We missed marking the occasion last week, but April 28 is National Arbor Day, the day that Americans throughout the United States are encouraged to plant trees.
For most Americans, that means taking a trip to their local tree nursery or home improvement store, selecting a seedling, and bringing it home where they'll break out their shovel, dig a hole, and set their new tree in its new home in the ground.
And then, they'll wait years for it to grow into its mature proportions, to become the tree they envisioned having in their yards.
Less patient Americans can shortcut that long wait by transplanting a more mature tree, which brings us to today's invention (via Core77): the 100-inch (254-cm) Tree Spade, which can automate the process of extracting, transporting and replanting a much more mature tree. And as seen in the following video, to the hypnotic beat of Eurosynthopop.
The biggest downside that we can see with Dutchman Industries' tree spade is that ideally, you would need have a second tree spade truck dig a "blank" hole at the location that the tree will go into at the same time that the first tree spade truck is extracting the tree from its original location, where then the trucks would drive to the other location, with the tree going into its freshly custom dug hole at its new location and the other truck depositing the large amount of dirt from that other location into the hole left behind by the tree extraction.
But what if you only had one of these tree spade trucks? In that case, you would have to go through a lot of additional steps to address the logistical problems associated with digging the hole where the tree will go, moving and storing the dirt, not to mention refilling the hole left behind after you've extracted the tree for transplanting.
There's a way to make that system work. Here, you need to have the equivalent of a "bank" for the dirt, which can be thought of an intermediary whose purpose would be to facilitate the depositing and withdrawal of dirt in order to enable the actual transaction of the tree transplant operation. And in fact, there are businesses that do exactly that!
That's not where this particular kind of solution ends, because the problems of transplantation logistics are not limited to landscaping. Many of the same logistical problems arise in the field of organ transplantation medicine, where organ banking has been proposed as a solution.
At least, until someone finds a way to cut out the middle man and pass the benefits of tree or organ transplantation directly on to you at much lower costs!
Labels: ideas, technology
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