestry projects, but I'm gonna focus on wildfires. I think that's most relevant. So a wildfire occurs and we know that,

Molly Wood

Yes, 100%. Yes, please. I'm in.

Molly Wood

It's so cool.

Cameron Jones

Either government or the landowner wants to get it planted. We will look at the polygons, we'll look at the map, and then our machine learning team will basically understand all of the factors for that site. It'll carve out the area that will respond really well to drone reforestation. And then it will come up with planting prescriptions for that site. What species do we plant where and at what density? Then we have a team that also generates flight paths. This is even before we go to the site.

We will know what flight paths the drone's gonna take so that it can plant most optimally. Then our team, we've basically automated pod production. It took us three months to make 30,000 pods when we first started. We do about 3 million pods every day now. About 2.7, I think, every day. So we automate the pod production, get the seeds in them, then we dispatch the drones and the pods once our teams get to the site.

All of that software is already plugged into the drones. It's plug and play. We just refill the pods and we change the batteries and the drones go out and plant all of it. They come back and then we're just, we can drink kombucha and the pods can be planted with very little intervention from us. We are not planting it by hand. The software takes care of

Molly Wood

So who, you alluded to this for a second, but who are the customers? Like who is paying you for reforestation?

Cameron Jones

So we've got a number of different customers. Let's go market segments. We work with a lot of big corporations that have, you know, wanted to plant trees, part of their giving back. we've planted with companies like KPMG, there's a big telecom company in Canada, the biggest, TALAS. So we plant about half a million for them every year. So we work with corporations that wanna address wildfires. We also work with government. So we do government contracts and that's kind of the issue with wildfires. It's kind of a... Are you familiar with the tragedy of the commons?

Molly Wood 

Yes, but it's still worth explaining. Everything always is, yep. Just because I am doesn't mean everyone is.

Cameron Jones

Yeah, you know, yeah, yeah. For sure, for sure. So tragedy of the commons is something where if everybody has access to it, but it's not anyone's responsibility for maintaining it, it will be exploited. And that's what happens with climate change and it's what happens with wildfires. So if no individual is responsible or company is responsible for planting after burn, because maybe it's happening on parkland or it's happening on government land, then government is...

now taking control and government is issuing contracts. So we're trying to do some contracts actually right now in the Pacific Northwest in the United States. So we work with government. They have a burn, we will bid and we'll say, we can treat this burn within six months. You don't have to worry about it. We'll be there and we'll plant it. And then the other is carbon developers. that's basically if, you know, that's a very...

large and growing industry of trying to offset carbon emissions and trees are the most effective tool we believe for sequestering carbon right now and you get all the ancillary benefits as well that you're actually getting trees which we need for oxygen we need for soil stabilization slope control and ecosystem restorations we're now doing projects with carbon developers where we plant trees on their behalf but we're giving them scale and speed say tell us where you want them planted

We'll get them planted faster than anyone else. The reason we do it is we want to tilt the scales for climate change. We want to start coming up with rapid tools so that we can actually sequester carbon. So those are the three big ones. I would say government, also forestry companies we also work with.

Molly Wood

So talk about, I mean, again, just in the interest of sort of putting a fine point on things, talk about those benefits. Like, why is it important to not wait for nature to take its course after a wildfire, right? Like, why is it important to reforest to treat burned areas?

Cameron Jones

Such a question. And honestly, this is something that we've now learned firsthand. Historically, wildfires would take care of themselves by and large, right? We even have, you know.

Molly Wood

I mean, grew up in, context, I grew up in Montana. So like this is, I went to a school that had very well known forestry program. you know, this is, yeah. I mean, I still want to explain it all to everybody, but I'm like, this is a big change.

Cameron Jones

Okay, perfect, perfect.

Cameron Jones

Big change, and this is a change that's happening in our lifetime. Historically, forests would take care of themselves after wildfires. Cones open up, some cones open up after wildfires, and they help kind of regenerate that site. What's happened now, I'd say over the last three, four decades, is that the fires are burning so hot, there's different classes for burns, they're burning so hot that they're incinerating all of the cones. Additionally, the fires are burning so wide.

The scale of these fires is so much bigger than what was happening before. There's no opportunity for cones to kind of even move into a site. Previously, right, you have a very big hotspot. Well, birds would have droppings that would restore seeds to that site. You'd have cones drift in from neighboring regions, but that's not happening anymore. And so what ends up happening is this area gets completely converted to grassland. So what happened in the Okanagan where I grew up? And I'll give you some numbers.

You know, on average in Canada, we have 1.5 to 2 million hectares that are burned by wildfire every year. In 2023, we had 17 million hectares burned. Those forests, a huge share of those forests are permanently converted ecosystems. You will not have conifers there anymore. And so that's why it's so important to actually come up with tools that we can respond to it. Otherwise, our landscapes are just permanently going to change. And it'll have...

Molly Wood 

Which again we should say is a biodiversity crisis but also a carbon sequestration crisis. then talk to me about navigating carbon markets and the carbon developers because that just is sort of an interesting constantly evolving space. Like we're all waiting for a price on carbon, the offsets market is tricky. Like what are you finding from your perch there?

Cameron Jones

100%, 100%.

Cameron Jones

Yeah, mean, a big, so maybe let's go back 10 years, carbon markets, a big focus was on avoidance. So we got an electric vehicle, you got a diesel vehicle, or gas-powered vehicle. Well, the electric vehicle, by purchasing that, you're not going to have the carbon emissions that you would have had with the alternative vehicle, so you get carbon credits. That's one tool, but is it really a net gain for the planet?

I don't believe it is. I believe it's nominal, if anything. It's clever math, it's clever math. So what we're finding is a lot of companies are shifting now to nature-based solutions where we're actually sequestering carbon dioxide. This is pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and one of the best ways of doing that is trees.

Molly Wood 

It's tricky math, let's put it that way. It's tricky math. Mm-hmm.

Cameron Jones

Because you're actually sequestering carbon dioxide, it's held in the trunk, it's held in the soil, you're pulling it out of the atmosphere instead of alternatives. And so what we've been finding over the last few years is that there's been a huge focus on doing carbon offset projects in the global south, South America, Africa.

in African countries, Southeast Asia, because land is cheap and you have fast growing species. But we believe that there's a really ripe and untapped opportunity in North America and we have such a need for it in North America that a lot of developers are now shifting their focus to try to come up with ways to make these projects make economic sense. Land is more expensive in North America.

But if that land is going to be converted into grassland, it doesn't have carbon value, it doesn't have timber value, merchantable timber value. So what we're presenting now is opportunities for companies to...

develop carbon offsets in North America, in wildfires, that are gonna actually be projects that are gonna generate a lot of revenue for these companies over their lifespan. But we just gotta, yeah, accept what's the alternative use for the land. What else is going to happen with the land? And as soon as you start to weigh that, then the carbon offsets make a lot of sense.

Molly Wood 

Interesting.

Molly Wood

Right. It's interesting the way you're describing it makes me think of solar, right? In the solar industry where it's sort of like there's land that might not have other value. And so solar developers might come in and say, we can put panels here and you'll get revenue. And you're saying we can put trees here and you'll get revenue. Yep.

Cameron Jones

100 % plus all the ancillary benefits of having trees. Stable water. What are the biggest things? Well, I mean, perspiration is such a, or precipitation is such a big thing. A lot of, I think, individuals discount how important having healthy forests are for rain cycles. In fact,

Molly Wood 

Right, which is, yeah, keep going, like, tell us the benefits, go crazy with the benefits, because I think we cannot talk enough about trees.

Cameron Jones

So LA right now, that massive wildfire that swept through the city in Southern California.

Part of that is because of forestry issues, is because we're not having transpiration from trees. So trees are constantly emitting moisture back into the atmosphere and creating stable rain cycles. When you have huge wildfires that California has had now for years, after enough sustained abuse of a forest, there's no transpiration. That means that the heat domes, the drought cycles are gonna be exacerbated. They're gonna get so much worse. So that's why we're trying to get back in place because then it becomes a positive feedback loop and it's just gonna cause more wildfires. So I mean I can go on about this forever I'm quite passionate about it.

Molly Wood 

I mean, I'll let you, it's fascinating. No, it's fascinating and super important, right? I don't think that, we talk a lot about recovery in the context of the LA fires, for example, we are talking a lot about recovery and rebuilding and people's immediate tendency, I think, is to think of buildings and houses and local businesses and all of that is real, but the question of trees is key. So that does raise kind of the other question though, which is that then the trees take a long time.

And that's just, that just is what it is, right? 

Cameron Jones

I'm sorry to say this is a shortfall of government planning that we've had for the last 50 years. When they're coming up with planting contracts, it's plant one species, maybe two. And especially in Canada, they like to use seed orchards, which are basically, it's an orchard where they have their preferred seed.

that grow trees and those are the only seeds you can go and use and plant a forest. It creates massive issues because you're just planting clones. That means that you have no natural biodiversity or diversity within those seeds to create resistance to disease. If that seed or that clone has a vulnerability to a disease, everything is gonna be wiped out and we see that. If you're only planting one or two species, well, now you don't have the species that are creating natural fire breaks.

Certain species don't incinerate like conifers and they create natural fire retardants. But government has not been prioritizing a lot of that diversity. So yes, you can have genetically modified seed or you can also just go into nature, collect what's in nature and use that to restore sites because you're getting the natural diversity that nature has developed over millions of years. And so that's been our big focus is we really push.

government and client to use natural seed and not to just use seed orchards because you're creating a much more vulnerable ecosystem.

Molly Wood

Fascinating. All right, so your goal is to plant a billion trees by 2028. How are we progressing against that goal and what does it take to sort of scale operations to that level?

Cameron Jones

Yeah, we're gonna have to push back the date, but not the goal. So the goal is still a billion trees. And once we hit that goal, we wanna be doing a billion trees every year thereafter. Yeah, it's gonna be a drop in the bucket even at that rate right now compared to the need. But we're...

Molly Wood

Wow. Okay.

Cameron Jones

I mean, last year we planted almost two million trees and we could 10x that in a year. If we have the right partners, we get the right contracts, we'll be able to 10x that. So we've got the systems in place now to scale it. It's just making sure we have the right clients, but I'm confident we're gonna hit that goal.

Molly Wood 

So how can, what kind of help do you need? Like if there are individuals or organizations listening to this, you know, how can they support the mission or get involved?

Cameron Jones

Thanks for asking. Let me think about the plug here.

Okay.

Cameron Jones

Maybe I'll present a little bit of like a case for how things are being done and what I think needs to be done. And then I'll have a call to action. So.

Cameron Jones

Reforestation has long been a reaction to crisis. It's wildfires, deforestation, ecosystem collapse. That's what forces us into scrambling solutions. Right now, we have tools between AI that gives us data-driven foresight on

what needs to be planted, where it needs to be planted, as well as mechanization to come up with ways to plant rapidly after a site that can shift this reaction to precision.

Right now it's being chaos and we want to move that to strategy. We can be very efficient with the resources we use, but we got to move into kind of a planning mentality. And that means governments, forestry companies need to be open to utilizing new technology.

We can use AI and mechanization to do this, but you must be willing to try new technology because I think the risk of inaction is far greater, not just for the ecosystems, but economically, because you're going to spend money where you don't need to spend money. that's so I think that's a really big call to action. If there are government bodies and forestry companies that are in this space.

Be willing to use the new tools. Reach out to us and we will train our data with what you have or we'll train our tools with your data. And for corporations that want to plant trees, either for carbon offsets or because that's where their ethos lies, reach out and we will work with you. yeah, we'd love to collaborate and show you what we could do together.

Molly Wood 

Amazing. Where can they find you? What's the site?

Cameron Jones

The site is [flashforest.ca](http://flashforest.ca/). You can also reach out to me, Cameron Jones. can find me on LinkedIn or email me, Cameron at [flashforest.ca](http://flashforest.ca/). I'd be happy to chat with anyone. Let's get some trees. It was a pleasure, Molly. I hope I wasn't a little too long-winded.

Molly Wood

There we go. Let's get some trees planted people. Cameron Jones. Thank you so much for the time. I love it.

Cameron Jones

Thank you, Molly. The pleasure was all mine.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.

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