Hope you had a better weekend than the Chiefs. — Dan

How To Plant Nearly 1,000 Trees an Hour

On November 6, 2022, 47,839 completed the 51st New York City Marathon. Over those, roughly a thousand hailed from Canada, and among them, a 23-year-old named Antoine Moses finished 7th with a time of two hours, 51 minutes, and 12 seconds. Moses’ feat was, by no means, a record-setting endeavor. But that didn’t matter, because he already had a world record to his credit:

For planting a lot of trees — all in one day.

The lumber and paper industries, as you’re certainly aware, need trees in order to thrive — companies in those sectors cut down lots and lots of trees to make the products they later sell. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we can make more trees by planting seedlings and waiting 20 or so years. And, as it turns out, that’s exactly what many of these companies do. Reforestation is a multistep process, as the National Forest Foundation explains — they collect seeds, grow them in a nursery for a year or two, and then send the seedlings out to “professional tree planting crews” that “fill up their hip bags with hundreds of seedlings at once, and trek across hillsides to plant seedlings.” That’s where people like Antoine Moses come in.

Moses and other tree-planting pros work very quickly to plant these tiny trees. They have a special shovel that can quickly penetrate pre-plowed land and create holes deep enough to support the seedlings. Without missing a step, they drop the seedling in, lightly pack the soil, and move on to the next. In total, it only takes a few seconds to plant each tree. Here’s a video of Moses in action, and as you’ll see, it’s a very quick, fluid endeavor.

In 2021, Moses decided to demonstrate just how quickly he could plant trees. Leveraging the endurance he gained training as an ultramarathoner, he started planting and, for 24 hours straight, didn’t stop. As GlobalNews.ca reported, he planted 23,060 trees over the course of the day — that comes out to just under 1,00 per hour, and one tree every 3.75 seconds.

And that, according to Guinness World Records, is the most trees anyone has ever planted in a one-day period.

But the real magic isn’t in that one-day feat. According to a 90-second documentary on Moses, he claims to have “planted more than 1 million trees across Canada” over his career. In fact, he and other professional tree planters have rebuilt forests through their efforts. As Summit Reforestation, a tree planting company, explained in a press release, tree planters like Moses collectively plant as many as 1.25 million trees each day during the planting season, with each tree planted by hand — very, very quickly.

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More About Trees

Today’s Bonus fact: It’s a good idea for companies that harvest trees to plant more of them, but sometimes, that doesn’t go as planned — in a good way, in one case. In the 1830s, Sweden realized that they needed to rebuild their navy, and the state-of-the-art warships at the time were built from oak. That required oak trees, so Sweden started felling the ones they had and planting new ones. Those trees, though, take a long time to grow — 150 years — and as Atlas Obscura notes, by the time the new oaks were ready to be made into warships, technology had advanced to the point where the oaks were no longer needed. As a result, Sweden is now home to a 900-acre oak tree forest.

From the Archives: The Spaghetti Tree Hoax: Not a real tree, but people fell for it.

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And thanks! — Dan