 the state of clean energy. I met you and your host and our sponsor today is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. I'm very pleased to welcome my guest Jill Wagner, head of forestry for terra formation. Welcome to the show Jill. Thank you very much Mitch. I'm very happy to be here. Well tell us about terra formation. What does it do and who started terra formation? I'm kind of curious about that. Yes, terra formation is a forestry tech company and our founder is Yixuan Wang. He is a tech guy. He started in with PayPal. He was an engineer with PayPal and went to Facebook and then he became the CEO of Reddit. He's as an engineer. He's a problem-solving person and he thought a lot about climate change and wanted to do something very specific to solve climate change. So he started terra formation and we believe that natural carbon capture is the most simple way to approach climate change. That is by planting trees. So we have a very holistic approach and we have we offer a lot of forestry tech for people on the ground all over the world both in Hawaii. We have projects and all over the world to do forestry so we can scale and solve the climate crisis. So before we get into all the details I'm just a little bit curious to about the funding and how this is funded because I think that will be interesting to our audience. Yes, Yixuan started the company and he put his own funding into it and we all we also have angel investors who invest in terra formation. There are many people who care about the future and care about climate change and want to contribute to help solve this problem. So we have angel investors as well and then I'll tell you about our technology and what we're developing to to offer all of yeah for projects. Well it's really awesome that a private individual put his own personal money into something like this. I was also able to track like-minded people to also put their money in it so you're like not totally dependent on government handouts. I mean this is really great stuff and you know I wish there were more people like him to step up and do similar projects but anyway let's get on so let's have a look at your next slide because I think this is very instructive. Okay, yes. So our mission is to accelerate natural carbon capture through forestry tech and we want to turn energy plants into healthy forests. So we have developed a lot of technology to do that. We have we're developing partnerships across the globe. We offer forest technology, training, open-source forestry applications, carbon credit sales and financing for projects. Let me just drill in. You said this is more than just Hawaii this is a global project so what countries or regions of the world are you currently operating in? We are developing projects in places like Uganda, Tanzania, Ecuador, Puerto Rico, the Ukraine, the Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Spain. We have a partner in Spain. We have a lot of you know many many places. I've been to Costa Rica on a hydrogen caucus a couple of years ago and they're really heavy into reforestation and they're very proud of the fact that they were able to reforest about 50% of their land and almost it's like the picture you showed about turning this into this. I mean it's amazing the transformation that was that took place and right up to the president I met the president and the first lady the country when I was there and they they couldn't you know they're really really excited about what Costa Rica did and how it's showing the world you know a really good example of what you can actually do it. You can actually do it you know because if you look at the left hand side of that picture you can see that must be like a rainforest shot you know it's like wow can I ever ever come back when I get the answer is yes thanks he's like that what you're doing. Absolutely yes so we've developed some forest technology you can go to the next slide. One of them is an all-in-one nursery kit. I've determined that there are some bottlenecks that forestry projects on the ground have and in developing countries sometimes they don't have protection for early seedlings for young seedlings and so just having a greenhouse with the proper equipment is a huge ability it really helps people with their capacity. So this week we shipped this greenhouse in a 40 foot shipping container it comes with the tables the irrigation the 20,000 pots and everything they would need to develop a forest nursery. If you go to the next slide you can see my nurseries which are the exact ones that they would be getting in Kona. These are the ones that we operate in Kona and if you go to the next slide you can see a little bit on the inside and then on the on the next slide you can see on the inside again my lead of nursery personally who is is propagating. This when you have seeds you need to have a more protected area before they go outside into a climatization. So these nursery kits are really helpful for projects on the ground and then if you go to the next slide you can see we also have developed solar solar powered seed banks. These seed banks come again in a 40 foot container and they're completely solar powered they're they have climate control their air condition and dehumidification they have three work stations they have come with three refrigerators and they can hold three to five million seeds and all of the equipment comes with the the seed bank. So this is really a game changer if you go to the next slide you can see the seed bank that I run in Kona and there's Lehua working on the seeds and the next slide you can see it. I have a question about the seeds like you know what's the timeline from the time you I mean how do you collect the seeds where they come from what kind of processes do they have to go through and and then basically what's the timeline from the time you pick whatever it is off the the host tree I'll call it to the point where you're ready to plant the seedling. Well that's a good question and it really is the heart of the matter because it all starts with the seeds and we want to support projects wherever they are to save their regional seeds their native seeds from their region this is a really really big bottleneck we have you know the trillion tree initiative from world economic forum from 2020 to 2030 we want to plant a trillion trees and the fact is if you think about it if you need to plant a trillion trees you need two trillion seeds you need at least double the amount of of seed because all seed is not viable so when you think about that then you realize that you need to start a massing seed you need to collect seed and you need to work on banking seed for these projects a lot of governments have made commitments and now the people on the ground need support to be able to do this and so that's a great question because you need to go out and you to have permission from from government lands or private lands collect seed and bring it back into the seed lab to process it and prepare it for projects so that there's a whole sequence of events that has to happen to make a restoration project work. So how do you how do you make sure that they're not infected by pests or you know some kind of a disease you know in other words how do you make sure they're absolutely clean seeds? Well you can I mean first of all most of the a lot of pests and diseases are are on the the actual trees and they don't always transfer to seed seeds can get bugs and pests in them too and the best way to ensure that you you don't have that is to collect ripe seed to collect fresh seed the longer it stays on the tree then you have you give an opportunity for insects to arrive and and to make a home in the seed and start eating the embryos inside so the quicker you you collect you you have to monitor requires going out into the field and monitoring plants to determine when they're going to be ready when the seed will be ripe and from then you can properly collect and get those back into the seed lab and what you do is we have seed cleaning equipment so you you remove the seed from the chaff there's a there's a skin on the seed it's either dry or wet you have to process that seed and clean it and then you can either take the seed and prepare it for banking for storing it for the future or for propagating it for your project and you can make a decision then but this seed has to be cleaned. I have one final question then we can move on I'm sorry to zero in on this but uh we have our inner radiation facility here I know for sure on the waterproof you know they kind of irradiate fruits and vegetables is there any kind of program to you know similar to irradiate seeds just to like make totally sure that they're okay? No no we don't do that because I think there's a it's possible that it could harm the the seed the life of the seed the best way to protect seeds is just to collect them ripe and then to to get them into storage to process them you know promptly and that that that is there of it we we so we store and propagate and bank a lot of seed millions and millions of seeds so okay well let's move on to the next slide all right so we have also developed we've got a bunch of tech geniuses on our team so we've we have developed some apps that um help projects to do to do a better job one is a seed collecting app you can go to the founder tree and that's what you were talking about you can go to the founder tree and you can mark that tree and know where you collected that seed from and you want to get as much genetic diversity from as many individuals as you can and it helps you to really organize your collections this when it goes back to the seed bank it downloads when it goes back to Wi-Fi it downloads that data and there's a very nice database that they've created for the collections it can you can look at seeds by species by site and you can start determining what you have in your collections we've also are developing a tree planting app and this app helps people when they plant to mark trees and to and to map their projects this is a really big deal it comes it's going to come into the carbon credit issue because when you have a project and if you want to sell carbon credits you've got to verify this project and you need to map your site and you need to show what you've planted and a lot of projects in in the world in developing countries and and develop countries don't have good mapping systems so we're developing a very simple mapping system so people can show what they're doing on the ground and it's it's very it's really really nice at a rush of you know what to the brain so i'm just thinking now with this program you talked about you know we have all these macadamia nut growers and coffee growers i would think that they should apply this technology to their to their orchards and and and be able to start looking at secondary income by by collecting carbon credits is it something that you're doing in the local community like in in kona yes we we're developing a project now in helo that's sort of a it's been an abandoned macnut farm and we're rehabilitating it and what we're doing is we're creating an agro forestry system so we support a bunch of land use systems one of them is native forest restoration another is civil pasture that's teaming up with the cattle people to plant trees and pasture to improve the quality of the pastures and the animals another is called agro forestry and agro forestry is where you have a layered system you may have a high value hardwood as an overstory then you have an economic crop like coffee or mac nuts or cacao as a mid-story and you can have natives in the understory and you can also have animals in the case of the macnut farm that we're developing we're going to have sheep to help graze the the grass and they won't eat the mac nuts so we're in good shape on that one and then also support timber silva culture and that's that's growing hardwoods for timber but the and that has some multi benefits one is the timber if it's we support selectively logged um so not clear cutting um we want to provide habitat and we want also to generate carbon credits care formation is really interested in pushing hard on the carbon credit markets so i'll talk to you more about that as we go down so i want to age i mean can somebody with an existing uh orchard come in like and you're not just starting from the uh from the seed stage when you're looking at carbon credits can you come in at some intermediate or you already have mature trees and still be able to tap into this that kind of program well first of all right now the carbon credit market is is really focused on large lands and so that's that's one thing it's got to be a pretty large piece of property we're trying to unlock that so that smaller landowners can benefit from selling carbon credits and terra formation would like to act as a bridge for buyers businesses that want to offset their carbon emissions with forestry projects on the ground that that um have forest to protect the thing about existing forest your question is that you can you can sell carbon credits on existing forest but it's got to be you've got to show that you have um you've got some kind of you're doing some kind of protection if you didn't protect that forest something would happen to it for example maybe it would be somebody would try to log it maybe ungulates animals would come and eat those trees and you've got to show some kind of if you can show some kind of protection like fencing or security then you can sell carbon credits on an existing piece of property if you have a new property that's completely denoted and you want to plant trees and you're and you're actively working on it you can also sell carbon credits and basically you have to commit the property to protect it either for a minimum of 25 years or in perpetuity you're going to protect this and you're not this land is not going to be cut down in the future okay thanks we'll go on the next slide now we also offer help with people who have water issues there are a lot of um projects that have limited capacity in terms of water either the water that they have is not clean or they they just don't have access so they can drill a well or if they have a well they can desalinate it and we we did a test case at our koala at a koala site that we call pacific flight and that that property is a really good a really good example of what solar desalination can do and this this is not a new technology obviously people have been desalinating water for a long time now but because the cost of solar has come down so much and it continues to it it um ties it with fuels and it it allows us to do these kind of desalination that that would have been very very expensive now it's really coming down in price so we're trying to help people to do that and to clean their water so you can go to the next slide and you can see uh that's our our koala site water and then we also help people in the next slide with um just catchment systems and it's not it doesn't sound very you know very innovative in hawaii but i can tell you that people all over the world do not do water catchment like we do in hawaii it's pretty common here but yes i did a project in vietnam and you know this is a this is a place that's similar to hawaii that but it's it's more even more um accentuated they have two seasons a wet season and dry season but the wet season is a monsoon season so they're getting torrential rains half of the year right and then the other half it's parts it's cracked it's very very dry and they don't catch the water so when you have to do a planting project you're really risking all that planting and the work that you've done if you don't consistently water those plants through that dry season so simple things like water um catchment is very very helpful for projects the next slide i can show you is the carbon credits and we as i said we're our mission is to help landowners to have access to carbon credits as a way to protect land and to make money because for the duration of the project which is our projects we're setting up for about 25 years it provides people with funding a funding stream and one of the ways that we're helping people to fund what they need if they're doing big restoration big tree planting projects and they say we really need a seed bank we really need a nursery then we can provide those those those technologies at no cost upfront and then we do a revenue share and that's that's a business model that we were developing so we can say okay well we just want to get the money back that we put out for for the tech that we provided there's no markup and then you can get the tech at no cost and get you started and um and then we we have also developed a relationship on on a multi-year you know multi-year relationships that's very important because a lot of projects maybe can get grants or maybe can get some funding on the short term but then after a while a year or two very quickly it runs out and the their their support leaves and and when that happens sometimes projects fail and it's important for for projects to be able to to make it through because this is this is fighting climate change this is carbon capture and it's it's got to succeed it has to so that we're committed to working with people and and making sure it does and so one of the other things that I wanted to tell you that we're developing is we're developing training we have two series of videos one is called nursery management and the other is on seed banking so people can get um the the all the training step by step they're 10 10 minute videos and it goes through step by step what they need to know to run a forest nursery and to collect seeds and to run a seed bank so they can learn that and go through it and get one-on-one zoom um calls with with our our leads so they can if they have any questions they can get those answered as well so we really try to support them in whatever way we can that sounds great so my quick question about do you have a relationship with the uh university of Hawaii the c-tar organization is that something yes yes i work with uh jb friday um the ux uh extension forester and um i also i've i've got a good size forestry team and i i have been um reaching out on several times a lot to the uh forest team and the um environmental training the forestry training at here at uh helo for people that want to learn conservation who are learning conservation in the university and then want to get jobs and we are we're expanding our teams you know a lot every every couple of months well that was a question i was going to ask is like what's what's the interest from the up and coming generations in this kind of uh field like you know it's really i hear the average age of the farmers like 65 or something like that uh farming's a tough business what are you finding uh what's been your experience so far uh with the younger generation coming up well two things one is i think we have to be we will be and we have to be accountable to the future generations they are very concerned about their future and they are are asking us what we're doing to ensure their their you know the good health of the planet secondly we have a whole um uh development that we're doing it with we're calling it new forest creators and we are helping young people to learn restoration and and we're hiring them and we're teaching them about the whole process of restoration so that they can do this work and they love we we have a really excellent team and they love it and i'm i'm hiring all the time so we we definitely are going to be expanding we want to be a very big presence in hawaii this is our home and we want to give a lot to to hawaii we're very blessed to be here and we want to do you know do a lot of good for hawaii and then and then reach out to the rest of the world well that's great so uh almost the final question because we're in our last two minutes is um what are what are your major challenges you know i mean you're doing all this good stuff but what are some of the challenges that you still need to overcome well i think the biggest challenge is time we're in a race we've got to do a lot in a very short time we really only have 10 years if you listen to what scientists are saying about what happens with the climate is it continues to fluctuate it continues to get more and more severe and so we our biggest challenge is is i think is is a private public private partnerships really getting governments to get on board and to trust and to start doing many more partnerships so that we can get this work done and that's what we're going to push hard on i think for the next few years okay i think i have one final question like this i was on your website and i saw one of your movies in your year planting these little seedlings out in the middle of the like in the middle of the desert like the second slide we saw and so how do you actually distribute the water to them i mean you generate the water how do you distribute it make sure that you you water all they keep these plants water until they get to some kind of a level where they're they're self-sufficient yes there there's different applications for water depending on the site one is is above ground irrigation we use drisco pipe and we drip we drip irrigate plants it's very efficient and we fine tune it for the site some site you can't do that and there's not it's two they're too large the projects are too large if you're going into tens of thousands of plants then you have to use other systems and there are some systems that are like water boxes where you can fill water and they can slowly feed plants and um and then of course a lot of projects we depend on the rainfall and we try to time the planting with the rainy season so that we can help those plants get established make it through and then they're adapted to you know wherever we're planting native plants largely so they're adapted to to that region and they will survive if they can make it through the first you know year of their life well uh chill believe it or not we're at the end of our time so i would like to thank you and your founder very much for helping us save ourselves i've been talking to jill wagner head of forestry of terra formation and they're planting it one tree at a time to make a better world for all of us so thank you so much jill thank you very much i appreciate it okay so aloha everyone we'll be back next wednesday with hawaii the state of clean energy