The future of tree planting has a strong Kelowna connection

Two Kelowna born entrepreneurs are spearheading a company with the goal of upgrading everyday technology used to plant trees.

Bryce and Cameron Jones, alongside two other co-founders, and a team of engineers and business execs, have started the reforestation company Flash Forest that aims to plant 1-billion trees by 2028.

The company has designed a modified, industrial-strength drone that will far surpass the planting capabilities of even the fastest shovel powered human tree planter.

Flash Forest founder Bryce and co-founder Cameron were raised in Kelowna's upper mission neighbourhood, where the family home bordered on the site of 2003's devastating Okanagan Mountain Park forest fire.

While such a destructive forest fire so close to home played a small role, Bryce's real inspiration to start Flash Forest came during a summer spent "doing the hardest work of my life" planting trees by hand.

Bryce managed to plant 76,000 trees in total that summer, a number that would be surpassed in less than a week with the help of Flash Forest's drone technology.

"In 2013, I saw first hand the scale of deforestation while tree planting in Western Canada," said Bryce.

"While the tree planters and loggers lived and ate together it became clear that there was something very different about these two groups: Technology."

The technology is not just in the space-aged flying drones, but also in the specialized pods the drone fires into the forest's soil.

Once in the ground, the pods are engineered to accelerate the seed germination process from the normal sprouting period of 60-90 days down to less than 15 days.

“To date, we’ve achieved a proof of concept, with the ability to plant trees at 10X the rate of human planters and 20% the cost using drones,” reported Bryce.

“This year we planted 3000+ pods of eight different Southern Ontario tree species in the Creemore area. On our last plant in October, we achieved autonomous flying and firing, reaching a milestone of 165 trees planted in 180 seconds using a single drone.”

The Flash Forest manifesto outline's the first goal of the business is to make a sizeable dent in carbon admissions and restore ecosystem biodiversity.

Bryce also adds that he would love to see his company one day reforest the hundreds of square kilometres of burned forest behind his childhood home.

Flash Forest has also launched a Kickstarter campaign where donations can be made to help the company scale-up over the next year.

Pledged funds will go towards purchasing an automation machine, scaling up the drone technology and exceeding their goal of 150K+ trees in the ground next year.

To view that Kickstarter, click here.