Seed-firing drones are planting 40k trees every day to fight deforestation

Re:Seed-firing drones are planting 40k trees every day to fi... by otikik on Saturday May 07, 2022 @05:23PM (#31298738)

Depending on the seed that might be enough. The same way just adding another machine to a cloud might be more economic than employing 2 engineers for a year in order to make a system more efficient.

A coffee bean weights 132.5 milligrams. 40k of those is ~5.3 kgs of beans. Sure it would be inefficient to employ all of those beans if only 200 of them end up being viable. But if those "wasted" 5 kg beans saves labour, then it might make economical sense. And if the alternative is running some sort of heavier planter machine, it might end up producing less emissions.

For the record I have not done real numbers here and my gut instinct is that the drone thing is a gimmick. I'm just trying to keep an open mind.

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Re:Seed-firing drones are planting 40k trees every day to fi... by twofornone on Saturday May 07, 2022 @07:19PM (#31299585)

I don't think emissions should be a concern at all for a reforestation project, unless orders of magnitude more waste is emitted compared to that absorbed by a tree over, say, 10-20 years. Forests pay long term dividends beyond carbon capture.

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