Fast-growing Australian environmental restoration company, AirSeed Technologies, combines drones, artificial intelligence and patented biotechnology, to achieve its mission of planting 100 million trees by 2024.
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00 [BEEP]
00:01 Governments around the world must take rapid action
00:03 to curb rising temperatures.
00:05 No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations
00:09 than climate change.
00:10 Climate change is having an impact now.
00:12 Climate change is getting worse.
00:14 Earth is warming.
00:15 The very livability of our planet is at stake.
00:18 We're on a course for an uninhabitable Earth.
00:21 The collapse of our civilizations
00:24 and the extinction of much of the natural world
00:28 is on the horizon.
00:29 Since the last 30 years, the world's
00:31 lost over 300 million acres of trees.
00:33 We have absolutely created havoc.
00:40 And that has a direct result on what's going on
00:43 from a climate perspective.
00:44 Of course, we're in trouble.
00:45 It's game over.
00:46 The bigger appreciation for forests
00:47 because they're very important to saving the world,
00:50 where people don't make that connection.
00:52 [BEEP]
00:58 My name's Andrew Walker.
00:59 I am a mechanical engineer and the co-founder
01:02 of Earthseed Technologies.
01:03 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:06 What we need to do is, as humanity, as a globe,
01:15 stop cutting away the Earth's lungs
01:18 and start mitigating global warming by reforesting.
01:21 And that's what Earthseed Technologies is about,
01:23 is bringing a solution that we can do this reforestation
01:26 on a global, scalable way.
01:28 I'm Andries Lowe.
01:29 I am the co-founder of Earthseed Technologies.
01:32 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:35 Earthseed Technologies have developed technology
01:39 that can plant trees with drones.
01:41 And how do we do it?
01:42 With a seed pod.
01:43 We're taking off the shelf drone technology.
01:45 And then we have developed a payload system,
01:47 which is a delivery system for taking these pods
01:51 and putting them into the ground.
01:52 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:55 [DRONE WHIRRING]
01:59 [MUSIC PLAYING]
02:02 The software that we use allows us to fly autonomously.
02:06 And every time we plant a tree, we
02:08 are able to log a GPS position when
02:10 we fly them into the ground.
02:11 That allows us to come back at a later date,
02:15 fly the same route, map the same route,
02:17 and we can quantify the success of every single tree
02:20 that we plant.
02:21 By making use of a pneumatic firing system,
02:23 we can plant two tree seeds per second,
02:26 approximately 40,000 trees a day for the team of two people.
02:29 By using a technique called swarm,
02:31 one pilot can fly up to five drones at the same time.
02:35 It's better and more effective than conventional manual plant.
02:39 A normal tree plant can do 800 trees per day.
02:41 We can do 40,000 seeds per day.
02:45 The germination rate of our seed pods are approximately 80%.
02:49 And what's extremely special about this seed pod
02:51 is it carries over a gram of carbon.
02:54 What we're trying to do is sequester carbon
02:56 out of the atmosphere, or CO2 out of the atmosphere,
02:58 by planting trees.
02:59 But we're also planting carbon from rotting,
03:02 dying vegetation, creating carbon, and putting it back
03:04 into the ground.
03:05 In that seed ball, there is all the beans for it.
03:07 There's this carbon in it, and there's nutrient in it,
03:10 and there's mycorrhizae to assist their roots.
03:13 Everything this plant needs to get healthy
03:16 and to start interacting with the soil,
03:18 it's got with it right now.
03:20 As it rains, the carbon absorbs the water,
03:22 allows the seed to germinate, and then the seed
03:25 puts down its roots.
03:26 And if you look at this one as well,
03:27 you can see how it's melting into the soil around it.
03:30 These are about five, six days old.
03:31 And the goodness from inside the pod
03:33 will then come into the soil to give the root system of the seed
03:36 everything it needs to grow.
03:37 The seed can also be protected in that little ball from insects
03:40 and rodents and birds and things like that, which a field can
03:43 lose about 30% of its seeds.
03:45 These pods, yeah, they've got no doubt that they will grow.
03:49 So it's a big conference center that we're
03:51 building under the soil and allowing everything
03:53 to come together.
03:54 It's giving it room, which we basically denuded before.
03:57 That little pod will allow that first room to exist.
04:02 CO2 is critical to our survival.
04:04 And if we could take all the agricultural land in the world
04:07 and lift it by half, by 1%, we could sequestrate more CO2
04:12 than what we're pumping out through our energy sectors.
04:15 The importance of this and the importance of reforestation
04:18 and stopping deforestation to help sequester the carbon,
04:22 the CO2, out of the atmosphere, mitigate
04:24 the level of warming over the course of the next 30 years,
04:27 and give our next generation a fighting chance of having
04:30 the earth left in a sustainable way.
04:32 And we have the means to do this.
04:34 We have the understanding now.
04:36 There's only one way to do it, and this is with technology.
04:38 Our goal at EarthSeed Technologies
04:40 is to be planting, by 2023, 100 million trees a year
04:45 by using the carbon seed pods.
04:46 That's the start of what we need to be doing.
04:49 We need to act today.
04:51 [MUSIC PLAYING]
04:54 [MUSIC PLAYING]
04:59 [MUSIC PLAYING]
05:02 [MUSIC PLAYING]
05:05 [BLANK_AUDIO]