How to Grow a Forest Really Really Fast | Hacker News Reader

How to Grow a Forest Really Really Fast

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592 pointsrokhayakebe88 comments

In Western Pennsylvania we've been doing something like this for a while on old strip mining sites. It used to be one of the projects for the local high school service clubs.

After the mining companies strip mine a place, they take the good topsoil, sell it, and just dump back the fractured rock leaving a very acidic (sulfuric acid) soil once the rocks begin breaking down a little. About the only thing that would grow in this stuff would be pine trees, so we would plant pine saplings to kickstart the forest growth. It would neutralize the acidity over time, and drop needles to create a topsoil that wasn't so toxic.

Pine trees are generally the starting point when a forest gets damaged, and then it switches over to deciduous over time.

For those of you who found this interesting and wish to know more, I would very heavily recommend you research permaculture and particularly check out some of the videos made by Geoff Lawton, which are extremely informative and entertaining. There is also a fantastic documentary case study of similar techniques being used by a farmer named Sepp Holzer on his farm the Krameterhof in Austria, though I don't remember the name. It was compelling enough to persuade a 16 year-old me to dig up about an acre of the hard red clay in my back yard and try to create a self sustaining food forest.

Slightly more on topic, I'm very glad to see people trying to make a business out of these techniques and I wish the people at Aforestt all the best.

Agreed. Fukuoka's classic The One Straw Revolution is also excellent reading. He was a trained biologist who then moved toward a more holistic and philosophically based approach to land management, reaping huge benefits. You can view his work as agricultural process hacking. His five principles:

(1) human cultivation of soil, plowing or tilling are unnecessary, as is the use of powered machines

(2) prepared fertilizers are unnecessary, as is the process of preparing compost

(3) weeding, either by cultivation or by herbicides, is unnecessary. Instead only minimal weed suppression with minimal disturbance

(4) applications of pesticides or herbicides are unnecessary

(5) pruning of fruit trees is unnecessary

Occasionally, when we're really busy with non-gardening tasks during the summer, we follow these "principles" by default. No vegetables other than the tomatoes end up producing. And actually most years even the tomatoes require something for the hornworms, although we've had some success with the Bacillus thuringiensis spray.

There must be more to this method than just not doing anything in the garden.

EDIT: OK, I'll read this book. I have to ask: have you, or anyone you know personally, managed to grow useful plants from seed without cultivating, fertilizing, weeding, or pruning?

I believe the source of your concern here is a misunderstanding. The points are principles by which to develop a locally sustainable method, rather than the method itself.

For instance, Fukuoka makes it clear that for effective pest control in particular, certain patterns of planting are critical to a encourage healthy insect biology that will protect the plants from devastating pest invasions. He also emphasizes that trial and error combined with observation are the most important considerations, and that one should draw initially from local seed stock and local established plantings. This will result in better results with less effort, ie. a superior process.

My father who is from a small village in India was pretty inspired by the book review of this article and then ordered the translation and tried out many of these techniques.

Even though I agree with the above summary it is not necessarily that simplistic. But turns out that relying more on nature instead of using too many artificial manipulators does have several benefits.

Of course none of that is strictly necessary. Plants grew for millions of years without anybody planting them, they can still grow.

That said, plowing and fertilizing are used to improve a terrain. Without those, you'll get a much lower yield. Their effects will last for several years, so one can get good results for some time without using them, but they are far from unnecessary. Human population was too big to sustain on Earth without those techniques milenia ago. Weeding is useless for some crops, actually damaging for others, but essential for some. Pesticides and herbicides too often do more harm than good, but are almost unavoidable on some cases. And pruning makes trees have the shape you want, what has a deep economical impact.

It's true that the agriculture overuses some techniques, but alternative agro proponents are often radicals that really don't deserve to be listened.

You fail to realize that the agro business model does achieve higher yields in the short term at the cost of soil damaging in the long term. As the natural biodiversity in both soils and seeds decrease, the risk of catastrophic pest swapping large number of crops grows and over-reliance on chemicals becomes a given.

We certainly need modern agriculture as a transitional technology to keep feeding the 7+ billion people on Earth today, but if this does not come hand in hand with measures to drastically reduce fertility rates (and per capita consumption, but that's another story) it means little more than kicking the can down the road. After all, the most important reason we are facing this dilemma today is that our parents' generation faced the same challenge when we were 4+ billion and decided to pretend there's nothing wrong with it.

Your choice of labeling alternative agro proponents as "radicals" because they cannot avoid calling a spade a spade tells more about the willful ignorance of society on these matters than about any objective measure of character of the label's subjects. And you surely know that problems cannot be made to go away by shutting eyes and ears, do you?

{{citation-needed}} on 90% of that.

However, I believe you are limiting your scope of thought by considering crop yield per unit of land as a measure of success.

Fukuoka by contrast considered the bigger picture, mainly the cost and reliability (ie. overall risk introduced by) all inputs to the agricultural process, but also the quality of the resulting crop. In his particular case, in a situation in which labour-intensive traditional Japanese agricultural processes were being replaced by western machinery, fertilizer and pesticide companies, he achieved excellent fruit yields with greater self-sufficiency, less risk and less effort than competing approaches. He also found that consumers appreciated his crops more, finding them tastier (qualitative improvement) and offering to pay higher prices.

You are of course correct that pruning is necessary for some types of crops, however Fukuoka worked primarily with fruit trees on his family farm and in his principles stated only that pruning was unnecessary for fruit tree agriculture, ie. this is a straw man argument.

Your final incitement to a mindset of dismission is unenlightened.

Do keep in mind that food prices are murderously high in Japan, which is a very real problem for low-income families.

One single apple at my local supermarket is $2 and up. A head of flavorless lettuce costs the same. The Japanese equivalent to "beans and rice" is instant noodles, because both rice and legumes of any kind are pricy.

It gets better outside of major cities, but food prices here are insane.

Fukuoka lived in postwar rural Japan, not post-bubble modern Japan. It's very true the economy is different. However, this fact really reinforces his point that depending on money to acquire inputs to your agricultural process is a big risk and unneeded complexity for the small scale farmer... hence, his success and book.

A bit late, but thanks for mentioning this. I just finish reading it. I hadn't heard of it previously, and it was well worth the time.

Indeed. Also, definitely Bill Mollison (Geoff's teacher). I studied with both of them in the AU, and they have done amazing work in agriculture.

Note that Mollison was inspired by Fukuoka.

Fukuoka, the city in Japan?

Based on someone mentioning his book, I'm thinking Masanobu Fukuoka: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka

Thank you, didn't catch that in the other comments.

Lucky you! I studied under someone who studied with Bill, but never had the chance to meet him.

Yes! For those interested in a DIY project, I would add that "Permaculture: A Designer's Manual" [0] is arguably the reference for these techniques.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Permaculture-Designers-Manual-Bill-Mol...

Just in case you're still working on your acre of hard red clay, try using the ancient technique of terra preta. This is what the natives in the amazon used to create incredibly fertile soil in the horrible red clay amazonian soil.

I have friends in the Okanagan who managed to get some of the advanced species of Rapid Growing Hybrid Poplar from the research plantation they have in Vernon, BC.

They have a small lot, about 5 acres, with a good agricultural water supply, which they planted mostly with this hybrid. In the first year these seedlings grew from around 6" to almost 5' in height. In the second year, the trees were 10' high. By the end of year three they had a mini forest of 15' high trees. It was actually terrifying how quickly these hybrids were capable of growing - reminded me of something out of "Day of the Triffids" - one only wonders what would happen if these fast-growing hybrid-poplars somehow managed to start spreading...

My family owns a small pine plantation as an investment, and we were very lucky to buy our saplings right before the fery vast growth varieties came on the market.

The fast growth versions have extremely soft timber, its functionally useless, even the paper pulp mills only buy it at a discount.

They are probably vulnerable to storm damage too, but we haven't had to deal with that.

Might still be useful to build a wind break and out-compete introduced varieties in phases

I guess they're moderately OK at carbon sequestration? Assuming that we just choose to do nothing with them once they die.

They're more water, less carbon. So, they are less efficient at carbon sequestration in terms of density. And, they are probably easier for microbes to break back down so they hold the carbon for less time.

Wait, so they literally took the meat industry's trick of "add water to add weight" and used that with trees?

Poplars are considered to be among the best trees in terms of carbon sequestration according to studies done thus far. In addition, if they're converted to paper and other wood products, they continue to sequester the carbon for the life of those products.

Here's a layman's article on the "best trees" for carbon sequestration- http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_l...

> paper and other wood products, they continue to sequester the carbon for the life of those products.

Which is basically forever if you throw away the paper instead of recycle it.

I would regard it as prima facia deeply unlikely that processing wood into paper is carbon-negative, regardless of how long you then store the paper. It takes power to turn trees into paper.

It's easy enough to calculate: Do you need more than an equivalent amount of paper burned into energy, to make that paper.

The answer is no, paper mills power themself from trimmings from paper making. They use much less than the mass of paper they produce.

Making paper does not take very much energy. The energy used in cutting and preparing wood is not that much when compared to the amount of wood produced.

So yes, turning wood into paper is carbon negative (in a way, technically it's the growing of the tree).

I think the problem with soft wood and carbon sequestration are possibly the same underlying problem.

If they are still gathering sunlight and carbon the same way but gaining size quicker then there is just less carbon per cubic cm. There'll be some advantage in being able to get at more light and carbon sooner, but as carbon stored per square meter of land it's probably less.

That is not to say that you could not in principle make trees better, but I think the changes would have to be something fundamental to the cell physiology. A C4 carbon fixation pine tree might be better but it might be easier to turn bamboo into a pine tree than it would be to make a pine tree work with C4. Evolution is really good at balance, tweaking a bit can knock a lot off balance. It's not an impossible feat to make something better but it isn't easy.

This is why hardwoods are, uh, hard. They're typically slower-growing, so their rings are more tightly packed, giving the wood additional strength. I'm skeptical that the fast-grown trees from the article are as long-term healthy as naturally grown ones.

I thought the trees in the article were native species, not special fast-growing varieties. Did I miss something?

Any tree that grows quickly will have thicker (less densely packed) rings. The author describes a planting strategy that "tricks" the trees into growing more quickly than usual, so my intuition is that those trees will be weaker than they otherwise would be. The choice of species just moves the "natural" density point.

growing forest quickly =/= growing trees quickly. I might have missed something, but I don't think he mentions anything about making the trees grow faster.

The "tricks" are to mature the forest (i.e. make it self-sustaining) within 10 years, tree growth-rate notwithstanding.

The article mentions planting them close together and having them compete for sunlight, thus stimulating fast growth.

> This is why hardwoods are, uh, hard.

General point of interest, but this isn't universally true. E.g. Balsa is a hardwood and is decidedly not hard.

I believe that the "hard" actually refers to the fact that such trees have a harder shell for their seeds.

From wikipedia [1]

Hardwood is wood from dicot angiosperm trees. The term may also be used for the trees from which the wood is derived; these are usually broad-leaved. In temperate and boreal latitudes they are mostly deciduous, but in tropics and subtropics mostly evergreen.

Hardwood contrasts with softwood (which is from Gymnosperm trees). Hardwoods are not necessarily harder than softwoods. In both groups there is an enormous variation in actual wood hardness, with the range in density in hardwoods completely including that of softwoods; some hardwoods (e.g., balsa) are softer than most softwoods, while yew is an example of a hard softwood.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardwood

This is exactly the kind of tree that Prof. Akira Miyawaki* refers to as 'fake trees':

http://www.ubraintv.com/watch.php?id=306

They are bred to be fast growing but they do not possess longevity nor are they hardy.

*Prof. Miyawaki is the inspiration and his methodology is the one adopted by Sharma.

Would they be any good for building cheap, sustainable log cabins?

Given soft timber, I don't know that you'd want to.

Probably not without some clever engineering, fast wood isn't very sturdy.

Biochar producers then? I mean, even if the wood is poor quality otherwise, the woody material is a good way to lock up carbon, right?

Plant decomposition results in the release of CO2.

Some, but it's still negative emissions, otherwise there wouldn't be biochar.

http://www.csiro.au/Portals/Publications/Magazines/resourcef...

my work sponsored CSIRO to look into some of this stuff, from everything I've heard theres a lot of potential for biochar.

Maybe you could use them in SIP panel construction even if only in pulp of fiber form.

Log cabins are of debatable sustainability being hard to seal and insulate to modern standards.

Yellow Poplars in Georgia grow at pretty much that same rate naturally. When I was living there I let a portion of my backyard go from lawn to natural, and the poplars were amazingly fast.

I read a book about Fordlandia a while back. Absolutely fascinating look at applying manufacturing principals to agriculture/horticulture without domain knowledge.

Was hard not to think of Fordlandia when reading this... odd they don't mention it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia

Here's the book. http://www.amazon.com/Fordlandia-Henry-Fords-Forgotten-Jungl...

There is another organization that advocates the use of cattle for grazing and converting deserts to green lands. The green lands have been found to restore streams. This movement uses the same principles for sustenance.

I think it is called the savant institute. the founder also has a ted talk.

Allan Savory: His ted talk is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI

Grazing for conservation is an interesting topic. Clearly, cattle and sheep do trample stream banks. In over-grazed lands (any place in the western USA) practically all riparian habitat has been destroyed by grazing.

But, limited grazing does have benefits. At the Vina Plains ecological preserve (near Chico, California) they found that without grazing invasive weeds took over the entire site. When they allowed limited grazing the cattle trampled the non-native weeds, giving the native grasses and flowers a chance to grow. Just letting a herd through briefly in the spring season was enough to have this effect and not enough to ruin the streams.

This is an interesting article about grazing at Vina Plains. https://www.cnps.org/cnps/publications/fremontia/january_200...

...over-grazed lands (any place in the western USA)...

Anyone who has spent any time in public lands in the West naturally will be skeptical of this "cattle preserve grass" theory. We need more detail about why this hasn't been the case in USA public lands, and how policies could be changed to make it so. (The most obvious change would be "keep cattle off public land so the taxpayer isn't subsidizing certain beef producers".)

That said, I'm confident that cattle aren't as bad for plants as horses are. Cattle lack upper incisors, as do deer and antelope. This means they tear off the upper portion of the plant, rather than extracting the plant along with most of the root as horses tend to do.

This is so neat. I have often dreamed of undertaking afforestation on a truly massive scale. In northern CA, every time I hike through redwoods (2% of their historical range) I wonder what prevents us from growing them faster. Not enough water? Not enough nutrients in the soil? Transporting either all the way up the tree? Can we engineer our way around these problems, or is it truly the case that the planet is incapable of recovering from the havoc we have wrought until long after we are all gone.

Redwoods are massive and they need a lot of energy just to stay alive. But, in classic 2d v 3d scaling they don't gain enough sunlight for rapid growth.

EX: A 250 foot tall tree with a 25ft diamiter base ~= 1,000 25 foot trees with 1 foot diamiter bases, but 1,000 25 foot trees would collect a lot more sunlight.

PS: Redwoods do grow fairly quickly when there 'small'.

Or if you just plant one or a few out in the open, they shoot right up.

They do often occur in mixed stands though. So while they do reach a maximum that doesn't allow the collection of more sunlight, they are still quite a bit taller than their neighbor trees that cannot reach the same height.

I think that redwoods need a very specific environment. As I understand, they tend to need forest fires to grow well. This is one reason why you see controlled burns year round in places like Sequoia National Forest. Maybe that is just when they are young, because they don't really seem to die very easily once they are established. I once read that their most common cause of death is erosion, causing them to fall over (due to a shallow root system).

I would love to see more redwood forests grown, but it seems like it might be hard to do.

Common misconception, Giant Redwoods and Giant Sequoias are not the same tree.

Sequoia Sempervirens is the Coast Redwood we see in places like San Francisco and surrounding areas. The tallest tree ever recorded was a Coast Redwood. These trees grow only along the coast in areas with plenty of moisture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_sempervirens

Sequoia Giganteum is the giant sequoia that grows in only on western facing slopes above ~4000ft in 68 groves in the Sierras. It is the most massive single-stem tree in the world. They also get quite tall, but not as tall as the Coast Redwood. As they mature, they become effectively fireproof, but their seeds do rely on heat to germinate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoiadendron_giganteum

As far as trees go, both species grow quite fast. even as they get older, they add significant mass every year.

I know that they aren't the same, but I guess I figured that they were similar as far as environment goes. Thanks for the clarification and extra info.