Other members raise 300-600 seedlings in a season in their own back gardens for designated farmers. The Million Trees Project draws schools together into similar tree-growing partnerships, each school raising and planting out an average of 4,000 trees each year and putting their botanical studies to practical purpose. And all this activity is focused on the planting-out time, a window of opportunity only ten weeks long, when every available volunteer is pressed into service. Like growing any crop there is only one short period when trees may be planted with any expectation of a satisfactory survival rate, and that's during the first half of winter. Here again, Men of the Trees are nothing if not practical.
Farmers spend their lives clearing the land to grow crops.
It would be humiliating for them to be told to plant the native plants back again. So the Society has, over the past 13 years, made a special study of productive trees for semi-arid farmlands. There are not many. Carob, Stone Pine, trees for Eucalyptus oil production, fodder for sheep and cattle, Pistachio, Pecan and Macadamia Nut trees, Olives and Mulberries. Wherever there is a possibility of making a dollar or two from these non-sacrificial crops, then Men of the Trees will give it a try.