The Origin and Evolution of Mast Reforestation

A Decade-long Journey to Restore Forests by Drones to Durable Carbon Removal with Biomass Burial

As the logs are being placed underground at MT1, it’s a ground breaking milestone for Mast. We’ve come a long way in the last decade working to expand post-fire reforestation, advancing the industry by addressing the wild seed and funding shortages needed to restore Western forests, engaging communities and supporting livelihoods along the way. 

It didn’t begin with burying carbon. 

It didn’t even begin with our nurseries. 

How did we get here, in Montana, surrounded by a massive carbon removal opportunity in piles of fire-killed trees that are financing new forests?  

The story of Mast, formerly DroneSeed, begins in 2015 when a desire to do something took flight. Ever since, our mission has steadfastly been to make reforestation scalable, to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.  

“One of the most painful things we’re seeing about climate change… is that we are seeing an unprecedented increase in wildfires. We’re losing our forests faster than they can regenerate. We’re all taught, forests burn. Forests regrow. We’re seeing that less and less.” - Grant Canary, CEO

Mast's Henry Creek project site, 2022. Burned debris and unstable ground challenge replanting crews, but seedlings are chosen to survive in this terrain and climate.  

Mast's Roots: The Founding of DroneSeed

Severe wildfires have increased. This has led to hotter, longer, and more frequent fires that are burning many forests beyond their natural ability to recover. Where terrain is steep or challenging as is often the case in the pacific northwest, forest regeneration is even less likely and highly vulnerable to impacts from wind, precipitation, and more.

This was the major reforestation challenge we started ideating around. How could we achieve reforestation on steep, rugged terrain that required manual access to replant? This hand planting is physically grueling and recruiting and staffing this work is difficult.

To replant these areas requires people running up and down mountains, burning the caloric equivalent of running two marathons each day. Drones have no trouble navigating difficult terrain, they fly.¹ 

DroneSeed launched with a mission to go where humans struggled––or couldn’t––to replant trees. We were accepted to Techstars Seattle in 2016 with a prototype and interest from a major forestry company. Our approach combined forestry, science, and technology to support landscapes in recovery to lend nature a helping hand.

Early Innovation and Lessons Learned  

We prototyped and developed custom heavy-lift drone ‘swarms’. We obtained precedent-setting FAA waivers and patents enabling us to operate these drones in groups of 3-5 (swarms), beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS), though we utilized a visual observer, and the max gross weight of these aircraft was 115 lbs, including the drone, its batteries, and payload (heavy-lift). In total, operating with these three engineering achievements required obtaining three FAA waivers whose language is still replicated by other drone companies seeking waivers today. The remote charging infrastructure and seed vessel technology the company developed, also resulted in five patents.

Our drones dropped thousands of seed vessels or “pucks” across fire-scarred landscapes. Each puck was loaded with native seeds, nutrients, moisture-retaining materials, and coatings to deter predators. The goal was simple: enable rapid, targeted re-seeding at a greater annual scale than ever previously possible by hand or foot. The company grew, with support from committed investors and the attention of the NBC Morning Show, Bloomberg, Fast Company, National Geographic, and influencers from Mr Beast to Mark Rober.

Early pilot projects included aerial seeding with the Washington Tribal Nation, and in partnership with the Tșideldel and Tl’etinqox First Nations in British Columbia, as well as at Henry Creek in Oregon, where Mast began with drone seeding and later returned to hand-plant more than 160,000 seedlings across ~300 acres. The projects also support clean water for communities downstream and provide critical wildlife habitat and recreation opportunities. New forests are now returning across some incredibly challenging terrain as a result of our drone-deployed seed.

The drone technology worked. Depending on the species and location, the pucks showed promise and could exceed seed natural survival rates in areas after high-severity fire, but the results were patchy and site dependent as we published in Tree Planters Notes. To scale reforestation as we set out to do, seed deployment and successful germination had to be reliable and sustainably in sync with available supply.

One of the painful realities we learned is that high-severity fires burn the soil deeper than expected. Poor soil conditions, exacerbated by wind, erosion, or heavy rains, and wildlife predation made any surviving seedlings a heroic and hopeful comeback story, but standing back at scale, onsite survival rates were lower than we could responsibly continue to pursue without a massive seed supply. It was around then that we also began to suspect that there was a critical vulnerability in the supply-chain: seed. Not only was there likely insufficient supply of seed for our operations, but in many places, any seed-supply.

The present-day forestry supply chain was designed for timber, concentrated around high productivity lands, and expected eventual high natural regeneration rates of over 90% with small acreage fires. But this is not today’s reality, with high acreage, severe fires. Natural regeneration is dropping. 

We faced a daunting decision. If we were to scale post-wildfire reforestation whether by drone or by hand, we’d need to take a much broader approach. In other words, because that seed supply chain had withered to such a great degree, we needed to rebuild it.

In operation since 1871, Mast's nursery Silvaseed, based in Roy, WA holds a long legacy in cone collection. 

"Around each corner we found new challenges but also ideas and ways to tackle those challenges which kept us going. This work has been an uphill, both ways, battle and it's why there are so few competitors in this critical space." - Grant Canary

The two-fold problem was clear: severely burned forests weren’t growing back on their own; their seed supply was destroyed, and acres upon acres waiting for reforestation vastly outnumbered those that were getting help. The extent of the problem was less clear—in fact, no one had put a number on the supply-chain challenges until we pitched a philanthropy on our concerns and they commissioned the independent research. Challenges to the Reforestation Pipeline subsequently published in 2016. 

"Large-scale global reforestation goals have been proposed to help mitigate climate change and provide other ecosystem services. To explore reforestation potential in the United States, we used GIS analyses, surveys of nursery managers and foresters, and literature synthesis to assess the opportunities and challenges associated with meeting proposed reforestation goals." -Challenges to the Reforestation Pipeline

Later, our co-authored Mind the Gap paper, published in 2024, found that the reforestation gap is widening—and will grow exponentially without major disruption. Even if wildfires stopped today (they won’t), and funding and supply chain capacity stayed flat (they're declining), it would still take more than 50 years to reforest the 6 million acres already lost. That’s the exponential problem that keeps us fired up every day.

Building the Backbone to Scale: Vertical Integration Begins

We set out to build out the first vertically integrated reforestation company focused on post-wildfire recovery. We would create our own supply chain to tackle the barriers we faced:

1. The need for seed: wild seed shortages would have to be overcome, working with communities on nature’s schedule (i.e. Mast events).
2. Nursery growing capacity: too few facilities growing enough ecologically appropriate seedlings.
3. Insufficient financing: a new funding stream was needed to support nearly all landowners who cannot afford to reforest their devastated properties. Few grants exist to provide upfront capital for replanting at scale. The carbon market opens new opportunities. 
4. Landscape conditions: badly burned forests, swaths of dead trees present hazards for people, wildlife, and reforestation. Landscapes need to be ready for new seedlings.

For the next two years, Mast focused on expanding through the strategic acquisition of nurseries and, in parallel, a wild seed collection network across communities spanning the Pacific northwest.

Mast's Cal Forest Nurseries has a proud history and reputation for rapid expansion as needed for commercial clients and our reforestation project needs. December 2, 2024.

2021: Silvaseed Acquisition
We acquired Silvaseed, one of the West’s oldest (operating since 1870!) and most respected seed suppliers. Since then we’ve:

• Tripled the seed supply available to communities for reforestation in the western U.S.
• Became the largest private conifer seed provider in the region.
• Introduced proprietary software to organize inventories and expanded cone collection.

“We tripled the seed supply—bringing availability to levels not seen in decades.”

2022: Cal Forest Acquisition + Rebrand to Mast
Acquired Cal Forest Nurseries, California’s largest conifer seedling producer (20M+ seedlings annually), completing the reforestation pipeline:

• Silvaseed for seed collection
• Cal Forest for seedling cultivation
• Tech-enabled or hand-planting

Today, Mast’s nurseries can produce more than 30 million seedlings annually, with Cal Forest alone processing 100 million seeds in 2024—enough to replant roughly twice the area of Chicago.

Bags of seed stacked from fall collection events at Cal Forest Nurseries, October, 2024. 

At this point, we rebranded as Mast Reforestation (CNBC), inspired by natural “mast” events—rare bursts of seed abundance that symbolize our mission to restore forests at scale.

The post-fire supply chain was ready, our reforestation knowledge unmatched. With shortages in federal recovery grants and few landowners who could afford to reforest, we needed to unlock a new funding pathway.

Leveraging Carbon Markets for Reforestation Funding

Carbon markets enable climate-committed organizations to support projects of their choice. Mast was the first to develop reforestation carbon projects under the Climate Action Reserve, opening new doors for corporate buyers to invest in reforestation and selling all credits from its first project. With it, Mast launched some of its most impactful reforestation efforts to date.

In California, the Feather River Dome project planted more than 47,000 seedlings across 150 acres, helping to restore habitat near a Wild & Scenic River and protect tributaries that feed the Sacramento River—one of California’s most critical waterways. In Montana, the Sheep Creek project has planted more than 897,000 seedlings across 2,700 acres, supporting the headwaters of the Missouri River and helping to restore migration corridors and habitat for species such as elk and bald eagles. All told, more than 1,629,850 seedlings have been planted.

We continue to find new ways to fund reforestation to align with carbon market demand. 

Can the Market Meet the Moment?

As climate urgency grows, financing reforestation has not been cut and dried.  Few buyers can wait for the new seedlings we plant to mature enough to produce retirable credits. Fortunately, a new option was right in front of us—something we were already regularly dealing with.

Fire-killed trees—whether standing or fallen—are hazardous stores of carbon destined for the atmosphere. This biomass is a wildfire fuel source, and a fall hazard that endangers work crews, wildlife, and new seedlings.

Where these trees hold low to no local economic value, they are often stockpiled and burned (sometimes state-recommended). We’re burying that wood instead, generating valuable carbon removal credits that fund reforestation for new trees to take their place. Biomass burial (wood vaulting) was recently highlighted by the World Resources Institute as a scalable, reliable, durable carbon removal solution.

In many of the more remote wildfire-devastated landscapes where we work, converting this biomass into bio-oil, biochar, bioenergy doesn’t make operational sense or would create more carbon than it would remove. Straightforward, yet rigorously monitored burial is a win-win-win for the environment, landowners, and carbon buyers seeking immediate removals with all the nature-based co-benefits of reforestation.

A Novel Means to the Same Mission

Mast's first biomass burial project Wood Preserve MT1 just two hours outside of Yellowstone, is generating its first phase of the project's total 30,000 tonnes of CO₂ removal credits by the end of 2025. The project is registered under Puro.earth’s Terrestrial Storage of Biomass methodology, and received a pre-issuance BBBe rating from BeZero and ‘aaa’ for additionality. Removal credits sold will fund the reforestation of native species on the surrounding landscape devastated by wildfire in 2021. Request a copy of the report here.

And it’s just the beginning. We estimate that 2.8 million tonnes of wildfire-killed trees exist in Montana alone from just the last few years, enough to fill 57,500 logging trucks. This project is the blueprint for more to come.

The more landowners we meet the more our commitment to this mission grows deeper. We have persevered through the last decade and we’re proud to be building a system to restore forests now for generations to come.

If you’re a corporation looking to invest in durable carbon removal, we invite you to connect with our team to learn more.

If you’re an individual who wants to help, you can support our reforestation work here.

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 SOURCES

[1] Source: Tree Planting calorie burn is more than 2 marathons a day. Link 1. Link 2.