Grant Canary, founder and CEO of Mast Reforestation (formerly DroneSeed), discusses the early operational milestones achieved by his drone reforestation startup.
Disclosure
Canary says Mast Reforestation buries dead trees to generate carbon credits
“So, we are taking fire-killed trees. So, these are trees that have been impacted by the bad fire, not the good fire. They're totally dead. They're a fuel risk. And they're, wow, there's a lot of acres of them. We're burying them, and that stores the carbon tha…”
Disclosure
Canary says Mast abandoned drone seeding due to seed constraints and inconsistency
“Seed constraint was such a hard constraint, and we'd spent two to three years also with the seed vessel, and like, really dialing that into the Have less variability and more consistency was going to be a challenge and so having spent a number of years on the …”
Assertion Supported
Canary says Mast buried ten million pounds of fire-killed trees in Montana
“So we excavated down 20 feet we buried the logs. About ten million pounds, or 171 logging trucks worth of trees. 6000 gross tons would be 4000 after deductions from a registry.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Canary says subterranean sensors show biomass decomposition emissions far below modeled levels
“We're monitoring for methane and CO₂ The data that's been coming back over the last year is fantastic. We're way below what we modeled. Definitely way below what is allowed. So, like, we are not seeing that decomposition.”
Assertion Supported
Canary says high-severity fires increasingly trap forests in brush states
“What we're seeing is that we are seeing not only more and more high-severity fires where forests don't come back, they end up in a persistent early seral phase, which is nice fancy words for, like, ten-foot-tall brush for, like, the next, you know, decades, if…”
Insight
Canary calls combining hardware, biology, and software a startup double black diamond
“From a VC perspective, you're like now combining hardware with biology, With software, like talk about like the double black diamond of a startup, like that's really difficult.”