Tree Planting Robot History and the ABB Angle

Most of the world's new forests are still planted one seedling at a time by a person with a shovel and a bag on each hip. A tree planting robot that can do the same job on rough, stumpy ground has been an engineering goal for more than 50 years. This post looks at how planting crews worked before machines, why the first planting machines stayed on flat land, what today's forwarder mounted planters, drones and field robots can do, and where ABB robots could fit in the seedling nurseries that feed every planting season.

A professional tree planter at work on a reforestation block in the Bulkley Valley, British Columbia, 2026. Photo: Ricdaguiar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

How crews planted forests with bars and hoedads

In the 1930s the work was pure muscle. Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps planted more than 3 billion trees, which earned it the nickname "Tree Army". A June 1939 photo from Hiawatha National Forest in Michigan shows an enrollee crew planting two year old red pine in furrows with Michigan planting bars: drive the blade into the soil, rock it to open a slit, drop the seedling in and close the slit with a heel. The same rhythm, repeated thousands of times a day, is still how much of the world's replanting gets done.

A Civilian Conservation Corps crew plants red pine in furrows with Michigan planting bars, Hiawatha National Forest, June 1939. Photo: National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The tools have barely changed. Planters today use dibbles, mattocks, augers and hoedads, paired with a hip or shoulder bag of seedlings. In British Columbia the average planter puts in about 1,600 trees a day, and experienced planters in the interior can reach 4,000. The equipment is cheap, but the labor is not. In the United States, hand planting generally costs 20 to 50 percent more than machine planting.

A Civilian Conservation Corps enrollee plants a tree, about 1933. Photo: National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

By the 1950s, tractor drawn planters were being shown off at field days. A photo taken for the US Soil Conservation Service in Columbia County, Georgia, in the 1950s shows two men on a tractor demonstrating mechanical tree planting to a crowd. Machine planting became most common on plantation sites in the Southeast and Upper Midwest, and it still needs fairly level ground with good soil and few obstacles. Sweden pushed further with a machine called Silva Nova, which carried out 10 percent of all Swedish tree planting in the mid 1990s before high operating costs and technical problems saw it dropped.

Two men on a tractor demonstrate mechanical tree planting to a crowd in Columbia County, Georgia, 1950s. Photo: USDA Soil Conservation Service via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Forwarder planters, drones and field robots today

Hand crews still dominate steep or cluttered sites, like the planters walking into a cutblock in British Columbia with seedlings in their bags, and there are not enough of them. Plantma Forestry, a Swedish company founded in 2018 by Log Max and Eco Log founder Stig Linderholm and Hans Arvidsson, the chief engineer of the original Silva Nova, says planting by hand is hard, dangerous and slow, and that labor shortages now hold back many planting programs. Its approach puts the whole job on a forestry machine.

Tree planters carrying seedlings in their bags into a block in British Columbia, 2019. Photo: Ben Hemmings / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Plantma's PlantMax mounts on a forwarder and scarifies, analyses the soil, compacts it and plants the seedling in one pass. Peak capacity is about 3,000 seedlings an hour, with 1,000 to 2,500 an hour more typical in real conditions, and the machine carries up to 24,000 seedlings so it can run a full shift without reloading. Two people run it, one in the forwarder cab and one in the planting cab. It logs every planting point for the landowner. UK forestry company Tilhill has trialled the system. In Estonia, Milrem Robotics and the University of Tartu built a driverless Multiscope Forester Planter with a 380 seedling payload.

A tractor drawn planter puts seedlings into a Louisiana wildlife refuge for The Conservation Fund's Go Zero program, 2012. Photo: Sean Gardner / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Drones handle a different case. In August 2026 The Nature Conservancy in Argentina and the startup ReForest Latam reported seeding about 8,000 native trees across 13 hectares of the Gran Chaco from the air, using biodegradable capsules of native seed, as part of a 100,000 tree project with the John Deere Foundation. The main species is the white carob tree, and more than 300 hectares of the same project had already been planted with nursery seedlings in the usual way. All of these methods depend on nurseries, where seedlings grow in trays of containers, like those under shade cloth at the Placerville Nursery in California. Much nursery work is repetitive tray handling, a job robots are already taking on in greenhouse horticulture.

Containers of tree seedlings growing under shade cloth at the Placerville Nursery, California, 2009. Photo: USDA Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Where tree planting automation goes next

ABB does not make a planting machine, and no source we found shows ABB robots in a forest nursery. Where ABB arms could help is in handling the trays. In Kingsville, Canada, an ABB IRB 4600 already stacks produce trays at Orora Fresh Packaging, and a similar arm, or an IRB 460 palletizer, could stack seedling trays for cold storage and shipping. A Flexley Mover AMR could carry those trays between greenhouse bays. Cells like this are usually laid out and tested in RobotStudio before any hardware arrives.

An ABB IRB 4600 in the Orora Fresh Packaging cell that stacks produce trays in Kingsville, Canada. Photo: ABB

Smaller jobs suit faster robots. An IRB 360 FlexPicker with vision could, in principle, sort or transplant plugs between trays, while an IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection is built to cope with water and dust. These are possibilities, and they face real costs: nursery work is seasonal, so a robot may sit idle for months, and seedlings vary in size and shape far more than packaged food. Field machines have their own limits, from the price of a PlantMax unit, about €700,000 before the forwarder, to steep ground that machines still cannot reach.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items at high speed. Photo: ABB

The likely path over the next decade is a mix. Machines will take the flat and moderately rough sites, drones will seed places where nobody can walk, and skilled hand planters will keep the steep blocks and difficult soils. For homes and small woodland owners, the change will most likely show up as contractors with better planting data. Several questions are still open: how to keep people safe around heavy machines, who trains the operators, and whether planting quality holds up as output climbs.

An ABB IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection, built to handle water and dust. Photo: ABB

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